SOCI 1000U Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: High Culture, Consumerism, Benjamin Barber
Document Summary
Review : we need to socialize ; we are not rational. Integral to limbic system - generates maternal response, empathy, emotional expressiveness and motivation to communicate. When it"s damaged, all of these things disappear. We have the natural drives to be altruistic and we dislike too much inequality. Healthy humans suffer depression, reduced immunity, even die without communication. Our culture, society, institutions are produced and reproduced through communication. We need these institutions to survive- they make our world intelligible and navigable (structural functionalism) Sometimes inequalities are build in to these institutions however (conflict theory) These inequalities tend to reproduce and even amplify themselves over time. But, humans have an aversion to inequality, especially when they are on the bottom themselves. We become emotionally attached to our view of reality. The emotional pathways in our brain are faster than the rational. Therefore our rationality is usually used to defend our automatic emotional responses. Humans interact from the moment they"re born.
