> Similar logic is used to argue that videogames cause violence, or (in Russia) that men become gay because it's cool.
What exactly is the similar logic here?
> I feel most of these social theories have no basis is reality.
I always think back to a passage from Georges Canguilhem's "The Normal and the Pathological", which is a bit hard to read but hit the nails on the head (and I'll be the first to admit not to be a philosopher or any sort of expert on the topic):
In anthropological experience a norm cannot be original. Rule begins to be rule only in making rules and this function of correction arises from infraction itself. A golden age, a paradise, are the mythical representations of an existence which initially meets its demands, of a mode of life whose regularity owes nothing to the establishment of rules, of a state of guiltlessness in the absence of the interdict that ignorance of the law is no excuse. These two myths proceed from an illusion of retroactivity according to which original good is later evil kept in control. The absence of rules goes hand in hand with the absence of technical skills. Golden age man, and paradisiacal man, spontaneously enjoy the fruits of a nature which is uncultivated, unprompted, unforced, unreclaimed. Neither work nor culture, such is the desire of complete regression. This formulation in negative terms of an experience consonant with the norm without the norm having had to show itself in and by its function, this really naive dream of regularity in the absence of rule, signifies essentially that the concept of normal is itself normative, it serves as a norm even for the universe of mythical discourse which tells the story of its absence. This explains why, in many mythologies, the advent of the golden age marks the end of a chaos. As Gaston Bachelard said: "Multiplicity is agitation. In literature there is not one immobile chaos" Lop. cit., p. 59]. In Ovid's Metamorphoses the earth of chaos does not bear fruit, the sea of chaos is not navigable, forms do not remain identical to themselves. The initial indetermination is later denied determination. The instability of things has as its correlative the impotence of man. The image of chaos is that of a denied regularity, as that of the golden age is that of wild [sauvage] regularity. Chaos and golden age are the mythical terms of the fundamental normative relation, terms so related that neither of the two can keep from turning into the other. The role of chaos is to summon up, to provoke its interruption and to become an order. Inversely, the order of the golden age cannot last because wild regularity is mediocrity; the,satisfactions there are modest aurea mediocritas – because they are not a victory gained over the obstacle of measure. Where a rule is obeyed without awareness of a possible transcendence, all enjoyment is simple. But can one simply enjoy the value of rule itself? In order to truly enjoy' the value of the rule, the value of regulation, the value of valorization, the rule must be subjected to the test of dispute. It is not just the exception which proves the rule as rule, it is the infraction which provides it with the occasion to be rule by making rules. In this sense the infraction is not the origin of the rule but the origin of regulation. It is in the nature of the normative that its beginning lies in its infraction. To use a Kantian expression, we would propose that the condition of the possibility of rules is but one with the condition of the possibility of the experience of rules. In a situation of irregularity, the experience of rules puts the regulatory function of rules to the test.