You tell me [I'm] the institution

"You say you got a real solution
Well, you know,
We'd all love to see the plan"

The Beatles - Revolution
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"Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man."

Ignatius of Loyola

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"We're gonna teach them
(Wrong from right)
We're gonna help them
(See the light)"

Mel Brooks, and do I really have to tell you what movie it's from?

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"Now where does this kind of stupidity come from? Well it comes actually from a very hopeful place. Because it basically argues that we're all born undamaged, we're all born with empty minds, we're all born with equal potentiality [...] So this kind of idiocy actually comes from a hopeful position, which is: hey we're all born the same and if we can only eradicate some environmental force then we'll all get along. But the fact that it's hopeful and nice doesn't mean that it's true."

Gad Saad, on social constructionism in a speech in 2017
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I first learned there was such a formal academic notion as social constructionism a decade ago (though the disease had been incubating in academia for some time (since about the time of The Beatles)) in an introductory sociology course. I was all for it at first. We were long overdue, by my estimate, to appreciate the due weight of mammalian learning and enculturation in psychosocial development. Yet, driven by their popular success, its proponents galloped past context and scope into declaring they'd uncovered The Ultimate Truth, a dogmatic refusal to appreciate or even acknowledge any influences besides their absolutist relativism. This new holy scripture was almost entirely proselytized from without any scientific inquiry, through Humanities departments and feminist cabals. At its root, it's a postmodernist flatfooted denial of objective physical reality: everything we do is made up and we have no intrinsic natures. We're blank slates.

Politically, it dovetailed neatly with feminist fundamentalism's need to establish some all-pervasive boogeyman against which to wage war - "The Patriarchy" or some even more ill-defined "institutionalized" force of evil. Because of course if we're all born as blank slates but the world is so observably evil then the evil is being deliberately inserted into us. It follows there must be some overwhelming evil influence actively, constantly and omnipresently scribing evil onto such blank slates as you and I, dear impressionable reader. So, just as Christian fundamentalists exhort their congregations to resist the lure of Lucifer lurking behind every temptation, feminist fundamentalists fabricated a conveniently invisible, intangible, indefatigable evil influence which could be ascribed (when convenient) to anything they wish to attack. So now when men fail at acting like extensions of women's interests, it's not because they're coping with inherently different pressures, needs and desires, victims of human nature just like their female counterparts, but because they're willfully perpetuating an all-pervasive cacodemonia. This absolutist interpretation of social constructionism neatly categorizes any target of opportunity as an enemy combatant, and therefore deserving of abuse. All's fair in love and war, right?

To be sure, other political lobbies have adopted the idea. Feminists merely carry the most clout as usual due to drawing on the largest potential cohort as adherents. Retards declare there's no such thing as intuhlijens. You'll also be informed, rather indignantly, that there are no races among humanity. As an absolute statement, yes, true, there are no precise delineations of races, merely gradations... but such platitudes utterly ignore the obvious anatomic, metabolic, immunological and other differences which cluster so blatantly around various historic/geographic regions. More amusingly, the various LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ "communities" have taken social constructionism even farther to declare that biological sexes are themselves social constructs and we should all be pretending to be vaguely effete hermaphrodites. I guess nobody told all those hundreds of thousands of species of gender-binary mice, lizards, beetles, birds, bees and bandicoots to stop culturally establishing their sexuality. Even the sex-flipping tropical fish so often given as examples of gender fluidity merely flip from one established sex to the other. Your guppy's not going to style its dorsal fin in bright blue spikes and start calling itself a "they".

Now, as all this hoorah can often edge into the pathetic, it's tempting to take the high road and go easy on the morons straining to disbelieve their own glands, to give them the benefit of the doubt as merely misguided do-gooders, to qualify them as hopeful and nice. Yet the interpretation of any desire, value, behavior or belief as mere mutable epiphenomena hides an implicit threat:
We can break you.
Whatever you think your desires may be, we will change those thoughts. Whatever you think you are, we will change to suit ourselves. After all, if there are no innate drives, preferences or desires, then correcting wrongthink no longer constitutes an interpersonal attack. It's just... spellchecking a set of instructions... tuning a clockwork.... weeding a memetic garden. We can beat our own preferences into you with a clear conscience.

Such solipsism reminds one of the dark side of the forces of psychological science, behaviorism and its promise of beating anyone into any shape with sufficient application of carrots and sticks. More worrisome, it's a philosophy which has always appealed to those in power, who do not wish to concern themselves with those they rule but merely to extract specific behaviors of service and obeisance. Social constructionism betrays a desire to see others not as separate entities with internal drives but as hollow parts instrumental to the constructionist's worldview. One does not need to consider the desire of malfunctioning instruments, but merely to hammer and lathe off whatever does not serve the construction's purpose. You can't hurt a construction. Hopeful? Yes, there's a hope there, for a something divorced from someones. Idealistic even. It's the sort of idealism which dictates that a big lie becomes truth by a sufficient clout of the fasces.