Fic Updates 48

[Norgarth]

A Thing of Vikings
https://archiveofourown.org/works/104089...6#workskin

However, social forces do not exist in isolation. Even apparently singular points of social influence exist in the midst of a web of cues, directions, impulses, and directives. A useful way in which to conceptualize social dynamics is through a concept called dialectics. Related to the dialectical method of Greek philosophy, social dialectics allows one to frame many social issues in terms of two or more social forces in opposition to each other. In such a framing, “society” can be conceptualized as a web or fabric suspended between numerous forces working in opposition with each other, each of them trying to pull the resulting network in a direction of their liking. Wages for workers is perhaps the archetypal example of a social tension, stretched between the employer, who wishes for the wages to be low—if not nonexistent, in the extreme cases of thralldom—and the laborers, who want them as high as possible.

Consider other such oppositions; the aristocracy will be in opposition to the peasantry in terms of rights and privileges, and possibly also in opposition to the royalty. Hedonists exist in opposition with the ascetics. The intellectual against the ignorant, and possibly the propagandist. The agriculturalist against the industrialist and each in turn against the preservationist. The artist against the censor. The pacifist against the martialist. The authoritarian against the libertarian. The anarchist versus the statist. The despot versus the democrat. And so forth.

Each of these in turn stretch the fabric of society between themselves, forming the social environment of laws, mores, attitudes, beliefs, concepts, traditions and systems in which they live.

—Nationbuilding: How People Move, Talk, Think, Organize, & Structure Themselves, 1888, Amsterdam University Press