…What's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
“We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.”
George Sand, Mauprat
Introduction
The last post documented that tens of millions of American are personally adrift in America - uninterested or unable to make friends, shunning family or being shunned by it, bereft of meaningful human connections. This is a new and deeply troubling contingency in America - one that has developed over the last half-century. The process by which that has increased decade over decade is so startling that it has acquired a name to shorthand it - the atomization of America.
The condition of people adrift from society was studied closely by a man considered the founder of sociology - Emile Durkheim. Durkheim, born in 1858 in France, was pre-occupied with how societies can maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity. He lived in an era in which traditional social ties were much less universal and new structures were developing. The Industrial Revolution, set in motion in England in the late 1700s, spread to mainland Europe in the 1800s, upending traditional ways of living - pastoral, agricultural, and craft. It spurred an exodus of people from rural to urban centers, which were completely unequipped to handle them.
This was a time when the world suddenly sped up, not at all unlike what today’s developed world has gone through in the shift to the Industrial Age. Mark Zuckerberg summarized the philosophy of the day in the immortal phrase, “Move fast and break things”. In the Industrial Revolution, albeit at a smaller scale, that is the phenomenon that people experienced and Durkheim studied.
There was a brief period when the trend toward industrialization was slow and uncertain, marked by some success and lots of failure. Then it came together and in a flash the world changed permanently from what people had grown up in. It was staggeringly unsettling, not only a threat to survival, but a challenge to the basic concept of what it means to be a person.
Durkheim saw that societies were at risk of disintegration. He coined a word, anomie, to characterize the problem. In his time, he was referring to a lack of social norms; where too rapid of population growth reduces the amount of interaction between various groups, which in turn leads to a breakdown of understanding (i.e. norms, values, etc.)
This period in American history where it is coming unglued has not been caused by too rapid a population growth. Anomie has arisen from a more complex process in latter day America. The social organization of the economic world has changed over the last several decades. In the first part of the twentieth century, America was roughly evenly divided between farm and natural resource labor and the industrialized work of factories. Over the century, the division became less and less equal. Industrialization reached a peak around the middle of the century, with most people fully integrated into a world organized this way.
But then came the computer. We have now begun the move into another age, the Information Age. A startling percentage of America’s factories have shuttered, as people who ran them realized they could offshore much of the work, or they could consolidate with competitors. Thus was born the American Rust Belt, a geographical area that runs roughly south of the Great Lakes for a few hundred miles.
There was a rapid evolution away from manufacturing to work that was more and more based on finance, the service industries, and those who worked in information. Compounding this was the general drive, arising out of the storms of the Sixties, of tens of millions of Americans rejecting community in pursuit of self-fulfillment. With typical American ingenuity thousands of service businesses leapt up overnight to assist people in being their best selves - everything from spas to fitness trainers to yoga studios.
Two problems led people to the same unhappy dead end. One part of the population was adrift because the ground under their feet had shifted without much warning - they weren’t wanted as machinists or assembly line workers where cars were being built, or steelworkers. Another part of the population became wandering, restive, unhappy, always in search of that one transformative moment.
This was America’s particular form of the disease of anomie, long ago discovered by Durkheim. Americans became sadder, lonelier and more unsure. They began to experience the lack of a secure place in the world, the feeling of making a difference, the satisfaction of being needed, and the balm of friendship and love. As the century approached its end, the sheer numbers of people at odds with life tilted America in a dangerous direction. Americans were lonelier, sadder and more angry. They were looking to assign blame. And they had guns.
Staring Down the Barrel
Many countries which are comparable to America in wealth and development, have some of America’s major societal woes, usually but not always, to a lesser degree. However, no peer country shares America’s affinity to guns. And the overwhelming number of guns, makes virtually all the other big issues worse. Private ownership of guns makes almost no sense. And yet…
The latest figures show that there are 393 million firearms in the United States. This is a vague number, easily glossed over. Giving it come context helps. In real terms, if you pick 233 random American adults, 100 of them will have guns. 133 will not. Presumably those 100 will just protect themselves somehow, practise at the local firing range, become skeet shooters. Some undoubtedly just ignore their guns.
This is the theatre of the absurd. Can you trust 100 out of every 100 armed Americans to use guns only in a responsible way? Clearly, no.
How many then? 80? 60? 40?
How do Americans, suffering from the anomie of modern civilization, look for solutions?
Many will “self-medicate” with alcohol or drugs (much more on this in a future post). This very often becomes a downward spiral with serious results.
Some will find and espouse anti-social causes - the more anti-social an issue presents, the more powerful their fervor for it will be. Examples from previous articles will illustrate this - Randall Weaver at Ruby Ridge, David Koresh and his Branch Davidians at Waco, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murragh building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and Eric Harris/Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School killers.
Some alienated Americans commit murder. The vast majority of murders are committed using guns - somewhere around 77%. It seems reasonable to ask whether there would be fewer murders if putative killers could search high and low without being able to find a gun to execute their mission. The murder would have to be done up close and personal, which alone reduces its chance of success.
Those are three methods, all dubious at best, of treating a growing sense of desperation. There is a surer method - that is suicide. It’s actually a statistically more common way to use a gun in America than murder is.
The suicide rate in the United States is up by 33% since 1999, reflecting the mental health crisis that huge numbers of Americans suffer from. Not all suicides are by firearms of course - for example females are significantly less likely to use a gun to try and kill themselves than males are. (This is one reason why a far greater number of females fail at suicide - drug overdose, a preferred method for women, is far less likely to be lethal than putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger).