The Pathology of Imprisonment - Essay Example

Mills describes that people often do not realize the way that they fit into society but that regardless of the path that they live, a person is still intertwined with those around them and people from the past. It is hard enough to embrace one's own troubles and then turns and look at the rest of the bigger picture. Events that become history affect the future and everyone on the planet during the event and anyone thereafter. Mills discusses the sociological imagination after this, describing those that use their individual sense of interpretation when they are editors, writers, or artists, for example.

In some instances, all people are created equal. However, it is their place in a culture that they succumb to the environment and societal issues around them. People only limit themselves. Every man or woman in some way shapes society regardless of who they are or what they do. Their pure existence somehow impacts society, the history left behind us when we are gone and starts precedence for what is yet to come. Mills says that the relationship between the biography of who a person is tied to what history is and society helps combine the two and that is life.

Every single institution in society somehow interacts with all others. Though there are social issues that every person will face. He discusses war, marriage, politics, unemployment, and economics as examples of social issues and institutions that exist in society. When considering sociological imagination, is being aware of what is going on around us. It is discovering how we are all intricately weaved together as a society. It helps people to realize the historical context of life and how it helps to define individuals.

Sociological imagination allows us to grasp what is history and tie it in with reality and understand how the two intertwine. It is the ability to embrace that concept and see how the two relate to each other and how history affects our own current lives and the people around us, determining a way that it all mingles together. A person who uses a sociological imagination way of thinking might look at how the past has influenced the now. How did slavery impact today's African American culture?

How did the woman's right to vote impact society for other women's rights today? What would have happened if Christopher Columbus had never discovered America? What if America never separated its democracy from the British ruling? How do technology trends in China impact other countries? What if America had never become a developed country? These are hypothetical questions without answers that a person using sociological imagination may try to work out in their mind to try to uncover meaning.

Though these are questions that have no definite answers, they look at history and how it has impacted the cultures of today. Personal troubles of milieu have to do with the cultural surroundings around us and how we deal with them personally. It can often be a struggle of our own minds and determining the meaning of life or try to gain our purpose. We are trying to see ourselves as part of the bigger picture and have trouble doing so. It also has to do with the personal relationships with the people that we interact with on a daily basis.

It is a social situation where a person has their own internalized threats as a result of their surroundings and their interactions with others.  Public issues of social structure have to do with the overlap of history and the larger structure of life.  Some of this involves institutional arrangements such as employment, marriage,  war, or the economy.  Though people have their own immediate personal issues, there are other issues that lay beyond their own.  Mills relates the two parts of sociological thinking as essential to social imagination because a person has to look at their own lives and see the historical background of it all and what the precedences are in society including social mores and scenarios.