Two: Are You Socialized?

The interaction is the basic unit—the atom—of sociology. Economists study the economy; chemists study chemicals; sociologists study interaction.

If I left society and became a hermit, living in the woods and detached from all other human contact, I would still be a product of society, because everything I take with me, knowledge-wise, came from someone or somewhere else. I probably didn’t learn it on my own; it was taught to me. Even the words I speak, and the thoughts I think in those words, are the product of the social environment in which I was raised, schooled, taught how to be a person. This is the fundamental lesson of sociology, I think: socialization. People learn how to be people from other people, through the process of interacting with them.