It occurred to me this morning that critical theory’s maniacal focus on everything as a ‘social construct’ is really just an often unconscious decision to ignore physis. When one ignores physis that enables all sorts of wild statements that only focus on desired outcomes rather than on peoples’ ability to actually achieve them. Thus, you can easily maneuver SJWs into having to agree with such absurdities that, for instance, everyone is capable of being a starting cornerback in the NFL. They have become so concretized into denying nature that it is inconceivable to them that not everyone has the same ability (nature, physis) thus, there might be different outcomes between two different people depending on their natural talents.
Of course, it goes the other way as well: racists of all stripes have their pendulum stuck in the opposite direction. For them everything is physis so black folks, Jewish folks, etc. are all inferior because of some perceived physical difference in their nature.
It seems to me that psychology’s experiments with identical twins solved this problem long ago. Yes, how one is raised affects one’s life. If you were raised being told every day that you were going to go to Harvard after having you read Shakespeare for an hour a day, the chances are better that you will believe and work towards that goal. However, if you have an IQ of 80, no matter how much you are told you will go to Harvard, the chances are pretty low you would ever get in. Conversely, if you were told as a little girl that ‘girls don’t do math’ you can introject that and tell yourself you will never be good at math even though you can solve differential equations at age 8! Nurture is very powerful, but it can’t grow you a missing limb.
In short, the nature vs. nurture, the ‘everything is defined by biological differences’ vs. ‘everything is a social construct’ is nonsense. As usual, the answer lies somewhere in between. As a middle aged white dude, I will never be a starting cornerback in the NFL, no matter how much I embrace ‘The Secret‘–it’s just not going to happen. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean there is some sort of mystical power in the universe that has constructed a vast systemic discrimination architecture to prevent middle aged white men from being cornerbacks in the NFL: I don’t have the talent nor the conditioning to achieve that status period.