from Chris Hedges book, America: A Farewell Tour

This is from Chris Hedges book, America: A Farewell Tour

 Mr. Fish / Truthdig

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book "On Suicide"
examined the disintegration of social bonds that drive individuals and
societies to personal and collective acts of self-destruction. He found that
when social bonds are strong, individuals achieve a healthy balance between
individual initiative and communal solidarity, which he called a
"life-sustaining equilibrium." These individuals and communities have the
lowest rates of suicide. The individuals and societies most susceptible to
self-destruction, he wrote, are those for whom these bonds, this
equilibrium, have been shattered.

Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a
sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the
self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as elections
and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and shared national
beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity.
They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the
meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The shattering of
these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress that leads
ultimately to acts of self-annihilation. Durkheim called this state of
hopelessness and despair anomie, which he defined as "ruleless-ness."

Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of
organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we
work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable
employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes
a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color,
nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered
some Americans—especially those from the white working and middle
class—modest social and economic advancement.

But the capture of political and economic power by the corporate elites,
along with the redirecting of all institutions toward the further
consolidation of their power and wealth, has broken the social bonds that
held the American society together. This rupture has unleashed a widespread
malaise Durkheim would have recognized.

"When society is strongly integrated," he wrote, "it keeps individuals in a
state of dependency, holding them to be in its service and consequently not
permitting them to dispose of themselves as they wish. Society is thus
opposed to them escaping from their obligations towards it through death. …
The bond that attaches them to their common purpose attaches them to life;
and, in any case, the high goal towards which their gaze is turned
alleviates the suffering that they feel from life's troubles. Finally, in a
coherent and vital community, there is a continual exchange of ideas and
feelings from all to each and from each to all which is like mutual moral
support, so that the individual, instead of being reduced to his resources
only, participates in the collective energy and draws on it when his own is
exhausted."

The reconfiguring of American society into an oligarchy and the collapse of
our democratic institutions have left most of the population disempowered.
The elites, predatory by nature, have discarded all restraint. "The state of
disorganization, or anomie, is thus reinforced by the fact that passions are
less disciplined at the very time when they need stronger discipline,"
Durkheim noted of the avarice of the rich.

"It is not for nothing that so many religions have celebrated the benefits
and the moral value of poverty," Durkheim wrote. "This is because, of all
schools, it is the one that best teaches man to restrain himself. By
obliging us to exercise constant discipline over ourselves, it prepares us
to accept collective discipline with docility, while wealth, by exalting the
individual, constantly risks awakening the spirit of rebellion that is the
very fount of immortality."

The political process, as the research by professors Martin Gilens and
Benjamin I. Page underscores, no longer advances the interests of the
average citizen. It has turned the consent of the governed into a cruel
joke. "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic
elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest
groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence." This
facade of democratic process eviscerates one of the primary social bonds in
a democratic state and abolishes the vital shared belief that citizens have
the power to govern themselves, that government exists to promote and
protect their rights and interests.

The economic structures, like the political structures, have been
reconfigured to mock the belief in a meritocracy and that hard work leads to
a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New
York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay
has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to
productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now,
not $7.25. Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less
than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored
health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times
wrote, the average middle class family's net worth is more than $40,000
below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40
percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent.

The economic disparity and political dysfunction have been exacerbated by
the collapse of the judicial system, as Matt Taibbi writes in his book "The
Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap." There is
aggressive criminalization of the poor while the ruling elites are protected
by high-priced lawyers and non-enforcement or rewriting of laws. Amid
selective enforcement of laws in the ruleless society, the high rollers on
Wall Street and in wealthy enclaves are not prosecuted for possessing and
ingesting illegal drugs but the poor are thrown into prison and must forfeit
all their property for being caught with small amounts of the same drugs.
HSBC, the world's seventh largest bank by total assets, after admitting to
laundering $800 million for Central and South American drug cartels, was
slapped with largely symbolic fines and a deferred prosecution agreement,
which is the legal equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. The poor,
meanwhile, are hounded, arrested and fined for absurdly criminalized
activities such as not mowing their lawns, loitering, selling loose
cigarettes, carrying open containers of alcohol or "obstructing pedestrian
traffic"—which means standing on a sidewalk. These fines are used to fill
state and county budget shortfalls resulting from corporations and the
wealthy fixing the rules to avoid paying meaningful taxes, if they pay taxes
at all. This virtual tax boycott by the rich has broken yet another social
bond, the idea that everyone contributes a significant portion of his or her
income to make the society function.

The elites, who sacrifice nothing for society and are not held accountable
for their criminal behavior, live in what Taibbi calls a "stateless
archipelago." They are empowered to pillage the nation, amass obscene wealth
and wield unchecked political and legal control. The result has been the
obliteration of the primary social bonds that, however biased in favor of
the white majority, held the nation together.

The shattering of these bonds has left tens of millions of Americans adrift.
Society, Durkheim wrote, is no longer "sufficiently present for
individuals." Those cast aside can participate in the society, as Durkheim
wrote, only "through sadness." The self-destructive pathologies that plague
the United States—opioid addiction, morbid obesity, gambling, suicide,
sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings—rise out of this anomie. My
new book, "America: The Farewell Tour," is an examination of these
pathologies and the anomie that fuels these self-destructive behaviors.

Durkheim noted that the poor have lower rates of suicide. The poor know the
rules are rigged against them. James Baldwin made much the same point when
he wrote that African-American men are less prone to a midlife crisis than
white men because they are less susceptible to the myth of the American
Dream. Most African-Americans learn very early in life that there are two
sets of rules. But white Americans, because of white supremacy, are more
susceptible to the myth, and therefore more infuriated when that myth is
exposed as a con. This, I suspect, is why nearly all mass shooters and
members of right-wing hate groups, along with a majority of supporters of
Donald Trump, are white men.

Capitalism, Durkheim wrote, is antithetical to creating and sustaining the
relationships that are vital to social bonds. Capitalism rewards those for
whom relationships are transactional and temporary. Relationships under
capitalism are mercenary. They are part of the scheme for personal
self-advancement and require the oily manipulation of others. To advance in
a capitalist system it is necessary to build and then discard a series of
ultimately hollow relationships. These empty relationships—and you can see
them on display at any business gathering—contribute to the collective
anomie and disintegration of social bonds.

Capitalism may cater to a natural desire among many for self-enrichment, but
you don't want this belief system to dominate society. Capitalism rewards
single-minded narcissists and often con artists devoid of empathy and
incapable of remorse. It rewards those focused exclusively on personal gain
and self-aggrandizement. These dedicated capitalists often lack the capacity
to form meaningful bonds, seeing in other people tools for commodification
and exploitation. Once a capitalist class achieves complete control, as it
has in the United States, it dismantles the structures that make social
bonds possible, seeing in them an impediment to profit. The more
concentrated wealth becomes, as with corporate capitalism, the more damage
it inflicts on society, sending jobs to overseas sweatshops and leaving
American workers underemployed or unemployed.

Karl Marx saw alienation as a positive force, one that estranged workers
from the means of production and moved them to question the structures of
power, educate themselves about their exploitation, and revolt. But for
Durkheim this alienation, or anomie, is debilitating. It is, he wrote, "a
collective asthenia" that drains us of energy and will. It manifests itself
in self-loathing. We may indeed understand what is happening around us,
Durkheim argued, but we lack the ability to free ourselves from the despair,
frustration and rage that cripple our lives.

"Our actions require an object outside of themselves," Durkheim wrote. "It
is not because we need to sustain the illusion of some impossible
immortality: it is because it is implicit in our moral being and it cannot
be lost, even partially, without that moral being losing its reason for
existence. There is no need to demonstrate that in such a state of collapse
the slightest cause for depression can easily give rise to desperate acts.
When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding
ourselves of it."

"For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to
be sick without their being affected," Durkheim added. "Its suffering
inevitably becomes theirs."

President Trump is not a product of the theft of the Podesta emails, James
Comey or racism—although he and many who support him are racists—or Russian
bots. Demagogues arise from failed democracies plagued by ruleless-ness and
anomie. They tell an enraged population what it wants to hear and crudely,
to the delight of the betrayed, ridicule the elites who sold them out.

Removing Trump from office without confronting the ruleless-ness and anomie
that define the lives of tens of millions of Americans would do nothing to
restore democracy. In fact, it would probably consolidate the power of a
Christianized fascism that cloaks itself in a cloying piety and false
morality. Vice President Mike Pence, because he is a creature of the
Christian right and has ingested its protofascist ideology, would probably
be worse than Trump if he gained the presidency.

The left, like most critics of Trump, personalizes our decay. It focuses
myopically on Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease. It spits back the
thought-terminating clichés about the Russians stealing our elections while
it refuses to examine the deep wounds within the society, wounds exacerbated
when the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton sold out working men and women.
If we do not heal these wounds, if we do not restore the social bonds
shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, when the next financial crisis
arrives—and it will arrive—this collective anomie will explode. Frightening
demons, harnessing these dark, self-destructive pathologies, will rise from
the depths of the ruleless morass.

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