It is ultimately an irony that the epistemological position--that Civilization is fundamentally about domination and cannot stand marginalized or dissident narratives--has only and could only flourish under civilizations in their least-connected-to-quotidian-life institutions. It requires being sheltered to recognize that ultimately everything is a social and linguistic construct. Everyone else doesn't have the luxury and are just trying to survive.
Even further, the idea that everything reduces to social and linguistic games isn't new. It is one of the oldest ideas in history found in both Buddhism (through depedent coarising) and in Graeco-Roman philosophy culminating in Christianity (the Logos). Both institutions developed monasticism for precisely the same reasons.
This world isn't real. You have to be out of this world to see the illusion behind it and to be free from it.
Everyone does not have to stop pretending it's real for you to stop pretending it's real.
A king is only a social construct. One can still order your head cut off.
oh well.
It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality", no less than social "reality", is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.