Division, discord and isolation? Poverty, alienation, and commodification! You sweep under the carpet the fact that in the United States, wealth accumulation--and the drive for profit at others' expense--is at the deepest structural level of our culture--the legal system and the political system.
The "D, D, and I" you mention all follow from the fact that ours is a system of unfettered, unrestrained, devotion to wealth (that is, materialism). And the "party of wealth" is the Republican Party, and their titular leader is a man whose wealth and political success produce and feed on "Division, Discord, and Isolation."
16
Brooks is the avuncular side of Trump. Couching his musings in the language of an intellectual, trying to understand the psychology of troubled men in troubled times. Worrying about the social isolation of people left behind. Brooks uses psychobabble explanations to deflect responsibility from where it belongs.
But, Brooks refuses to renounce the man and the party that are stoking the fires of hatred. Brooks thinks that we are all responsible for the problem and therefore equally responsible for fixing it. No, Mr. Brooks, I am not responsible in any way shape or form for the bomber and gunmen whose attacks are motivated by hatred and right-wing lies. Lies that are spread by the so-called president of the United States. Lies that are broadcast by the largest and avowedly Republican news network in the country.
Kumbaya doesn't cut it, Brooks. You have a privileged spot, a column in the New York Times, which you can use to call out the hypocrisy and hatred that is the platform of the Republican party. Or you can continue to support the Trump regime through your obfuscation and silence.
23
I'm truly apologetic that I couldn't leave things as they were in an earlier response. But I'm a Floridian, and everyone knows we're split down the middle: 50% Red, 50% Blue.
And sure enough, when one examines the roll of registered voters in Florida, it's very close to 50-50! So in the context of this article, we're divided into % 3rippers and 50% weavers.
While it's unlikely that ALL "Red"s are "rippers", and vice-versa, it's beyond belief the extent to which the rippers have prevailed!
Percent of Registered voters in Florida:
Democratic: 37.2%
Republican: 35.3%
And yet...
Member of the Florida House of Representatives:
Republican: 75
Democratic: 42
Members of the Florida Senate:
Republican: 22
Democratic: 16
What's going on here. Republican gerrymandering, that's what Take at look a this Congressional districting Map:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Florida_congressional_districts.png
Without getting too far into it, look at district #27, which covers most of densely populated Dade County. Then scroll up to Districts #21 through #24, each of which sends a Congressman to Washington.
It gets worse and worse, doesn't it.
9
These same lonely people will find out in due time that they can be fired because they’re too old. They’ll find out their medical coverage doesn’t exist anymore, that they’re social security has been cut or lost to the stock market. All the things we take for granted are on the republican chopping block. Especially as we age.
When republican working class people find out what they’ve lost they need to keep in mind whether the illegals coming into this country were the biggest threat to their existence.
10
Yes isolation and loneliness is a problem in our culture. There are many "weavers". more than there are "rippers" I believe. But your ideas, lovely as they sound, ignore the fact that we allow rippers to be armed like the military. Many of the rippers belong to organized groups of racist bigoted right wing groups who have military weapons. These guys aren't lonely, they are angry and dangerous. I so wish you would address the huge problem we have with the rise of these groups fueled by our dear leader. We need weavers of course, but first get the military style guns away from the rippers for heavens sake, and get a grip on who foments all of this rage and violence. It ain't the weavers of Bernie Sanders.
9
David, you may want to consider whether you exhibit a deft manner of denial.
12
There are scarce resources for boys and young men whose social and emotional development is impaired and for their families to help them. We as a society need to invest in helping them before they grow up to be angry, isolated and prone to being radicalized and armed. I am in no way defending or justifying the grotesque actions of the few who carry out heinous acts such as the Pittsburgh massacre. But I am speaking out for the many, many more who suffer their despair in silence.
4
I wish I had written that, even though it's a certainty that only my friends and a few correspondents - also friends - would read it.
A very few of my friends have disappeared into the ranks of the rippers. I hope to renew those friendships one day, but for now it's impossible. The force of reason has always been the centerpiece of my life, and those who have abandoned reason for sloganeering have no place in it.
I value my own sanity too much.
3
Terrific column. Thanks.
3
Brooks' column, like most of his, starts of compellingly. He's loading the bases for the cleanup hitter. Who then predictably strikes out.
