Hunter Thompson: alienation, anomie, and what's wrong with America

Hell's Angels (Ballantine Books, 1967) is perhaps the straightest and best book by Hunter Stockton Thompson, Doctor of Gonzo Journalism. It is more than sensational reportage about a "fringe group with unacceptable views". It is a study in the sociology of California in the 1960s, a dark omen of a darker future, not just for California but for all of America.

Near the end, in Chapter 21, HST has this to say about the psychology which informed the Angels' notoriously antisocial actions, and indeed their lives. The emphasis is mine.

The outlaw stance is patently antisocial, although most Angels, as individuals, are naturaly social creatures. The contradiction is deep-rooted and has parallels on every level of American society. Sociologists call it "alienation" or "anomie". 

It is a sense of being cut off, or left out of whatever society one was presumably meant to be a part of. In a strongly motivated society the victims of anomie are usually extreme cases, isolated from each other by differing viewpoints or personal quirks too private for any broad explanation.

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President [Eisenhower, in 1960] feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular -- especialy among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're supposed to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place.

Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The lawas they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so-called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug.

America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a  political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger, and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.  

In the terms of our Great Society, the Hell's Angels and their ilk are losers -- dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem.

The Hell's Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything, it is not the "moral revolution" in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that "outlaws" like the Hell's Angels have been finding for years.

The difference between the student radicals and the Hell's Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo.

55 years since Dr. Gonzo wrote those lines, it looks more and more as if the Angels were right to "fight the future". Today is the tomorrow they fought against yesterday. And, if things continue as they have, if Western Society continues to be led down the wrong road, the future looks even worse. 

Readers of  WWW sometimes ask me what I'm so angry about. "What is it," they write, "that you're against?" By way of reply, I can do no better than this oft-quoted line from The Wild One.