The Enablement of Society

Topic: Do you believe that external social forces are more or less important than individual internal characteristics and motivations in shaping our lives?

C. Wright Mills said that, “The sociological imagination enables us to grasp the connection between history and biography” (Essentials of Sociology, pg. 4). Society’s influence is what “enables” us to connect to the timely flow of history and stimulates the perspective of personhood in structural facets. External social forces are more heavily influential than individual internal characteristics and motivations. In a big way because external social forces give direction to latent functions. We all have relative tendencies to varying characteristics and motivations, but it is those external social forces that give those individual characteristics and motivations kinetic stimuli.

Ask someone what they are passionate about and why they are passionate about it. They will tell you a story of a person, an advertisement, a social event, a life transforming day when their heart ignited with passion. They will tell you they are passionate about what it is because they saw something that attracted them to what it was. Now, that can be external or internal, but what gave them the idea about what they are now passionate about was an outside force that motivated them. But why were they motivated by that one thing in the first place?

Although outside forces are at work, inside forces are at work as well. Inside forces or internal forces, are build in, designed intentions of a Creator. The witness is is that you look in any family and you will see what motivates them by what they do and who they are individually. Not only that but you will acknowledge that each individual in a household, dorm, club, community, office has varying characteristics and motivations even though they are operating in the same nuclear family or social location. The point is is that, though internal forces are at work and present, external forces are what give manifested desire guidance to what is socially functional.