It's almost always about the economy. Hatred rises when folks don't have disposable income and are struggling just to get by. Isn't that what got Trump elected, all those undereducated white folks who lost their jobs in manufacturing? Unemployment rates that don't talk about surviving on twenty dollars an hour in today's world, let alone minimum wage? The jobs without vacations, health care benefits, or pensions? Try surviving on your own on fifteen dollars an hour after you've paid taxes, rent, utilities, and put food on the table. Then imagine trying to do so with a family.
It's the economy, stupid.
The Pittsburgh shooter was an economic loser who lived with his grandparent before they died and was living in a rundown one bedroom apartment. Would he have shot up a building full of strangers if he had a solid job with benefits? We'll never know, but blaming others who aren't part of one's tribe always rises exponentially when folks are struggling in the economy.
The Tom Lehrer song comes to mind . . . "everybody hates the Jews."
2
I am a Jew , I am 70 and I remember Philadelphia Mississippi. I remember 1964 when Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were martyred by the fine Christian conservatives for registering American citizens in order to vote. I remember 1980 when Reagan that fine conservative Republican went to Philadelphia to honour those fine loving Christian conservatives who murdered three of America's finest and bravest young men.
10
Right on the point. I suspect that political extremists, to a man or woman, are people who externalize their insecurities in a way that gives them form and something to fight, for the simple reason that they would otherwise drown in their own misery.
1
Dear David, just so you know sitting up there on your perch, you yourself and your sophistic (at least in his eyes) writing are the source of my husbands severe depression.
3
When others commit terrorist acts, David Brooks doesn’t make them the victim. He rightly calls out the wrongs done.
I guess we learn today that all is forgivable if it is done in the name of sad lonely white men.
There were three right wing terrorist attacks last week. Black people and Jews died for their ethnicity.
The hate was theirs, and it is the same hate that Trump couldn’t give up for one day. Many of their compatriots on the right were claiming false flag attacks. Many continue to go after Soros for a Jewish conspiracies that reek of anti-semetism. It is the same hate that drives anti-immigration on the right. An anti-Hispanic hatred.
Suicide and mental health are problems in America. But this is never anything Mr Brooks would have given any minority males over the past decades.
For Mr Brooks, murder and terrorism is different if you are a white man. There is no moral equality for Mr Brooks. He isn’t just the nationalist he claims, he wants the white exceptionalism too.
Mr Brooks needs moral not mental help.
5
Brooks announced that he's a "nationalist" last week, which puts today's curious nonchalance in perspective:
"There’s always a pile of bodies at these massacre sites."
(Get used to it, America, whispers Brooks)
"the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic"
(The ideology I espouse is blameless, David continues)
"It’s not between one group of good people and another group of bad people"
(DB fails to denounce violent anti-Semitism, mimicking DT's "good people on both sides comment after Charlottesville)
The author is known as a theorist about "character", but I'm doubting his bona fides on the topic.
7
Brooks displays his right-wing partisanship once again. He dutifully bleatpeats the party line that the latest right white terrorist was just one lonely disconnected guy. Does anyone believe for one second that Brooks would say that of anyone on the left who committed mass murder? No mention of division and the sowing of hate by the Republican Party for decades. No mention of Trump who didn’t drop his hateful, lie-filled story line even for one day. Brooks should man up and write a column about the evil within his own party, but I won’t hold my breath. Brooks is as dihonest as every right-wing mouthpiece.
7
There’s always a guy like the Pittsburgh synagogue attacker Robert Bowers, who, according to Times reporting, was friendless in high school and a solitary ghost as an adult, who spent his evenings sitting in his car smoking, listening to the radio, and living, as one acquaintance put it, “in his own little world.”
Yes, there is always a guy. And in modern America, he has plenty of neo-nazi propaganda on the radio and online to engage him, we elect a president who repeats the propaganda from the highest office in the land and fills political appointments with purveyors of (often) anti-Semitic conspiracies, and we give the guy an arsenal of guns.
I'm not sure from reading your piece, Mr Brooks, just exactly which one of you is "in his own little world."
5
and the digitalized world is the biggest threat to the unsound mind. You get the same hate in the com box below. They like that the lonely man acts in violence. They feed off of that. They are the pimps of the lonely man.
