Supplemental Essay: Anomie in Society

 

Introduction

In the main essay I said that modern freedoms create anxiety, and the breakdown of traditional hierarchies and structures allow people to contract down to the point of nonparticipation in life and anomie as an anxiety-stilling exercise. Multiply that by millions of people, and there is a potential for an enormous amount of disengagement and disaffection in society as a whole.

 

I said that drop-outs lose their "hardness" or "definiteness" of personality once they no longer identify with a set of preferred narratives on one side or the other of a dichotomous pair. Drop-outs become nonparticipants in life, observing but not interacting. Dropping out puts them in much the same position as prisoners of war, existentialists, or nihilists: What do you do with your life once it becomes meaningless?

 

Also, anomie isn't necessarily a completely detached and carefree state of being. Drop-outs can feel hemmed-in by the world and aggrieved that they have to disengage completely from society simply in order to find a measure of peace. 

 

Psychologist Carl Jung talks about a kind of ego contraction where the individual is haunted by resentment: "The more he withdraws and hides himself, the greater becomes his secret need to be understood and recognized. Although he speaks of his inferiority he does not really believe it. There arises within him a defiant conviction of his unrecognized merits, and in consequence he is sensitive to the slightest disapprobation, always wearing the stricken air of one who is misunderstood and deprived of his rightful due. In this way he nurses a morbid pride and an insolent discontent—which is the very last thing he wants and for which his environment has to pay all the more dearly."[1]

 

The drop-out attempts to maintain a bubble of aloofness and self-sufficiency; but if he is also harboring a lot of resentment toward the world for his position, he may find himself getting caught up in occasional misadventures. He surveys the world from a perch of detachment; but with no agenda or values or "hardness" of personality of his own, he can become gripped and even obsessed by some outside agenda that catches his attention for one reason or the other. 

 

The end result is that drop-outs can suddenly find themselves pulled into sudden bursts of ego expansion and sadomasochism, usually to their own dismay and detriment. This is exactly the kind of involvement in the world and anxiety-ridden adventure that they are trying to avoid by dropping out; but with no guide or guardrails in their life, they can get ambushed by their own repressed needs. Some masochistic victim narrative or sadistic outrage narrative seizes their attention and draws them in despite their own attempts to stay disengaged.

 

In the supplemental essay entitled "Sadomasochism in Modern Society" in the Thinking chapter, I talked about Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground published in 1864, with its unnamed narrator who repeatedly bounces back and forth between bouts of sadism and ego contraction. A couple years later (in 1866) Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment about a character who has seemingly dropped out of society and lives in a state of anomie; but petty resentments cause him to get pulled into a murder plot.

 

The main character, Raskolnikov, is another high-minded intellectual, a student who has temporarily dropped out of college due to financial difficulties and lives alone in a semi-permanent state of ego contraction. He is so poor that he is only able to live in the slums of St. Petersburg where he circulates among drunks, prostitutes, and thieves.

 

He seems perfectly content to live in this manner, subsisting on a small income from carrying out occasional translations and clerical assignments that come his way. But over time he finds himself captured by an idea to resolve all of his money issues with a single big gesture: He'll kill a moneylender--an old woman who lives nearby--take her money, and dole it out in the slums to help alleviate the misery there. 

 

The motivation appears to be part compulsion and part rationalization: In part he is driven by his disgust for an old woman living in the slums and simply sitting on a large pile of cash out of pure greed; and in part he feels a need to prove himself special, in other words, to prove himself something more than just one more failure living in the slums and never amounting to anything. Raskolnikov reasons that Napoleon conquered much of Europe and achieved great things simply by daring to go to war and kill people by the tens of thousands; Raskolnikov need only dare to kill one person to prove himself the equal of Napoleon; and his subsequent charity would provide ample justification for the crime.

 

But after the murder nothing comes of his charitable plans. Instead the reader is immersed in several hundred pages of family drama: His mother and sister are poor and have sacrificed greatly to send him to college with the expectation that he will graduate, undertake a successful career, and deliver them all from poverty. They are traveling to join him soon, and Raskolnikov is tormented by his failure at school and his inability to rescue his family. 

