How does society affect individuals

Groups previously isolated geographically or politically become ever more aware of different ways of thinking, living, and behaving, and sometimes of the existence of vastly different standards of living.

Migrations and mass media lead not only to cultural mixing but also to the extinction of some cultures and the rapid evolution of others. The size of the human population, its concentration in particular places, and its pattern of growth are influenced by the physical setting and by many aspects of culture: economics, politics, technology, history, and religion.

Some religious groups also take a strong stand on population issues. Leaders of the Roman Catholic church, for example, have long campaigned against birth control, whereas, in recent years, religious leaders of other major faiths have endorsed the use of birth control to restrict family size.

Quite apart from government policy or religious doctrine, many people decide whether to have a child on the basis of practical matters such as the health risk to the mother, the value or cost of a child in economic or social terms, the amount of living space, or a personal feeling of suitability as parents. In the United States, the trend toward casual adolescent sexual relations has led to increasing numbers of unexpected and unwanted pregnancies.

Great increase in the size of a population requires greater job specialization, new government responsibilities, new kinds of institutions, and the need to marshal a more complex distribution of resources. Population patterns, particularly when they are changing, are also influential in changing social priorities. The greater the variety of subcultures, the more diverse the provisions that have to be made for them. As the size of a social group increases, so may its influence on society.

The influence may be through markets such as young people who, as a group, buy more athletic equipment , voting power for example, old people are less likely to vote for school bond legislation , or recognition of need by social planners for example, more mothers who work outside the home will require child-care programs.

Choices among alternative benefits and costs are unavoidable for individuals or for groups. To gain something we want or need, it is usually necessary to give up something we already have, or at least give up an opportunity to have gained something else instead.

For example, the more the public spends as a whole on government-funded projects such as highways and schools, the less it can spend on defense if it has already decided not to increase revenue or debt. Social trade-offs are not always economic or material. Sometimes they arise from choices between our private rights and the public good: laws concerning cigarette smoking in public places, cleaning up after pets, and highway speed limits, for instance, restrict the individual freedom of some people for the benefit of others.

Or choices may arise between esthetics and utility. For example, a proposed large-scale apartment complex may be welcomed by prospective tenants but opposed by people who already live in the neighborhood.

Different people have different ideas of how trade-offs should be made, which can result in compromise or in continuing discord. How different interests are served often depends on the relative amounts of resources or power held by individuals or groups. Peaceful efforts at social change are most successful when the affected people are included in the planning, when information is available from all relevant experts, and when the values and power struggles are clearly understood and incorporated into the decision-making process.

There is often a question of whether a current arrangement should be improved or whether an entirely new arrangement should be invented. On the one hand, repeatedly patching up a troublesome situation may make it just tolerable enough that the large-scale change of the underlying problem is never undertaken. On the other hand, rushing to replace every system that has problems may create more problems than it solves.

It is difficult to compare the potential benefits of social alternatives. In a very large population, value comparisons are further complicated by the fact that a very small percentage of the population can be a large number of people.

For example, in a total population of million, a rise in the unemployment rate of only one-hundredth of 1 percent which some people would consider trivially small would mean a loss of 10, jobs which other people would consider very serious.

Judgments of consequences in social trade-offs tend to involve other issues as well. One is a distance effect: The farther away in distance or the further away in time the consequences of a decision are, the less importance we are likely to give them. City dwellers, for instance, are less likely to support national crop-support legislation than are farmers, and farmers may not wish to have their federal tax dollars pay for inner-city housing projects. As individuals, we find it difficult to resist an immediate pleasure even if the long-term consequences are likely to be negative, or to endure an immediate discomfort for an eventual benefit.

As a society, similarly, we are likely to attach more importance to immediate benefits such as rapidly using up our oil and mineral deposits than to long-term consequences shortages that we or our descendants may suffer later. The effect of distance in judging social trade-offs is often augmented by uncertainty about whether potential costs and benefits will occur at all.

If relative value measures can also be placed on all the possible outcomes, the probabilities and value measures can be combined to estimate which alternative would be the best bet.

But even when both probabilities and value measures are available, there may be debate about how to put the information together. People may be so afraid of some particular risk, for example, that they insist that it be reduced to as close to zero as possible, regardless of what other benefits or risks are involved. And finally, decisions about social alternatives are usually complicated by the fact that people are reactive.

When a social program is undertaken to achieve some intended effect, the inventiveness of people in promoting or resisting that effect will always add to the uncertainty of the outcome. In most of the world's countries, national power and authority are allocated to various individuals and groups through politics, usually by means of compromises between conflicting interests. Through politics, governments are elected or appointed, or, in some cases, created by armed force.

Governments have the power to make, interpret, and enforce the rules and decisions that determine how countries are run. The rules that governments make encompass a wide range of human affairs, including commerce, education, marriage, medical care, employment, military service, religion, travel, scientific research, and the exchange of ideas. The U. Constitution, for example, requires the federal government to perform only a few such functions: the delivery of mail, the taking of the census, the minting of money, and military defense.

