the things we make real

i keep coming back to this word — construct — and the way it gets used like a quiet dismissal.

money is a construct. success is a construct. nation-states are constructs. usually the point is that these things aren't really there in the way we imagine them to be. we made them up, agreed to them, inherited them from people who agreed to them before us, and somehow discovering this is supposed to make them feel less real. i'm not sure it does, or at least i'm not sure made up and not real have anything like the relationship we assume they do.

i think about traffic sometimes because it's such an ordinary example of this. thousands of people get into cars every morning and move through a city trusting that painted lines on the road will mean roughly the same thing to everyone else. you stop because a light turns red and someone you've never met moves because theirs turns green, trusting that you will do what you're supposed to do. there's nothing in the red light itself that can make you stop and the painted line isn't a wall. we could have designed the whole thing differently and, in different places, we have, but you still wouldn't drive through an intersection on the basis that traffic rules are socially constructed.

i think we move too easily from we made this to this isn't real, when so much of ordinary life seems to exist somewhere between those two things. something can be invented and still become part of the environment you have to live in, and if enough people organize themselves around it for long enough, you eventually stop experiencing it as something anyone invented in the first place. money is probably the easiest example because most days you don't have to believe in money in any conscious sense. you check your balance, pay for something, complain that something has become too expensive. the belief is buried so deep inside the activity that it just feels like dealing with the world.

maybe the more interesting thing is how an agreement gets from something people made up to something a person has to contend with, because most of us arrive after that has already happened. money was here before you were. governments were here. universities, companies, property and all these systems of recognition and permission were already running by the time anybody explained them to you. you learn your way around them without having been present for whatever long sequence of events made them normal, a little like learning that this door is always locked or that this road gets terrible after five. eventually it's just knowledge about how to move through the world.

you tend to see the construction again when something stops working. a bank run makes the confidence behind money suddenly much easier to see, in the same way that an institution which looked permanent can become surprisingly fragile once enough people stop behaving as though it deserves their confidence. maybe this is part of why calling something a construct can feel powerful in the first place. seeing what holds it up gives you some distance from it. what looked inevitable turns out to be maintained by people, habits, incentives and sometimes force, although understanding this doesn't necessarily put you anywhere outside it. you can understand exactly why a currency has value and still need it tomorrow morning. there is a difference between understanding where something gets its power and being free of that power.

i also don't think constructed things are as arbitrary as we sometimes imply when we talk about them. they could have developed differently, obviously, but we don't build in empty space. whatever form a market takes, people still have different things, want different things, know different things and somehow have to coordinate all of that. you can change the arrangement without making the underlying problem disappear, and i suspect this is why certain patterns keep returning even when we consciously reject the form they previously took.

status is a good example because you can reject one hierarchy and watch another begin to form inside the group that rejected it, not necessarily because everyone is a hypocrite but because people still notice one another, imitate one another and want recognition from one another. what earns status can change completely while the tendency to confer it survives. the expensive suit might become embarrassing while knowing the right obscure musician suddenly matters, or being early to some idea does, or appearing not to care about status at all does. we seem to be much better at changing what counts than we are at getting rid of the counting.

once i started thinking about constructs this way, whether they were “real” became less interesting to me than the different ways something can be real. a mountain doesn't need us in the way a company does. everyone could stop believing in the mountain tomorrow and nothing much would happen to it, whereas the company depends on people continuing to recognise ownership, employment, money, authority and a bunch of other things that themselves only work because other people recognise them too. and yet this apparently more fragile kind of thing can determine where someone spends most of their waking hours, what they can afford or even which country they are allowed to remain in. its dependence on us doesn't prevent it from having consequences for us.

even something as ordinary as a queue has a little bit of this in it. there's no physical reason the person who arrived before you has to be served first, and sometimes there isn't even an actual line. you walk into a room, quietly work out who was there before you and become annoyed when somebody behaves as though the order doesn't exist. nobody needed to explain the arrangement and, more importantly, nobody needs to stand there enforcing it most of the time. everyone is carrying some version of it around in their head.

i think that's the part i find most fascinating: something can exist almost entirely between people and still become stable enough that somebody else encounters it as part of the world. they weren't there when the agreement formed, if there ever even was a moment you could call an agreement. they inherit whatever survived, and probably don't spend much time wondering why this arrangement survived instead of another one.

maybe this is also why getting rid of constructs is harder than pointing them out. you can change the rules deliberately, of course, and sometimes you should, but whatever replaces them still has to survive contact with the things that produced the old rules in the first place. people still have to coordinate, decide whom to trust, deal with scarcity, live around other people who don't necessarily want the same things they do. the arrangement can change while the problem underneath it remains.

this is probably why “it's a construct” increasingly sounds to me like the beginning of a thought rather than the end of one. knowing that something was made tells me that it has a history, that its current shape isn't inevitable and that somewhere inside it are assumptions about people and the world they were trying to live in. i'm much more interested in why it took this shape, what keeps it stable and what it quietly requires everyone to continue doing for the whole thing to work.

the painted line on the road is still paint and you could scrape it away tomorrow without violating any law of nature, but tonight people will drive home trusting it, probably without thinking about it at all. a surprising amount of the world seems to work this way.