No, only people can make choices. Societies can never make choices, because they do not exist in the real world. One of the greatest mind prisons of this age is believing "societies" have any agency. It's always people, always was, always will be.
We can also give up an offering to "luck" and pray for our luck to change, since luck "makes choices" all the time. Choices which impact your everyday life much more than "society". Or we can accept that these things don't have agency.
How to differentiate between what exists in your head and elsewhere? Good question. Metaphysical. Society is an idea, an abstraction. It is only useful for us as long as we understand it doesn't really exist. Man should never be enslaved by man-made ideas. Other abstract ideas are more powerful and more beneficial. These are better to treat as real than "society".
GP is mostly ranting around some methodological individualism garbage when they could have been reading about the social model of disability and finding it's not that contradictory to their stated beliefs and probably not deserving of outright dismissal.
> Individuals exist, "society" has never existed and will never exist. It's only individuals who can take actions. "Society" does not have any means at all, because it's just a mirage within the imagination of some people.
It's one of those critiques that hits really hard when you've been doing lines of cocaine off of stacks of Hayek and Mises books and doesn't really inspire anyone outside of those niches. "Oooh! Checkmate! Got you now, Statist! That's not a society! it's a collection of individuals!" etc.
If you were to say something like "an individual with impaired eye sight is not considered disabled when they have access to eye glasses. disability does not consist solely of an individual's medical impairment, but in the relationship between the individual, other individuals, and available infrastructural and technological means" maybe it'd hit better for them.
"the obstacle is not some property of the individual experiencing an access issue, but are created by a system made by other people who didn't provide alternative access methods" (roughly the same thing) is just super objectionable though /eyeroll
I'd like to say that your comment speaks for itself - in many ways. It demonstrates how somebody who holds a strong belief in "society" reacts and acts towards another person when their core belief is questioned. Your behaviour is predictable.
How do you differentiate between what exists only in your head vs what exists elsewhere?
Societies make choices that have physical and pragmatic realities associated with them. Those choices impact our everyday lives.