Maggie's Farm

Erving Goffman is a sociologist worth reading for pleasure. He works by irony.

Asylums was his big attention-grabbing work, but misinterpreted. He found that in (then) mental institutions nobody was doing what the institution said they were doing. This was taken as evidence of the failure of mental institutions.

Goffman's point was that there's nothing special about mental institutions. Society works that way too,but it's just harder to study. Asylums ends

"The simplest sociological view of the individual and his self is that he is to himself what his place in an organization defines him to be. When pressed, a sociologist modifies this model by granting certain complications : the self may be not yet formed or may exhibit conflicting dedications. Perhaps we should further complicate the construct by elevating these qualifications to a central place, initially defining the individual, for sociological purposes, as a stance-taking entity, a something that takes up a position somewhere between identificaiton with an organization and opposition to it, and is ready at the slightest pressure to regain its balance by shifting its involvement to either direction. It is thus against something that the self can emerge. This has been appreciated by students of totalitarianism ...

I have argued the same case in regard to total institutions. May this not be the situation, however, in free society, too?

Without something to belong to, we have no stable self, and yet total commitment and attachment to any social unit implies a kind of selflessness. Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit ; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personality identity often resides in the cracks."

Goffman Asylums ``The Underlife of a Public Institution'' p.320

Many other books too, a half shelf full, on what you know but don't notice about the rules.