Brooks has shown he can't tell the difference between expressing an opinion (those people are deplorable) versus telling malicious lies (the President wasn't even born in the USA).
Shameful!
3
"Guys like that" are wholly susceptible to public nationalist exhortations of hatred and violence toward "others" from a racist president.
3
David Brooks is intellectually dishonest here.
He puts the blame on the forces of division but never names the biggest forces.....the GOP and Trumpism.
Brooks continues to say the nation is divided by differing ideologies....but that is incorrect. The nation is divided into those who are sleazy, selfish, and dishonest and those who aren't.
Brooks can't connect to the current GOP and is adrift.
4
The lonely man wasn’t at the crime scene. The lonely, deranged man is in the White House. David Brooks never seems to notice. Another absolutely stomach-turning column. And another comment that will never get published.
4
There is more than one way to be isolated from community.The money men behind Trump and his ilk have no connection to most Americans and certainly the disadvantaged ones.They are killing most of us in the long run without an automatic weapon.Their massacre of civil society, will be much more deadly.The are taking away the"Life,Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" for future generations and calling it freedom.
1
"It’s not between one group of good people and another group of bad people. The war runs down the middle of every heart. Most of us are part of the problem we complain about."
More whataboutism and bothsideism...Can you please read your colleague Paul Krugman's article today?
2
Once again, David Brooks skirts the "elephant" in the room....the Republicans have been making this Frankenstein monster since Regan. OWN IT.
5
"Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community. Most of us live in insular media and social bubbles that provide us with Pravda-like affirmations of our own moral superiority. Most of us hew to a code of privacy that leads us to not know our neighbors."
Dear David,
.....Buy into a workaholic ethos? I am of the baby boomer generation and that ethos was handed down to me by my parents who both worked their butts off to provide for our family. Given the Corporate "ethos" of making more money with fewer resources (workers) do we have a choice to provide for our families? As for living in "insular social bubbles" I've had to move 4 times in the last 6 years because these corporations get rid of workers as necessary. We've become a population of tumbleweeds, no roots, no extended family. Yet 99.99% of people like me do not commit murder, much less mass murder or any crime. We do what must be done to go on living.
Your answer may be part of an explanation, but only a part. Go back and return with the other parts. Hopefully, one of those parts will include the debased set of leaders in this country feeding racist haters that gulp legitimacy like a sponge absorbing water. The grossest part is they do it for VOTES and more power.
1
For shame, Mr. Brooks. To claim that “we need to be trained” to be weavers? All you have to do is be kind. Choose kindness, helpfulness, consideration. After all, who is sowing division, discord, and isolation? DJT and the GOP, that’s who. Fox News, Brietbart, and Infowars, that’s who. Religious conservatives, with the added assertion that if it is their “religious belief” they have a right to be as divisive and discordant as they please. You have been supporting the rippers for many years. The weavers have always been here and they are powerful. Let’s vote the rippers out of political power. Let’s turn the voices of the rippers off - change the channel on the TV and the radio; stop frequenting right wing websites. Let your inner weaver out - as you yourself say, Mr. Brooks: there is a weaver in every heart.
3
Since this piece touches on how brains work, let me share my opinion of Trump's brain function...the brain of a very lonely man...perhaps the most lonely man in America.
You give Trump too much credit, David. He's not shrewd, smart, or cagey. Trump is Trump. It's the way his brain is hard-wired and the homeostasis of his particular brain chemicals that make him operate the way he does.
He is totally predictable. He never thinks to make a new lie to over shadow the old ones. He always lies, or speaks from the context of a lie, (except when reading the teleprompter.) And this works for him, just as it has done all of his life, beginning in his childhood.
Maybe there are some loners who can't or don't weave. And it's likely because of their inherent brain chemistry and internal wiring—just like our president's. Yes, sometimes, it's society's fault.
But please stop giving the president credit for being smart when he's just being who he is...a totally predictable, sociopath and, if given enough rein, a reigning despot.
2
America... the "lonely man" of the global arms industry.
What goes around comes around. We feed on ourselves
Let's elect NEW PEOPLE.
Please be mindful when you vote for as fresh breath of human thought:
it's not "us" and "them" it's not GOP or Democrat, left or right.
It's human- vs corporate.
