On this evening’s televised news, all three networks emphasized (“Breaking News!”) an unprovoked knife attack in Times Square, killing one person and grievously wounding another. If you read in the newspapers about this incident or others like it, the story likely ended with some variant of the Guardians’s reference to “turbulent times” or similar descriptions decrying why things currently seem so badly out of kilter.
We don’t need to coin a new word or phrase to describe the conditions that make possible such grisly events. (Two days later, police shot and killed a man wielding a knife on a cable of the Brooklyn Bridge.) Anomie, popularized in 1893 by sociologist Émile Durkheim, refers to a “generalized state of normlessness” where there is a breakdown of social and moral rules. In such a setting, violence increases secondary to the loss of the social constraints that ordinarily keep aggressive and other negative impulses in check, the so-called “cultural corset,” as it was referred to during the Victorian era.
How Stable Social Structures Regulate Human Behavior
Anomie is actually a straightforward concept: Stable social structures ordinarily regulating human behavior become less powerful as determinants of how people actually behave.
For instance, during times of social breakdown (extreme polarization, political corruption, general malaise, anxiety, and distress), violence tends to increase among a small percentage of individuals who, until recently, had functioned non-violently. According to Durkheim, this small percentage was only tenuously restrained by social expectation and easily became untethered under conditions of stress or disorganization. For this percentage, only formal legal sanctions, not social expectations, have any chance of guaranteeing behavioral compliance.
At the neurobehavioral level, a stable, predictable society provides a setting in which the brain functions at its best. Neural structure and function work in synchrony to enable individual predictions of probability, a sense of confidence, trust, a spirit of common purpose and cooperation, and the ability to regulate emotions and inhibit disruptive or violent responses. Healthy networks within the brain ordinarily reduce the cognitive effort required to function healthily in daily life. But under conditions of anomie, the brain’s social judgements lose clarity and conviction. Who can be trusted? What is expected of me? And, most damaging, is an imperiled sense of identity: “Who am I really?”
When comparatively stable social conditions deteriorate, resulting in an increasingly fragmented, anomic world, seemingly random acts of violence, like the one reported on the nightly news, become increasingly frequent nationwide. How does this come about?
The Brain’s Reaction to Anomic Times: From Vigilance to Hypervigilance
First of all, during anomic times like the present, the brain, in its attempt to make sense of the world, is driven to take in as much information as possible by increasing its vigilance. You can think of the brain as a prediction machine that is always vigilantly transforming current information into predictions of what will happen next and what should be done in response. As the conditions of anomie increase, the brain’s hypervigilance kicks up several notches into a state of hypervigilance.
Hypervigilance nurtures a sense of threat combined with a decreasing ability to trust others, social withdrawal, and a general loss of the cognitive inhibition required for maintaining sustained relationships with friends, acquaintances, and people in general. Such losses in social connection provoke anxiety, depression, and political extremism. Currently both our trust in other people and our confidence in our institutions are at an all-time low. According to findings by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of people who believe “most people can be trusted” decreased from 34% in 1972 to 23% by 2018 and has remained at that low level since then. Another survey (Gallup 2026) found that only 27% of Americans expressed confidence in 14 of our major institutions.
Added to this are the expressions of anomie resulting from the ever burgeoning digital/ social media environment engulfing us. Although this environment connects vast numbers of us, those connections involve, for the most part, social voice-mediated or screen-mediated social interactions that lack the verisimilitude of one person encountering another in the flesh.
With even greater vigilance comes increases in the perception of subjectively threatening information that acts as a multiplier, resulting in greater vigilance and stress. Under such conditions of uncertainty and threat, people holding similar views tend to attract one another and form groups. Shared explanations, even erroneous ones—in fact, especially erroneous ones, since they’re often very difficult to prove mistaken—reduce the amount and intensity of personal anxiety. We think: “Whew! So I’m not the only one who believes this”. Thanks to the accompanying reduction of anxiety, self-identity merges with the newly acquired group identity. The stronger the affiliation within the new group, the more shared-group-identity plays the predominant role: Protecting the group becomes synonymous with protecting the self. Put another way, when the larger social world becomes less intelligible, a smaller, narrowly defined group becomes more and more psychologically attractive, simply because such groups tell individuals who they are and how they should think and behave.
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Political Affiliation During Anomie
Both cultural history and neuroscience research demonstrate that political affiliation can become an anchoring point for self-identity. This is one of the reasons that the formation and acceptance of new political convictions is often experienced as a change in identity, not just a change in beliefs and expressed opinions. We hear, for instance, the converted speak of having become a “new man” or a “new woman”. Currently, we are experiencing these changes in the form of political and cultural polarization marked by many strongly held beliefs, but few shared norms. If the polarization becomes strong enough, the conflicts threaten to preclude resolution. While this process can be reversed, reversal doesn’t come easily.
Now, less than two months before the midterm elections, let’s hope that both parties are working towards decreasing the suffocating effects of our nation’s sense of polarization that disunites us. Failure to do so will only lead to additional polarization—the lynchpin of anomie.