Money as a Prime Example: How Paper Becomes Value

Hey, guess what! That money in your swear jar is a social construct. Don’t believe me? Think about money for a minute. Most currency passed around the world is made from fancy paper. How much is that paper worth? Stationery is also fancy paper. How much do you pay for a few sheets? And how do you pay for it?

Think about it. What is the value of money outside of the values that we decided to give it? Sure, a gold coin has a value outside of itself, because it can be melted down into other things, or exchanged as gold. But paper money does not really have any value outside of what we give it.* 

If you’ve been around the philosophical portions of the interweb for a while, you’ve probably heard it said that “such-and-such is a social construct anyway” as a way to get the interlocutor (dude against whom they are arguing) to rethink or to rile them up. But what is a social construct anyway?

The Confederate Dollar: A Historical Case of Worthlessness

In the Southern United States, there is a phrase people used to use, “like a Confederate dollar,” to indicate that something is absolutely worthless. After the American Civil War, the currency that the Confederate states had made was worth nothing, because their government had dissolved, the states returning to the United States. As such, there was a lot of this currency around, and even a hundred years later it sold cheaply, even as an antique relic of another era.

The two most common social constructs referenced in any philosophical debate are race and gender. If you’ve ever sat through enough philosophy, you’ve probably encountered one or both of these proclaimed, and then the intellectually lazy rebuttals of both. “If gender is a social construct, why are there trans people?” (but said more uncharitably). “If race is a social construct, then racism doesn’t exist, amirite?” (but said more uncharitably).

A social construct is a “fact” that we’ve all agreed upon, even though it exists only inside our human society and does not exist in objective reality outside of it. We agree, for instance, in upholding certain laws that exist in our respective countries of origin. Whether we do actually uphold them or not is irrelevant. We’ve agreed that these are rules we should abide by. Social constructs are similar, in that most of us believe it is useful for us to have and use them.

Beyond Blue and Pink: The Fluidity of Social Conventions

Gender is widely held to be a social construct because, many feminists and others argue, our outward appearances and demeanor are not tied to our sex at birth. Consider, for instance, the “boys wear blue and girls wear pink” idea that really made headway in the 20th century. Is this objectively true, that if you are a boy, you have to wear blue to be a boy? And if you are a girl, you have to wear pink, to be a girl? And, further, since there are only these two options, there can be no other genders?

Think about this carefully. Interestingly, this has not always been the case. In certain instances, arbiters of fashion proclaimed that pink was for boys and blue for girls, making this far more convoluted than first imagined. Social constructs are like this, since they are rules we’ve agreed about as a society. They can fluctuate and change. If they were objective fact, in the world outside of human understanding, this would not be so.

Objective Reality vs. Social Agreement: Understanding the Difference

Consider, for instance, the objective fact that a spider has eight legs. Unless someone or something tore one of the legs from the spider, a spider will always, objectively, have eight legs. This is one of the reasons we classify it as an arachnid. Will the spider ever have more than eight legs? No, because this is the objective composition of the spider.

It can be helpful to strip away the trappings of a social construct in order to see if it is indeed a social construct. What is race, for instance? A lot of people consider it a mixture of physical and cultural markers. But, while cultural origins can denote certain genetic markers that might make a person more susceptible to sickle cell anemia, for instance, this does not indicate that the color of a person’s skin or other physical appearance aspects make them objectively different in some way from a person of another color or physical appearance.

Breaking Free from Social Constructs: A Path to Empathy and Understanding

It is often argued that race and gender have been socially constructed to demean certain cultural or gender identifying groups and elevate others to better societal positions. In her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson argues that many of these constructs are used in the United States to create and maintain a hierarchy similar to the caste system of India. Women and African Americans, she maintains, fall at the bottom of this hierarchy.

While this may be sobering, it can be helpful to know that, once you’ve understood something as a social construct, you can start to work your way from the construct and question why it exists. Maybe as a result, you will be less cautious approaching people who look differently than you. Maybe you might even make a new friend of a different gender or race. Because, when we realize that the demarcations made by a social construct are a little arbitrary, we can better see the humanity in the other people around us.

*Unfortunately, TPS needs money to function, so you will still have to pay for our goods.