Fools say "race is a social construct", but actually society is a racial construct.
Countries look the way they do because of their people. If you change the people, you change the country. A colony of beavers escaped from a zoo after generations in captivity -- they went straight back to building dams.
You could say that a society is an emergent property of its people. Emergence is where simple entities interact to produce complex things. In a sense the society is encoded in the DNA of its people, in the same way the beavers' dam is encoded in the DNA of the beavers. In the case of the beavers, chance has little impact. In the case of a complex society, with path dependency, it is possible that chance has more of an impact and the society would turn out differently if you started from scratch. But it's unlikely when you look at how peoples recreate their societies when they move around the world.
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