Since anomie has been brought to the table

[Ian Livingston]

> I don't know if this latter interpretation has any metaphoric value for
> moderns who no longer hope for resurrection of the body and life everlasting
> but still want to hope in something.  Suicide is often, I believe, the
> result of loss of hope. Hope in anything. For super-thoughtful people, the
> loss of any meaning in life.

This one point I want to correct you on, Paul: Suicide is most often
the result of depression, which is not so much a spiritual / moral
despair (though such is among its symptoms), it is, rather a
biological condition that must be treated organically. The body is
depressed, which makes the mind sick. That's where it starts, anyhow,
after a point a feedback loop kicks in, in the most serious clinical
cases often leading to suicide. It's not because depressives lose hope
that they take their lives, but because their thinking is disordered
by depression.

Hope is something else again. Hope can be tragic, leads to the deaths
of many, and to abhorrent behavioral ticks. Thanatopic escapism is the
route of the hopeful. People who act most effectively in critical
situations do so without any consideration of hope. The action is the
opposite of hope. I would say that one must be without hope to care
enough to act. One hopes for things to change, or one sets out to
change them.

Depressives are unable to rouse the energy to act.

On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
> On 1/7/2012 1:25 PM, Ian Livingston wrote:
>>>
>>> Lack of rule was extended to mean lack of meaning.
>>
>> Interesting. Is it rules that shape meaning--in the abstract, I mean?
>> Hm. A point to ponder. As this discussion started as discussion of
>> acedia, which is more a spiritual funk than an interpersonal malaise,
>> as anomie seems to be, I wonder, if there is fertile ground in
>> thinking about the two as shadings of one another?
>
> Yes, several ideas seem closely associated.  One is the Christian idea of
> Despair which if voluntary is considered a serious sin. Despair is in turn
> associated with Sloth, one of the seven deadly or cardinal or sources of
> sin(s), the idea that one can voluntarily become too inert to continue to
> hope for the good, the  good of course being eternal salvation.  Aquinas
> spoke of it in Aristotelian terms. It is unnatural for the appetite not to
> seek the good, the unnatural of course being sinful by Aquinas's lights.
>  (something like that, Alice can correct)
>
> I don't know if this latter interpretation has any metaphoric value for
> moderns who no longer hope for resurrection of the body and life everlasting
> but still want to hope in something.  Suicide is often, I believe, the
> result of loss of hope. Hope in anything. For super-thoughtful people, the
> loss of any meaning in life.
>
> This may tie in with Pynchon's young people in Vineland, who despite their
> anti-authority stance still in their heart of hearts needed a leader to
> follow. (if I'm remembering at all accurately--was it Brock?)
>
> Anyway, there may be some deep, ineradicable thing in us that requires a
> ruler or in Durkheim's words a rule, and without one we are thoroughly
> befuddled and lost.
>
> The implications for anarchism I won't dare speculate upon.
>
> P
>
>
> P
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 7:35 AM, Paul Mackin<mackin.paul at verizon.net>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On 1/7/2012 5:37 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Check out the curious wikipedia article on it which Kai first sent.
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie
>>>> One curious thing is the "original research' that is, effectively,
>>>> literary criticism,
>>>> finding anomie as a major theme in many writers and movies......
>>>> (Seems a bit loose to me.....The Stranger, yes, Brothers K?, maybe not
>>>> so
>>>> much.)
>>>>
>>>>  Q: Could describe Benny P.?
>>>>  article links it to tourism(?!) in later studies, a motif of V....
>>>>    "Durkheim describes anomie as "a rule that is a lack of rule,"
>>>> "derangement," and "an insatiable will."[2]
>>>> Why "an insatiable will"?..interesting, yes?
>>>>
>>>>
>>> The staff sociologist at the think tank i was at used to use the word to
>>> described the psychological state of workers brought about by the
>>> meaninglessness of industrial work.
>>>
>>> Lack of rule was extended to mean lack of meaning.
>>>
>>> He quoted Durkheim sometimes.
>>>
>>> P
>>>
>>> P
>>
>>
>>
>



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant