A Member of Society

A MEMBER OF SOCIETY

While doing something have you ever thought and asked yourself why you are doing that or why you have to do that in particular way same as others do? Most probably you have not. Individual behavior is insured to be in conformity with the requests of the public because the society highly manipulates individuals by the social mechanisms such as laws, customs, folkways, traditions, and even fashions which affect individuals imperceptibly. For that reason, individuals do not recognize that they do what others do and they little by little become fitted in the society.

It is a well-known truth that individuals live in a society to which they belong. Thus, it is obvious that an individual is a part, a member of the society and he has this membership by birth. As from the birth, interaction between him and his circle begins which results in him to be fitted to the society. The effects of the membership to a society occur when an individual makes a decision on any subjects. For example, Stepan Arkadevich, one of the characters of Lev Tolstoy, decides to subscribe to a liberal newspaper because of the propensity to which the majority belongs. It is understandable that instead of making his own decision about to choose the newspaper he likes, he prefers the newspaper which others choose. In addition, he holds the opinions of those which the majority and his gazette profess, even though he is not interested in at all. As the effects of social control appear in his life, as a result, he begins to think and behave like others as mentioned above.

In modern sociological thought, it has been argued by the pioneer sociologists such as Durkheim and Freud that social control, far from involving merely external regulation of the person’s conduct, becomes undoubtedly internalized in the individual so that the ethical demands of society become constitutive factors of the individual’s personality. For instance, despite choosing