What's wrong with our society? An answer... maybe...

In "What motivates mass murderers?", WWW 19/5/18, I said that I didn't understand what's wrong with Western society -- American society in particular -- that we produce a shockingly large number of psychotics who, for some reason or for no reason, go out and kill shockingly large numbers of innocent people. What's wrong with those people, I asked [rather indirectly. Ed.]. What motivates them? I just don't understand...

Thinking about it some more, I remembered an exchange with Agent 9, who educated me on the distinction between antinomianism (from the Greek: ἀντί, "against" + νόμος, "law"): any view which rejects laws or legalism and is against moral, religious, or social norms) and anomie: a condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.

I don't know if Nikolas Cruz and Dimitrios Pagourtzis are antinomians or not. I rather think not, as having a thought-out and thought-through view of anything implies having given the idea (whatever it is) some thought. But I do think both young men may have been affected by the anomie which has been prevalent in our society ever since the hippy-dippy 60s.

Anomie is the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community, resulting in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values. The concept was described by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his 1897 book Suicide. (Early reports from Santa Fe suggest that Mr Pagourtzis wanted to commit suicide, chickening out and surrendering to the cops after he had killed ten people.)

Durkheim describes anomie as "derangement" -- craziness -- and "an insatiable will". Anomie, he wrote, arises from a mismatch between personal or group standards and wider social standards, or from the lack of a social ethic, which produces moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations.

Compare those words with this passage from Bobos in Paradise, by David Brooks (Simon & Schuster, 2000), sent to me yesterday by Agent 3:

In 1995 [actually 1994. Ed.] George Gilder wrote, "Bohemian values have come to prevail over bourgeois virtue in sexual morals and family roles, arts and letters, bureaucracies and universities, popular culture and public life. As a result, culture and family life are widely in chaos, cities seethe with venereal plagues, schools and colleges fall to obscurantism and propaganda, the courts are a carnival of pettifoggery."

In 1996, Robert Bork's bestseller Slouching Towards Gomorrah argued that the forces of the sixties have spread cultural rot across mainstream America. In 1999 William Bennett argued, "Our culture celebrates self-gratification, the crossing of all moral barriers, and now the breaking of all social taboos."

Aha! Lots of further reading there, and I think we may be close to an answer to my headline question. I have long maintained that the year in which the wheels started to come off our society can be pinpointed, based on empirical evidence, as 1964 -- 1965 at the latest. I'm off to the library to find whatever I can written by George Gilder, once described by Time as "male chauvinist pig of the year". Sounds like my kind of guy!