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Anomie v.2
By Kate Burch
Pioneering French sociologist Emile Durkheim used the word, “anomie” in
his 1897 book, “Suicide” to describe a situation in which the society’s
standards and values are rapidly changing, causing people to feel
confused, alienated, and purposeless. He further wrote that
significant changes in the economic fortunes of a society and
especially a situation in which people are unable to achieve the
commonly-held aspirations and values of the culture because of such
changes, cause anomie and contribute to suicides. His work was
ground-breaking because he helped us to understand that societal
factors, and not just individual pathology, could contribute
significantly to self-destruction.
Today, we are immersed in a witches’ brew of disintegrative change, and
the devastating impact on people is becoming more and more
apparent. I wrote a few months ago about the 15% increase in
death rates of the white U.S. population ages 40-55—from
drug-and-alcohol-related causes. Murder rates rose nearly 17
percent in the nation’s 50 largest cities in 2015, following the
ferment over Michael Brown’s likely “suicide by cop” in Ferguson, MO
and the anti-police ideology pushed by our elites. The suicide
rate among middle-aged white women has risen by 80% in the last
decade. Among adolescent girls, ages 10-14, the suicide rate
surged 200% between 1999 and 2014! Incidence and prevalence rates
of mental illness among adolescents have increased since the 1930’s,
and today about one in five teenagers has a diagnosable mental
illness.
In the 100 years or more that the Progressives have gradually
established the media and our educational establishments as their
fiefdoms we have seen, in the name of creating a fairer and more just
society, the growth of a truly monstrous regulatory state and a system
of entitlements that have paradoxically damaged opportunities for
personal development and entrepreneurship, hurt the cause of liberty,
and sent us well down the path toward impoverishment. Lower
animals are given preferential protection and care over humans, to the
extent that shooting a gorilla to prevent his killing a four-year-old
boy is protested by thousands. In the name of freedom, women are
entitled to kill their unborn children, and there have been an
estimated 56 million abortions since Roe v Wade (disproportionately
killing black babies, by the way.) Politicians whose behavior is
breathtakingly corrupt, self-seeking, and dangerous to the nation get a
pass if they cannot be proved to have literally violated a law.
The complete mismatch between radical Islam’s values and system of law
and those of Western civilization is overlooked and their outright
avowal of intent to conquer us denied. A prospective employer
cannot have confidence that a graduate of our public schools has
developed the knowledge and skills required for successful job
performance because everybody graduates, regardless of merit. The
schools teach students to be ashamed and apologetic about
America. Schools promote leftist propaganda, such as “climate
change,” and encourage truly weird and destructive notions about
sexuality and the family that further increase confusion in the young
and cause fragmentation and isolation in our world. Even basic
sexual identity is now fluid and questionable. Religious liberty, the
primary motivation for the creation of the United States of America, is
denied in the name of forcing the public to pay for irresponsible life
choices.
Can it be that these changes are evolutionary? Or are they part
of a deliberate program? George Orwell wrote, in “1984,”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together
again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
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