TITLE:
Complex Social System Theory—The Systemic Meaning of Illness Pain in Contemporary Modern Society
AUTHORS:
Rosalia Condorelli
KEYWORDS:
Illness Pain, Greek and Christian Pain Tradition, Technologization and Medicalization of Pain, Complex Social Systems Theory
JOURNAL NAME:
Sociology Mind,
Vol.16 No.3,
July
8,
2026
ABSTRACT: Since pain’s meaning changes over time within scenarios that are a product of collective consciousness, how has the objective form or social meaning of illness pain changed over time in our modern contemporary society? How has its manifestation or communicative expression changed? How have the relationships that it generates changed? Today, does it really generate relationships? In order to answer these questions, the meaning of illness pain in Western modern contemporary culture was placed within two major worldviews that were its precursors: Greek tradition and Christian tradition. Then, today, there is a new, unexpected, illness pain meaning codification that has rejected and replaced the Greek and Christian pain tradition, that is, technologization and medicalization of illness and illness pain. In this paper, changes in the semantic codification of illness pain as well as its risks are argued. They are “explained” by a nonlinear conception of the social system that is expressed in a systemic micro-macro-micro perspective. Indeed, Complex Social Systems Theory explains in a single theory—in the Luhmannian perspective, that is, in the social perspective of emergence, self-referentiality, and autopoietic self-organization concepts—both organization change and organization stability of social systems, departing from unilateral conservative or progressive theories. The main hypothesis is that hospitalization, as a consequence of contemporary technologization and medicalization of illness and illness pain, has increased sufferers’ loneliness.