The most simple example: since when did it become "OK" to not watch where you're driving... and look at a text and devote all the neural bandwidth you use doing that...while hurling a two ton automobile 10-15mph over a posted speed limit? That's corporate. And you want to complain about Trump?
There's a wonderful community institution -- open to all, accessible, affordable -- that can address the problem of loneliness: it's variously called church, synagogue, or mosque. Why don't more lonely, disconnected people participate in the services and programs offered by these religious institutions as a way to build relationships? Perhaps some of these community institutions seem to require participants to adopt certain beliefs as a condition of full membership. But others are willing to invite the participation of people with a wide variety of beliefs, even those who do not know what to believe. I wonder whether more vigorous outreach efforts by these institutions might offer a path to community for the lonely and disconnected.
"There's always a pile of bodies..." is a very cold detached way of describing a mass murder scene. And that one lonely guy, well he gets a lot of encouragement from the present state of right wing ideology. It IS ideological, misogynistic, racial, sociological, economic, and psychological.
Talk about missing the forest for the trees, David, I think you missed both and everything else in between.
4
Once again with his pretty story, Mr. Brooks distracts from the fact that his Republican Party succors and feeds rightwing extremists, who statistically are responsible for the vast majority of homegrown acts of violence and terror in the US, relative to all of the others. Trump's style and methods (now fully welded to the GOP from top to bottom) are simply more brazen and downwardly deviant relative to his predecessors. There is no bottom in sight. Nobody in the GOP is "weaving" anything but a skein of lies.
3
@Theo D
Let me see if it goes through in reply :)
You have it wrong Mr Brooks. It turns out extremists are often loners. It is not loners who are often extremists.
Mr Bowers did not seek infamy, he sought fame. He believed he was doing us all a favor because of all the republican propaganda about Muslims terrorizing us here in the US and immigrants coming here illegally to take our work and terrorize us.
That is how stochastic terrorism works. You continuously rant and rave about the evils of this or that group or person you want to target who are harming "us" and eventually someone will break down in a weak moment and commit an act of violence against that target. There is no new or larger mental health problem that didn't exist before the GOP turned to stochastic terrorism in the 70's. It is the incitement by republicans that is new.
Apparently Mr Bowers felt El Trumpo a known lifelong racist wasn't doing enough to stop whomever it is he imagined or was told by GOP propaganda HIAS was helping.
How about you talk about the intentional destruction the republicans have inflicted on our society to create lives like the one Mr Bowers was living? Or at least admit to being part and parcel of the GOP stochastic effort!?
Most people are struggling because the wealth and income distributions in the US have become so skewed. While the 0.01% accumulate more and more of the wealth, the rest of us struggle to feed and house our families, find healthcare and so on. Thus despair. The recent tax bill made this even worse. But Fox news says the problem is immigrants stealing our jobs. Illegal immigrants do make it possible for corporations to keep wages down, but the bigger problem is that all the profits from the corporations are going to the very few. We have experienced class warfare and we have lost. With Citizens United and the constant propaganda of Fox News and Sinclair, nothing with change. With concentrated wealth, comes concentrated power. The super rich (like Trump) made their money the old fashioned way- they inherited it as will their ever more powerful children. Income and wealth distributions are much more equitable in Europe hence much greater levels of happiness, and an easier life style.
3
Very good and important column. I do wish it had also included mention of economic stress as a leading cause of anxiety and hopelessness. Our society is becoming not only more alienated, but also more economically stratified. Too much wealth has been siphoned to the very top, leaving vast numbers unable to make ends sufficiently meet.
Which party has added to this damaging imbalance? We all know, but Brooks avoids the issue.
2
Another sermon from Pastor Brooks. As I recall, it was President Reagan who opened up the mental hospitals and released its occupants in the 80's . Thereby absolving the taxpayers from responsibility for protecting the mentally ill. What happened? The homeless started fires that destroyed the millionaires neighborhoods and worse have made decent communities unlivable for their homeowners. I have NEVER seen one written word in any of Brook's columns that indicts a Republican or says mea culpa for all the years of GOP loyalty that Brooks has shown. Instead we see half philosophical blather about how we can fix things and who is to blame. Contrary to Brook's generalization comments about how to resolve the divisions in our country, I say I am not a person with half a bad heart. I am a person who sees reality and has a conscience. Vote to protect our Democracy, vote yes for Democrats, vote NO for Republican demagoguery.