 

In other words it seems likely that the psychological mechanism for the murder is patriarchal castration and matriarchal daemonism. The component of patriarchal castration is represented by his feelings of anxiety and guilt at dropping out of school and failing his family; the matriarchal daemonism of chaos and murder fantasies serves as a distraction from his anxiety.

 

The weeks and months spent imagining and planning the murder represent a welcome distraction from his anxiety and self-flagellation over his shortcomings and lack of accomplishment. In his fantasies murder becomes an alternate route for achieving grandiose aspirations, and those thoughts provide him with relief from the realities of the slums and his shame. Thoughts of murder become an obsession for him, pulling him out of his bubble of anomie and finally moving him to deadly action.

 

But the murder represents ego expansion, and once it is accomplished Raskolnikov finds himself disgusted and ashamed at his actions. He returns to a state of anomie and detachment; he hides the money, never to touch it again. The rest of the book becomes about Raskolnikov wrestling with his new reality: The murder is done, and he is still just as much of a failure and disappointment to his family as before; however now he is not only a college drop-out and slum-dweller but also a common murderer and thief trying to cover his tracks as his mother and sister arrive in town and the police slowly close in on him.

 

Dostoevsky's characters--Raskolnikov and the unnamed narrator of Notes from Underground--aren't hard-core sadists in the mold of the Marquis de Sade; more likely they are just overly withdrawn from the world, suffering from a lack of meaning or purpose, and they seize upon some casual meanness or criminality as a way to distract themselves from their anxiety about how they've fallen short in the world. But the need for a diversion from anxiety can motivate a lot of different things, from great acts of perversity down to small acts of obstinacy and peevishness.

 

In the case of Raskolnikov, he seems to have sunken into a more-or-less permanent state of anomie over time; but he knows that he will have to account to his family at some point for his failure in college. His anxiety over that approaching reckoning gives rise to an obsession for murder as a quick fix for his problems; and the old female moneylender serves as a convenient stand-in for Raskolnikov's anger toward his mother and her expectations of him.

 

In a way, Raskolnikov is basically the 1800s version of a modern school shooter. He lives a cramped life in a state of uncaring anomie, but anxiety about his failings is awakened by an approaching reckoning with his family. To deal with his anxiety, Raskolnikov becomes obsessed with carrying out a single, quick demonstration of his superiority over the mass of humanity. It's a transient fascination, a sudden sadistic expansion of the ego that subsides back into anomie as soon as the need is met and the deed is done.

 

In Chapter 11 of 12 Rules for Life Dr. Jordan B. Peterson talks about a wave of nihilistic "anti-humanism" in the West, motivating people ranging from school shooters to philosophers and politicians. He mentions Columbine School shooter Eric Harris, who considered humanity "a failed and corrupt species"; David Attenborough, who considered humanity "a plague," and the Club of Rome, which has claimed that humanity is "a cancer." As I suggested above, a lot of this kind of pessimism is probably due to anomie: A loss of meaning, nihilism, and the need for some strong idea to serve as a diversion from anxiety. Again, the need for a diversion from anxiety can motivate a lot of different things, from to small acts of obstinacy and peevishness to great acts of perversity.

 

Dr. Peterson says that when a mass shooter goes on a rampage motivated by such thoughts, he may consider himself a hero, a savior, and even embrace martyrdom at the end. These, nihilistic "anti-humanists" may consider themselves judge, jury, and executioner for the entire human race.[2]

 

As I said above, people in a state of anomie generally try to avoid entangling themselves in the affairs of the world. But a repressed need or anxiety may cause them to become obsessed with some romantic idea, a grand gesture to dispel fears about personal shortcomings.