However, the increasing size and complexity of U. Today, the federal government is directly involved in such areas as education, welfare, civil rights, scientific research, weather prediction, transportation, preservation of national resources such as national parks, and much more.

Decisions about the responsibilities that national, state, and local governments should have are negotiated among government officials, who are influenced by their constituencies and by centers of power such as corporations, the military, agricultural interests, and labor unions.

The political and economic systems of nations differ in many ways, including the means of pricing goods and services; the sources of capital for new ventures; government-regulated limits on profits; the collecting, spending, and controlling of money; and the relationships of managers and workers to each other and to government.

The political system of a nation is closely intertwined with its economic system, refereeing the economic activity of individuals and groups at every level.

It is useful to think of the economy of a nation as tending toward one or the other of two major theoretical models.

At one theoretical extreme is the purely capitalist system, which assumes that free competition produces the best allocation of scarce resources, the greatest productivity and efficiency, and the lowest costs. Decisions about who does what and who gets what are made naturally as consumers and businesses interact in the marketplace, where prices are strongly influenced by how much something costs to make or do and how much people are willing to pay for it.

Most enterprises are initiated by individuals or voluntary groups of people. When more resources are needed than are available to any one person such as to build a factory , they may be obtained from other people, either by taking out loans from banks or by selling ownership shares of the business to other people.

High personal motivation to compete requires private ownership of productive resources such as land, factories, and ships and minimal government interference with production or trade.

According to capitalist theory, individual initiative, talent, and hard work are rewarded with success and wealth, and individual political and economic rights are protected. At the other theoretical extreme is the purely socialist system, which assumes that the wisest and fairest allocation of resources is achieved through government planning of what is produced and who gets it at what cost.

Most enterprises are initiated and financed by the government. All resources of production are owned by the state, on the assumption that private ownership causes greed and leads to the exploitation of workers by owners.

According to socialist theory, people contribute their work and talents to society not for personal gain but for the social good; and the government provides benefits for people fairly, on the basis of their relative needs, not their talent and effort.

The welfare of the society as a whole is regarded as being more important than the rights of any individuals. There are, however, no nations with economic systems at either the capitalist or the socialist extreme; rather, the world's countries have at least some elements of both. Such a mixture is understandable in practical terms. In a purely capitalist system, on the one hand, competition is seldom free because for any one resource, product, or service, a few large corporations or unions tend to monopolize the market and charge more than open competition would allow.

Discrimination based on economically irrelevant social attitudes for example, against minorities and women, in favor of friends and relatives further distorts the ideal of free competition.

And even if the system is efficient, it tends to make some individuals very rich and some very poor. Thus, the United States, for example, tries to limit the extreme effects of its basically capitalist economic system by mean of selective government intervention in the free-market system. This intervention includes tax rates that increase with wealth; unemployment insurance; health insurance; welfare support for the poor; laws that limit the economic power of any one corporation; regulation of trade among the states; government restrictions on unfair advertising, unsafe products, and discriminatory employment; and government subsidization of agriculture and industry.

On the other hand, a purely socialist economy, even though it may be more equitable, tends toward inefficiency by neglecting individual initiative and by trying to plan every detail of the entire national economy.

Without some advantages in benefits to motivate people's efforts, productivity tends to be low. And without individuals having the freedom to make decisions on their own, short-term variations in supply and demand are difficult to respond to. You as parents can influence all these things as well, but the things that will stick with the kids for long haul are learned from the society.

Now society comprises of a lot of different things that include media, neighborhood, laws, and school. Media has really expanded these days. They all play a huge role in shaping up your teens. If the latter see violence all over the news against people of one race, then they might grow sympathetic towards them, or spiteful towards the oppressors.

However, if the same news channels start to show those same victims as the bad people, then they will most likely develop a strong hatred for every individual in that race. Teens form their opinions based on what they see on the media, and their behavior is guided by these opinions. The rate of crime and how law enforcement reacts to it also play an important role in affecting the behavior and mindset of teens. Rawls rightly rejects this position as being unable to account for justice, except perhaps by some administrative decision that it is desirable for the whole to give individuals some minimum level of liberty and happiness.

But individual persons do not enter into the theoretical position. They are merely sources or directions from which desires are drawn. The second paradigm is that which characterizes the original position. It has already been suggested that this is a picture of an aggregate of individuals, mutually disinterested, and conceived primarily as will.

While not necessarily egoistic, their interests are each of their own choosing. They have their own life plans. They coexist on the same geographical territory and they have roughly similar needs and interests so that mutually advantageous cooperation among them is possible.

Thus, one can say, in brief, that the circumstances of justice obtain whenever mutually disinterested persons put forward conflicting claims to the division of social advantages under conditions of moderate scarcity [17]. Here the tension between individual and society is resolved in favor of plurality, of an aggregate of mutually disinterested individuals occupying the same space at the same time. It is resolved in favor of the plural, while giving up any social unity which might obtain. The classical utilitarian model and the original position as sketched by Rawls provide paradigms for two polar ways in which the tension between the plurality of individuals and the unity of social structure might be resolved.

One resolution favors unity and the other favors plurality. It is described as a good, as an end in itself which is a shared end. This paradigm is distinct both from the conflated application to the entire society of the principle of choice for one person and from the conception of society as an aggregate of mutually disinterested individuals. The idea of a social union is described in contrast to the idea of a private society.

A private society is essentially the second model as realized in the actual world. It stems from a consideration of the conditions of the original position as descriptive of a social order. Over against this notion of private society, Rawls proposes his idea of a social union [18].

It is one in which final ends are shared and communal institutes are valued. Besides, the relationship between individual and society can be viewed from another three angles: Functionalist, Inter-actionist, and Culture and personality. What is the relation between individual and society? Functionalists regard the individual as formed by society through the influence of such institutions as the family, school and workplace. Early sociologists such as Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim and even Karl Marx were functionalists, examined society as existing apart from the individual.

For Durkheim, society is reality; it is first in origin and importance to the individual. In contrast to Auguste Comte known as father of sociology , who regarded the individual as a mere abstraction, a somewhat more substantial position by Durkheim held that the individual was the recipient of group influence and social heritage.

How an individual helps in building society? For inter-actionists, it is through the interaction of the people that the society is formed. The main champion of this approach was Max Weber social action theorist , who said that society is built up out of the interpretations of individuals. The structuralists or functionalists tend to approach the relationship of self individual and society from the point of the influence of society on the individual.

A prominent theorist of the last century, Talcott Parsons developed a general theory for the study of society called action theory, based on the methodological principle of voluntarism and the epistemological principle of analytical realism.

The theory attempted to establish a balance between two major methodological traditions: the utilitarian-positivist and hermeneutic-idealistic traditions. For Parsons, voluntarism established a third alternative between these two. He added that, the structure of society which determines roles and norms, and the cultural system which determines the ultimate values of ends. His theory was severely criticized by George Homans. A recent well-known theorist Anthony Giddens has not accepted the idea of some sociologists that society has an existence over and above individuals.

Or How Individual and Society Interacts? Both the above views are incomplete. In reality, it is not society or individual but it is society and individual which helps in understanding the total reality. The extreme view of individual or society has long been abandoned. Sociologists from Cooley to the present have recognized that neither society nor the individual can exist without each other. These anthropologists have studied how society shapes or controls individuals and how, in turn, individuals create and change society.

Thus, to conclude, it can be stated that the relationship between society and individual is not one-sided.

Both are essential for the comprehension of either. Both go hand in hand, each is essentially dependent on the other. Both are interdependent on each, other. The individual should be subordinated to society and the individual should sacrifice their welfare at the cost of society. Both these views are extreme which see the relationship between individual and society from merely the one or the other side.

But surely all is not harmonious between individual and society. The individual and society interact on one another and depend on one another. Social integration is never complete and harmonious. The wellbeing of nations can occur at the cost of the well-being of their citizens, and this seems to have happened in the past. Yet in present day conditions, there is no such conflict. Society and individual are made mutually dependent and responsible and mutually complementary.

The result is that society progresses well with the minimum possible restrictions on the individual. A very wide scope is given to the natural development of the energies of the individual in such a manner that in the end. Society will benefit the best by it. While society reaps the best advantage of the properly utilized and developed energies of the individuals, an attempt is made to see that the normal and sometimes even the abnormal weaknesses of the individuals have the least possible effect on the society.

Spirit of service and duty to the society is the ideal of the individual and spirit of tolerance, broadmindedness and security of the individual is the worry of the society.

There is no rigid rule to develop the individual in a particular pattern suitable to the rules of the society. Society demands greater sacrifices from its greater individuals while the fruits of the works of all are meant equally for all. The general rule is: the higher the status and culture of the individual are, the lesser his rights are and the greater his duties are.

A sincere attempt is made by the sociologists to bring to the minimum the clash between the individual and the society, so that there will be few psychological problems for the individual and the society both. The inherent capacities, energies and weaknesses of the individual are properly taken into account and the evolution of the relation between the two is made as natural as possible.

Human values and idealism being given due respect, the development of the relation between the two is more or less philosophical. MacIver and Page Society. Macmillan and Company, London, Green A. Horton, P. Lenski, G. McGraw-Hill, Boston, Maryanski, A. Stanford Univer- sity Press, Redwood City, Quoted from Ritzer, G. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, MacIver and Page Society, op.

Sanderson, S. Blackie Press, New York, Bottomore, T.