Social Pathologies: Distinctive Features

Abstract

Social pathologies are presented as having four distinctive characteristics. Each of them is developed in different sections of this chapter. (a)Social pathologies are the effect of anonymous social processes, that is, they acquire a logic of their own that becomes independent of the participating agents, and therefore, it is not possible to attribute them to an agent or group of agents. Hence, social pathologies become independent from the agents that take part in it.(b)The second feature is the imposition of a type of practical rationality on a social space ruled by another type. This is so because there is a non-conscious transformation of the beliefs of the affected individuals who act in such a context, distorting the interpretation of its shared meaning.(c)The third one is the undermining of the agents’ autonomy, imagination and reflection. Undermining the imagination enables a type of rationality to be imposed on social spaces alien to it.(d)The fourth distinctive feature follows from the previous one, since one of the consequences of the weakening of imagination, autonomy and reflection is the stimulation of deceptive justifying processes, i.e., ideological processes. Finally, I present “malinchism” as a particular case that illustrates social pathologies in the context of Latin American societies. Besides the undervalued self-image of Latin American people inherited from the Conquest and Colony that characterizes malinchism, it implies a methodological approach that can be projected to other specific cases equally affected by historical colonization.