Socially Patterned Defects

[H2O Man]

" Our society is produced in such a way that we create hungry ghosts very young, every day, by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands. They are everywhere, wandering around without anything to believe in, without anything to love, without anything that looks true and good and beautiful." – Thich Nhat Hanh; August 6, 1996

Today is a day that will stain our nation’s history. I sit, stunned, watching the news on MSNBC, listening to the reports about the killing spree on the Virginia Tech campus. 22 dead, 28 wounded.

My younger son is a college student. Last year, there was a stabbing on the sidewalk in front of his dorm. It’s not like when I was a student.

Last summer, a disturbed young man who was asked to leave a party my son was at left, and returned with a hand gun. No shots were fired, but again, that is a very different experience than I had in my years as a student.

My education included reading Emile Durkheim and Erich Fromm, and I am reminded of both of them today:

"One of the most penetrating diagnoses of the capitalist culture in the nineteenth century was made by a sociologist, E. Durkheim, who was neither a political nor religious radical. He states that in modern industrial society the individual and the group have ceased to function satisfactorily; that they live in a condition of ‘anomie,’ that is, a lack of meaningful and structuralized social life; that the individual follows more and more ‘a restless movement, a planless self-development, an aim of living which has no criterion of value and in which happiness lies always in the future, and never in present achievement.’ The ambition of man, having the whole world for his customer, becomes unlimited, and he is filled with disgust, with the ‘futility of endless pursuit.’ Durkheim points out that only the political state survived the French Revolution as a solitary factor of collective organization. As a result, a genuine social order has disappeared, the state emerging as the only collective organizing activity of a social character. The individual, free from all genuine social bonds, finds himself abandoned, isolated, and demoralized. Society becomes ‘a disorganized dust of individuals’." – The Sane Society; Erich Fromm; page 191.