Social theories have been unable to address the mutual relationship between imperial (macro) phenomena and protection and sacrifice (micro) phenomena. They are not been able to overcome the imperial and sacrifice masking mechanisms. They are, therefore, supporting the masking mechanisms and the imperial interests that build them. They do so in a professional manner, by developing realistic rational skills, insensitive to lives defeated since birth, and attentive to the practical needs of employers, funding agencies, all those who fulfill higher hierarchical roles in the imperial organization.
The central discussion in progress in the social sciences is to know how to better position yourself in relation to funders: alongside or against the prevailing interests at work. Both sides neglect due attention to the importance of care in the production of social identities. Human reproduction, pregnancy, and child-rearing are subject almost ignored by the social sciences, although this is admittedly decisive for social structuring and for individual destinies. When these kinds of subjects are dealt with, it happens inside closed subdisciplines, such as psychoanalysis or educational sciences, which in turn are centered not on the children. Instead, they centered on adulthood or on the institutions and professional children caregivers.
The production of people’s identities is a fundamental aspect of our existence, both personal and social, without which we cannot survive. The survival and the quality of life of each one – and of societies – depends on the quality of the identity that is produced when we are children when we have little reflexive capacity and great dependence on what is transmitted to us, first among caregivers, then among friends or colleagues or spouses or children, etc.
The state is a way for the empire to meddle in the production of people’s care and identities. It does so by building ideal models of families, daycare centers, schools, asylums, and other institutions and policies aiming children and youth. The reduction of the empire to the nation-state is one of the modern forms of cognitive and emotional alienation of the mechanisms of identity construction on a large scale, framed by the states. Nationalism, money, criminal law, schooling, professionalization, employment, are some of the ways of the identity constructions manipulation developed by nation-states, in close connection with caregiving. Levels of differentiated caregiving according to the social status of each one, which thus reproduces the statutes from generation to generation, adapting them to the evolution of societies. The same mechanisms isolate perceptions and discussions about the imperial mechanisms that deliver misogyny, elitism, and concealment within borders. The nation-state’s main function of domination is to threaten death any external and internal enemy, anyone who questions its sovereignty. The republican state takes as its main duty to defend the honor of its ruling classes hard and with weapons, having the effect of blocking, censoring, criminalizing any discussion about the globalized world’s ruling class complicity, at the same time evident and unspeakable.
Nation-states´ funded and guided theorizing collects synchronous data produced by national statistical services, eventually compare international data between countries, so that all allowed questioning is about each country ranking regarding diverse subjects. The main national institutions are responsible for their comparative performance, using the averages, or other statistical points, as the ideal standard.
The zoom out and zoom in social-analysis (or vice versa) is a methodology inspired by the critique of nationalist social theories, taking into account all humanity as the roof. This methodology is interested in power, but not exclusively. It strives to break with the current censorship that disqualifies the dimensions of care and identities, mutually associated with the power of dissimulation, hierarchization, and discrimination of institutions. The social sciences integrated society, state, and private institutions. It would be unrealistic to expect that the dominant standards of the social sciences would be other or external to what is social common functioning. At the same time, science, reason, clairvoyance, intelligence, morality itself, complain about professionals, including ourselves. They call for trying new, more humane paths.
OpenEdition sugere que esta publicação seja citada da seguinte forma:
Antonio Dores (1 de Maio de 2020). The social sciences method. Libertação do império (Liberation from the Empire). Recuperado em 18 de Fevereiro de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/qvmp