Socialization puts us into what we come to know as our "reality". To an outsider to our culture, that outsider, if he questions one of our beliefs and behaviors, will necessarily have to understand myriad other things to finally be convinced of why it is a custom or belief of ours. If he says, "Why do you wear a tie?" we will say, "My job requires a tie." He will say, "Why do they require that?" We will say, "Because it is not a blue-collar job, but a white-collar job." He will say, "What’s the difference? I thought a job was a job. Why does one type require a tie? Because those are the jobs for people who prefer ties?" No matter what we say, he will still not see a tie the way we do. There are a thousand things that outsider has to know in order to see a simple custom of ours the way we do. For each particular belief or custom, there are a thousand other concepts and beliefs that are interconnected with it, so that one must nearly understand the whole, to understand one part. Usually only anthropologists studying a culture make a concerted effort to do this completely; when we go to India or Japan, and we are told of a custom that seems strange to us, we are satisfied with merely saying to ourselves, "It is only a custom; I understand." But we do not see the custom the way they do; to them, this is how it ought to be done, and it is not an arbitrary custom, but positively the right thing to do.

This world in which we live, in which everything makes sense to us in the context of everything else, is what anthropologists call a world made of "webs of significance". By being socialized in these particular webs of significance, we have been socialized even to find pleasure in things other cultures do not find pleasure in, and pain in things other cultures do not see any pain in. Even something as "real" to us as the pleasure found in watching a film, or the pain found in being deprived of TV for six months (should we try it), is socially constructed.

David Hume argued that we can never conclude a statement containing an "ought" from statements that merely describe how things are. He was using reason, and saw that his senses only told him how things were, not how they ought to be. And he found with reason, furthermore, that to conclude what we ought to do, from only propositions containing how things are, introduces a completely new concept, one that is not supported by the premises. Other philosophers later agreed with him, and thanks to him this "taking ‘ought’ conclusions from ‘is’ premises" is known as the naturalistic fallacy. But does this mean David Hume never again, after reasoning that way, said to himself upon waking, if he had to be somewhere, "I really ought to get out of bed"? Was he so guided by reason, that once he discovered we can never conclude an ought, that he never again used them, not even when it crossed his mind, say, that he had been lately spending too much money? Of course not: he was socialized to continue to believe things like, "I ought to get out of bed," and though reason told him these statements were irrational, he went on using them, or so I would expect, unless he was very extraordinary.

Kant argued, in his Critique of Practical Reason, starting from beliefs we have been socialized to believe, which we cannot live normally and not believe. He said basically (this is a paraphrase), "If you have ever, and continue to, believe that there is something you want to do that you ought not to do, certain logical things must follow, in order to keep all your beliefs logically consistent." He needed not prove that "I ought not to do A," but said, "If it is true that I ought not to do A (and everyone is socialized such that they must believe this from time to time), then I must hold other beliefs that follow from this belief." This is an example of irrational socialization working its way into the "rational stronghold" of philosophy. Kant pointed to beliefs we have been so socialized to believe (though we have no purely logical reason to believe they are true), that we cannot but believe them, and said certain things followed from these beliefs. If we deny the things that follow, there will be a contradiction in our belief system.

Socialization affects not only our beliefs, but our perceptions of what we call "reality". The Existentialists were the first to point this out. Say I have two apples and two pears, and one apple is yellow, the other red; and one of the pears is yellow, the other red. Someone who does not know what apples or pears are might point to the red pear and red apple and say, "What are these?" and then point to the yellow apple and yellow pear and say, "And what are these?" But we see the apples as falling under the concept "apple", and so we think they appear to have more in common with each other, than either has to either pear. The arbitrary classifications our language uses to divide up the world affect our perceptions of that world. If we had no separate word for "nose" but merely regarded it as "part of the face", we would not notice things like a big nose as much, because it would be hard for us to linguistically express "He has a big nose." And if it is hard for us to linguistically express it, it is hard for us even to think it; for we think in terms of the concepts our language gives us. Thus we would not notice it as much; or, if we did, we would have a harder time being quite sure what we were noticing.

This process is not based upon reason. We live in a world where everything makes sense, and has meaning to us, in terms of everything else. But it does not begin with logical, true premises, and build itself around that, but begins with the properties of our environment, and what is necessary to survive in it. This is where Marx’s historical materialism was a sound insight; but I do not think it can explain all the things a culture believes and does. I will discuss this at length in the next chapter.

For now, the issue is that cultural significance, the very thing we call the "real" world, does not issue from reason. It begins not with things like, "How may I logically analyze this world, and create a belief system built upon that logic?" but, "What need I to do to live, and what sorts of beliefs must I believe in order to motivate me to do this?"

The Existentialists often wrote novels instead of philosophical treatises, in order to express a "meaningless" experience, as a novel is a better format for expressing experience that is out of the ordinary than a philosophical treatise. One of the experiences they expressed was the transcendence of the conceptual framework that the culture lives under, so that everything lost the meaning this framework had given it, and life became absurd.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea focuses on the perceptual experience of literally looking at people and objects without imposing the categories and concepts, which language gives us, onto them, so that they transform into absurd sights that terrify.

Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger is about a man who lives in a society in which he must cognitively understand all the various customs and rules, while their "significance" and "sense" do not manifest themselves in his emotional life. When he is denied cigarettes in jail, he at first does not understand, until they explain it to him rationally. Once he gets the reasoning behind it, which is that jail is a punishment and going without tobacco is part of his punishment, he understands perfectly, and has to agree with them, without any emotional attachment to the issue whatsoever. He seems to be constantly trying to intellectually understand the webs of significance of his own culture, without ever really "feeling" that meaning on an instinctive, subconscious level. When he kills an Arab after an altercation, he is put on trial for murder, something he cannot understand until it is explained to him. During the trial, he follows the prosecutor’s logic as if he is trying himself to discern whether he is guilty or innocent, whether, according to this complex and intellectually baffling network of meaning he finds himself in, he has actually done something wrong.

Of course, if such people exist in our culture, they are only very alienated and rare. For the rest of us, these webs of significance take on such a "reality" that we cannot comprehend that things like "ownership" and "legal precedent" are social constructions that have no correspondent in nature. They are facts about our mental life in all its complexities, which we each create through mental activity and convention, and the truths that describe them have no correspondent other than the minds of the individuals that grasp them.