When Reality Itself Becomes A Social Construct Let's start with the idea that almost everything is a social construct. Critical theory is particularly prone to make that conclusion, due to an inheritance from the Western Marxist tradition. Marx had a general belief that all the culture, including all the social and political institutions, and all the dominant ideas of each era, were a product of the underlying economic system, and worked to benefit the dominant class of the system. Later Marxist thinkers, most notably Antonio Gramsci, expanded this idea further, suggesting that the culture and institutions of the advanced capitalist West were responsible for keeping the workers in their place and preventing revolution. Thus, the Western Marxist tradition in which critical theory is rooted has a strong tendency to question every part of the status quo, and to suspect that it is all a construct in the service of the powerful and privileged. Postmodern philosophy in particular takes this view to the extreme: it denies even the fundamental faith in scientific truth that has underpinned Western intellectualism since the Enlightenment, instead favoring the use of critical theorystyle power analysis when comparing competing subjective narratives. This ultimately leads to a meaningless relativism, where everything is valid, where I can have 'my truth' and you can have 'your truth', and any attempt to introduce objectivity is seen as an exercise in power and oppression.
Where I think the problem lies is a fundamental confusion between language and reality. All human language is, by 90
