Anomie
Description
Knut Wimberger:
"Anomie is usually translated as normlessness, but it best understood as insufficient normative regulation. During periods of rapid social change, individuals sometimes experience alienation from group goals and values. They lose sight of their shared interests based on mutual dependence. In this condition, they are less constrained by group norms. Normative values become generalized, rather than personally embraced.
Psychologist Martin Seligman, the founding father of modern positive psychology, writes that most of the developed world, is experiencing an unprecedented epidemic of depression – particularly among young people. Why is it that in a nation that has more money, more power, more records, more books, and more education, that depression should be so much more prevalent than it was when the nation was less prosperous and less powerful? He concludes with his own definition of anomie: Depression is a disorder of the “I”, failing in your own eyes relative to your goals. In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individuals failure almost inconsolable. Individual failure used to be buffered by the second large force, the large “we”. When our grandparents failed, they had comfortable spiritual furniture to rest in. They had, for the most part, their relationship to God, their relationship to a nation they loved, their relationship to a community and a large extended family. Faith in God, community, nation, and the large extended family have all eroded in the last forty years, and the spiritual furniture that we used to sit in has become threadbare."