5
"And here’s the hard part of the war: It’s not between one group of good people and another group of bad people. The war runs down the middle of every heart. Most of us are part of the problem we complain about."
Thank you for that nice sugar-coated dose of bothsideism Mr. Brooks. I'd tell you what to do with it, but that would be uncivil.
You might make distinctions about where you can find the community builders, and where you can find those promoting radical individualism. You might acknowledge that there are good people and bad people rather than glossing over them.
"It’s easier to destroy trust than to build it, so the rippers have an advantage. But there are many more weavers, people who yearn to live in loving relationships and trusting communities. The weavers just need what any side in a war needs: training so we know how to wage it, strategies so we know how to win it and a call to arms so we know why we’re in it."
In case you missed it Mr. Brooks, your colleague Dr. Krugman has issued that call to arms: "Hate is on the Ballot Next Week".
https://nyti.ms/2yGEf0x
1
@Larry Roth
I remember the Republicans heaping scorn and derision on Barack Obama because he had been a community organizer. How dare he seek the presidency with such a ridiculous resume! The wackier right winger hinted darkly that “community organizer” was really code for subversive. Mr. Brooks said nary a word against that.
1
This is a beautiful essay...thank you.
1
Your fable of "a lonely man" ignores what happened.
The man who massacred Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue "wanted all Jews to die" because he believed Jews "were committing genocide against his people," not because he was lonely. This wasn't the work of a lonely or unhinged man, it's exactly how "redemptive anti-Semitism," which Saul Friedländer defined, works. "Redemptive anti-Semitism" is the belief that in murdering Jews you are saving your nation and your people.
Trump exhorts massive adoring crowds with dehumanizing rhetoric appropriated from white nationalists. His rhetoric revolves around 3 themes: identity, purity, and security. Trump uses rhetoric to define outsiders as seeking to defile, pollute, and ultimately destroy an insider community, so those who see themselves as the "insiders" intend to destroy all "outsiders".
Trump told his supporters that the migrant caravan was filled with dangerous "criminals" and "unknown Middle Easterners." Lies. There were no criminals or Middle Easterners. Worse, it meant Jihadists were in the caravan. Lies upon lies. Fox commentators compounded the lies by lying too, saying the caravan was sent by wealthy Jews.
A violent anti-Semite learned that the Jewish Community was helping refugees. Trump and Fox already "explained" that Jews were helping Jihadists destroy America, so for the killer murdering Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue was an act of "Redemptive anti-Semitism." The killer's supposed loneliness is irrelevant.
454
@Robert B - Excellent analysis.
13
@Robert B
Very well stated -you succinctly pointed out the underlying factors behind the murders at the Tree
of Life synagogue. Words have power and the
vile words spat out by Fox, Trump, Bannon et al
are fueling the fire.
17
@Robert B David, this massacre was a premeditated act of "Redemptive anti-Semitism." The killer explicitly said it was, which makes your piece all the more distressing.
I'm a criminal and civil rights attorney, so I understand weaving a narrative so jurors can feel some compassion for a criminal. However, I never fool myself into believing that it explains why if you take 1000 lonely men and place them under the same exact pressures only 1 will commit a violent crime. Here, a hate fueled massacre occurred. Further, those belonging to large supportive organizations, with vibrant social lives, and no drug dependency, also commit horrific hate crimes. You've heard of these large supportive organizations, they include the KKK and the Aryan Nations.
David, in every column over the last 2 years you consistently ignore what is happening in America and tell stories like this one which excuse anything linked to the political right because you refuse to accept that Trump and the political right are the reason these things are happening.
However, you’ve gone too far here. A Nazi who listened to and believed vicious and violent anti-Semitic conspiracy theories offered everywhere by the political-right, including on mainstream media like Fox, and from top Republican politicians, murdered a synagogue full of Americans in the worst act of anti-Semitism in American history.
David, you're hurting Jewish Americans, and millions upon millions of other decent Americans. Please stop.
