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.

Remembering Abraham Lincoln

February 12th used to be celebrated as Lincoln's Birthday. Which it was. February 12, 1809 was the date. Because it's Black History Month, the only holiday Americans get now is Martin Luther King Day. Washington, Lincoln and other nobodies have to make do with "Presidents Day". That's one of the fruits of the triumph of freedom and equality begun by President Lincoln and completed by... wait for it... President LBJ.

Since President Lincoln and others are gradually being consigned to the Memory Hole, I thought it might be appropriate to share a few opinions of Honest Abe, as penned by his contemporaries, drawn from Civil War Curiosities, by Webb Garrison (Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville, 1994).

No other war maker was so widely vilified as was Abraham Lincoln. Contemptuous of the president's announced policies, the abolitionist Benjamin F. Wade announced that Lincoln's views on slaver "could only come of one who was born of 'poor white trash' and educated in a slave State." Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who had his own eyes on the White House, characterized his leader as "greatly wanting in will and decision, in comprehensiveness, in self-reliance, and clear, well-definted purpose."

Henry Ward Beecher, the nation's most famous clergyman in 1861, denounced the president from the pulpit. According to Beecher, the chief executive lacked any spark of genius and possessed "not an element of leadership, not one particle of heroic enthusiasm." Fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips described Lincoln as "a second-rate man" and charged his "slackness" with "doing more than the malice of Confederates to break up the Union."

Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, who was among the first to commit himself fully to the war effort, castigated the man for whom he raised regiments of volunteers. "Besides doing my proper work," wrote Andrews, "I amsadly but firmly tr5ying to help organize some movement, if possible to save the President from the infamy of ruining his country."

Soon the Massachusetts leader sent one of his top aides to confer with Lincoln. Reporting about this visit, Henry Lee said just what Andrew wanted to hear. As he sat waiting, Lee recalled, "I grew more and more cross to think that this Western mummy of a rail splitter should sit in Washington's chair."

Congressman Frank Blair of Missouri urged that the primary obligation of every Unionist was "to stop fighting Jeff Davis and turn in on our own Government and make something of it," According to the lawmaker, soon to become a Federal brigadier, all Confederate leaders taken together had not harmed the4 nation has as much as "the cowardice, ignorance, and stupidity of Lincoln's administration."

I'll leave for another day the quotation of President Lincoln's thoughts about "African-Americans" (as they are now called) and their place in American society. Suffice it to say that General Robert E. Lee's views, quoted in Walt's profile, were much the same as those of the Great Emancipator. And we know that they were both wrong, as evidenced by the contribution of people of colour to making America what it is today. Right?

Walmart shopper finally sees the light!

When I feel my life is kind of sad, I check out People of Walmart and say to myself "Things could be worse. Look at these poor bastards!" Here's a photo that tickled my funny bone today.

Blogger's comment: Finally someone has seen the light while inside Walmart!!!!

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!

Are we making any progress?

Just reread The B.S. Factor, by Arthur Herzog (Simon & Schuster, 1973). The subtitle of the book is "The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America". It's about "thought pollution" -- the fakery and hypocrisy that pervades American communications. In the conclusion, Mr. Herzog calls for a new breed of "radical skeptics" who, he hopes, will clear away the bullshit that is now engulfing the USA.

Writing in 1973 -- not long after the "flower power" revolution -- the author poses an excellent question: did the social upheaval of the hippy-dippy `60s result in any real progress towards making America a better society? Here's a quote.

Among the things a asociety might want to conceal from itself -- because the realization might be too painful, or imply a need for changes that the society did not want to, or was afraid to make -- would be the failure to achieve its own stated goals. Progress, for instance.

Americans work, and work hard, but do they in any fundamental sense progress? And in a time-frame small enough so that progress is clearly focused? How do we measure progress? Greater personal security? Shorter work week? Better education? Improved medical protection? Higher culture? More happiness? In none of these ways does there seem to be progress commensurate with the enormous effort Americans have been putting out.

In a footnote to the quoted passage, Mr. Herzog says: "For a chronicle of our 'progress', see William O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion (Random House, 1970). The remarkable (or perhaps unremarkable aspect of Douglas' depressing findings is that the conditions he reports are so persistent. In other words, years have passed and nothing has been done about them."

Walt hastens to add the the William O. Douglas whose book Mr. Herzog recommends is the same William O. Douglas who was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. He survived two attempts at impeachment before retiring in 1975, having served the longest term in the history of the court.

In 1975 Time magazine called Justice Douglas "the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court". He appeared to have little regard for judicial consistency or stare decisis when deciding cases. And what were the fruits of the liberal judicial activism for which he became so well known? Was any progress made? Errr, no.