 

Another consequence of anomie is that the traditional four-position spectrum turns into a truncated three-position spectrum: This four-position spectrum

 

Extremely one-sided extraversion <--> Conventional extraversion X--X Conventional introversion <--> Extremely one-sided introversion

 

turns into this three-position spectrum: 

 

Extremely one-sided extraversion <--> Anomie <--> Extremely one-sided introversion

 

In other words, anomie occurs when society is so "free" that there is no longer any cultural assimilation; there is no longer any social consensus on the basic narratives that should guide our actions within a community. The "conventional" positions--which represent the narratives that we adopt to guide our lives--effectively cease to exist; or at least, they become so weakened that people who are focused on ego contraction are unable to establish a comfort zone there. For them, the traditional "comfort zones" of conventional one-sidedness no longer provide safe harbor from the anxiety associated with ego expansion. Conventional one-sidedness and extreme one-sidedness effectively become the same thing for people with a bias toward ego contraction. So they drop out in order to cease caring at all.

 

To sum it up: The drop-out detaches himself as much as possible from the world around himself in order to maintain his bubble of anomie. But when that bubble is broken by outside events, the drop-out has no recourse but to transition directly into a state of anxiety, in other words extreme one-sidedness. The result can be occasional outbursts of masochism or sadism. It harks back to the quote from Jung, above: "In this way he nurses a morbid pride and an insolent discontent—which is the very last thing he wants and for which his environment has to pay all the more dearly."

 

Fixes for anomie

Naturally, I'm not suggesting that all or even many disaffected people with anomie will turn into school shooters. The vast majority of such people will live peaceful lives in a state of social withdrawal akin to androgynes, which I discussed in the Sensing chapter: Withdrawn, self-contained, asocial, and collapsed in upon themselves.

 

But if large portions of a community embrace disaffection and anomie, it probably leads to some degree of social breakdown. Freedom is generally good; but when freedom turns into absence of guidance and life in a vacuum, then the community risks becoming atomized: Individuals have no commonality with those around themselves and spin off in a random directions based on little more than whim and caprice. This harks back to the quote from Jonathan Haidt that I mentioned in the main essay: "We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago."[3]

 

In the section on ego expansion I discussed several areas where society encourages self-assertion and self-definition. But those areas largely concern the workplace and politics. By comparison, early socialization, childhood, and youth may be largely bereft of guidance in the interest of letting children choose their own identity without indoctrination. The problem is that children often don't have the capacity to make those choices and decisions. Released into a void with no guidance, children and young adults may flounder for a while and then give up in the face of anxiety or seize upon passing fads without any sense of where they might lead, just to have something to identify with and claim as their own.

 

The fix, then, would seem to be greater social consensus and guidance on basic roles and structure in society. I raised this same issue in the Sensing chapter concerning androgynes: People are told what not to do with their lives, but it's not clear to them what they can or should do. I suggested that a cultural canon needs to provide a variety of personas that people can try on in order to see what works best for them personally.

 

The idea isn't to curtail freedom; rather, the idea is to provide some guidance to young people in the choice of socially-approved narratives that create some "hardness" or "definiteness" of personality and rebuild four-position spectrums with the "conventional" positions as comfort zones.

 

This also harks back to something I said in the Sensing chapter on the subject of rape. I said that masculine focus and drive need to be channelled properly into socially approved challenges and objectives. Without proper guidance and a personal sense of restraint, masculine focus and drive can go to extremes and end up misdirected into sadomasochism, violence, and crime. As I said above, anomie with its lack of narratives leave the drop-out prone to sudden bursts of ego expansion and sadomasochism: With no narratives and "hardness" of personality to serves as guide or guardrails in their life, they can get ambushed by their own repressed needs. Some masochistic victim narrative or sadistic outrage narrative seizes their attention and draws them in despite their own attempts to stay disengaged.

 

In other words, people generally adopt anomie as a protective shield against an anxiety-inducing modern world. And it works well much of the time. But anomie tends to leave people vulnerable to their own worst instincts, and it can result in some erratic behavior or even heightened criminality if individuals are unwary.

 

Link: Return to Thinking (T)

 

~Posted September 23, 2025

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