58
As misguided as they might be, at the base of thoughts of people like Robert Bowers there are beliefs. Granted, they are not our beliefs, and they are not what we would call "good" beliefs, but there are beliefs just the same. In the near future, we will program the human mind in the computer based on a "survival" algorithm, which will provide irrefutable proof of how we trick the mind with our ridiculous beliefs about what is supposed to survive - creating minds de facto programmed for destruction. When we understand this, we will begin the long trek back to reason and sanity. See RevolutionOfReason.com
This is an important subject that Americans take for granted and can't comprehend unless they live it.
An recent article in this paper talked about an average adult having a social network of 300 to 500 people (I wish I could come up with the reference.
Really?
I believe this is a gross misrepresentation. Many people as they age have but one or two friends and no family left. The most vulnerable have no family and no friends.
Watching parents age, the need for outside assistance becomes obvious. As an example, Americans like to think they are helpful, but often expect others to ask for help when they need it, when what is really needed is for more people to just offer it. An item from the store, a cup of coffee, etc.
I'm not talking about taking care of an opioid addict, that will be the next generation's burden.
2
"Guys like that are drawn to extremist ideologies, which explain their disappointments and give them a sense that they are connected to something." This is exactly the guy Trump targets with his rhetoric which is why he is so dangerous. Trump has blood on his hands for the attempted assassinations of two Presidents, members of Congress and others as well as murders in PA and all the while not a peep from Mike Pence the supposed "religious" family values guy or the Republicans who remain complicit.
3
I dunno.
Seems to me support of right wing hate groups that Trump lends, takes these most recent events to a whole new level. You want to blame each of us for the loneliness of one man who was pushed in a direction of a hate attack and antisemitic violence egged on by the commander in chief? You want to ignore the immorality and complicitness of DJ Trump? Nice idea, to work together. But if Trump wants a fight, there can be no solution but to resist. If Trump and his complicit Republicans continue the divisions espoused by antiimmigrant rants and Nazi propaganda, then it is highly moral and ethical to take a stand, denounce them, and work in any way possible against them. Nonviolently of course. But to unilaterally disarm? That's just what a bully wants. A bully fears being made a fool. And being shown just how weak he can be. Confront the Bully and cadres. Do not give an inch against facists.
If you ask me...
1
I suspect the "lonely alienated man" problem has been around at least as long as the industrial revolution. However, it expresses itself differently in different times, countries, and cultures. The Times recently had an article about older Japanese men who die "in place"--usually in cramped, squalid conditions--and decompose, unnoticed, in their nondescript apartments. Professional "death cleaners" then have to be called in to clean up the remains.
But note, mass politically motivated shootings are rare in Japan. So Mr. Brooks needs to go a step further and ask, why do we vent our social pathologies in such uniquely violent ways in the U.S.? (And, as other have noted, we have the misfortune now to be influenced by a "corroder in chief" who weakens all sorts of norms of public decency and civil political behavior.)
1
I worked two and three jobs for over 40 years to put a roof over our heads, have health insurance, put my kids through college and take a very occasional small vacation. This was not a choice, it was a necessity. As for the folks who cannot find a way to make friend so they decide to kill people?...I find that a very big stretch. There are plenty of "isolated" people who enjoy their own company without fighting homicidal urges.
2
David Brooks is always an intellectual apologist for whatever harm the Republican party is doing or has done. He is a stubborn man and really wrong headed.
Social media is clearly the problem causing vulnerable adolescents to suicide in record numbers, it is not protracted loneliness as per Johann Hari's book. And serial killing from political gun nuts is not about their loneliness. We've always had lonely people in this world, it's just that in our world the few who get unhinged have unfettered access to automatic weapons.
I've given up on David, but I continue to read him just to see how stubbornly he persists in never nailing the problems for what they really are. He is quintessentially a Republican who will continue to stomach Trump and evade all responsibility.
6
I don't know what America Mr. Brooks is looking at. Communities have been destroyed by the big banks, gene frication jobs have been shipped overseas, yes people love working three jobs to make ends meet. People love the fact that they can't get sick because they will loose everything. We love to be under constant stress. After last week three horrific experiences leaving the two minorities dead in front of Kroger and eleven who thought they could worship in peace. Pipe bombs sent to politicians, and the writer from the Washington Post tortured and murdered the week before
Nothing will change till we get the haters out of office and fund mental health programs and incorporate people back into the world. Get off the cell phone social media and develop social skills be respectful.
We can ignore the president and his swamp people by voting and moving forward without his lies
3
Dear David,
Your article sounds quite naive to me. You need to explore and expand the very reasons for loneliness and mental illness. These conditions are perpetuated and exploited by groups of people who have much to gain, money, power, influence. It appears you do not want to go there. Are you afraid of what might happen to you?
1
Sure - there are indeed lonely people who need love and friends. What's going on here is far more dangerous than a few lonely people losing control, reaching for their guns and killing themselves and / or others.
We now have those "leading" our nation intentionally pouring gasoline on what were mostly embers and if we do not remove those with the gasoline from positions of power and authority, this country is in very serious trouble, and therefore so it the world.
If you care about your future, if you love your children, grandchildren, your community, then it is imperative that you truthfully, honestly (two critical values being burned up by the same "leaders" throwing the gasoline) look in the mirror, look at who you choose as leaders, and think critically about who they really are, what they're really saying. The same goes for many with the label, "business leader" - far too many are predators looking to steal every dime for themselves.
It's not the few lonely people - it's "the system, stupid." It's the massive lies being told over decades, perpetrated by one party in particular - as we know, the Republicans (see Steve Schmidt's declaration from Oct 29. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/10/29/1808327/-Steve-Schmidt-does-not-hold-back-in-tonight-s-Commentary?detail=emaildkre)
David B - you are a bright guy, at times you seem to find excuses for the worst actors in our public sphere. Take a lesson from Steve Schmidt. Read Paul Krugman today.
What Gertude Stein said about Exra Pound applies even more dismally to David Brooks:
"A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not."
1
Every form of social organization involves tradeoffs. The country mouse has to accept conformity in exchange for the warmth of community; the town mouse has to accept loneliness in exchange for his individuality.
1
Another sop from Brooks. How many guns did this guy have? How much garbage did he listen to on Fox. I am sick and tired of hearing excuses for these white guys. There are many lonely people in this country, many truly mired in poverty, homelessness and mental illness, but it was this guy who brought an arsenal of weapons to slaughter Jews at prayer. Time for Brooks to hang g it up.
3
Maybe if we had a health care system in this country that actually worked, these isolated individuals would be able to get the therapy that they so desperately need.
Maybe if we had less guns out there, these isolated, troubled individuals would be less likely to get them into their hands.
Maybe if there were decent wages, people wouldn't be obligated to spend so much time trying to support their families, leading easily to more connected individuals.
Maybe if we didn't have a hate monger for a president and and suck-up, disgraceful Congress, these issues could be addressed head-on.
How about let's try to fix all this and then see what happens?
1
So you've got a society that puts the individual above the collective, while being underpinned by a capitalist economic system that guarantees a lot of those individuals will be exploited, impoverished, and discarded. There's nothing dysfunctional about that, certainly.
1
Behind all the flowery sentiments about community versus isolation, Brooks is giving domestic terrorists cover by implicitly blaming the victimized communities for terror visited upon them. He's challenging autonomous human beings and social creatures to deny their own natural stimulus-response instincts by persisting in trying to socialize with individuals who radiate habitual and deeply ingrained aversion to socialization. Both plants and animals have ways of signaling they do not want to be bothered.Other lifeforms ignore those warnings at their own risk. How does a proposition like forced socialization respect biological common sense? How does such a proposition pass the laugh test on practicability? How does such a proposition respect basic human agency, of the individual or the community?
Brooks' argument strikes me as the same faux-intellectual shenanigans that had people suggesting the way to deal with incels is to mandate companions for them. Maybe it's just me, but I tend to think that part of our unalienable right to "pursuit of happiness" is the right to avoid patently undesirable social interactions and connections. I don't care how much nobility of intent one uses to cloak such intentions; to suggest the price we pay for exercising such a basic social right is living with the risk of being gunned down or terrorized is a fancily varnished bit of moral irresponsibility. As a regular reader, I must challenge Mr. Brooks and his readership to do better.
1
David wants to reduce the source of our collective fears to unhinged thoughts rattling around the head of that 'lonely man' living in 'solitary disappointment.' Find the individual lonely men, make them less solitary and disappointed and the hateful violence is robbed of its fuel.
But this privatization of hate mistakes the lightening strike for the larger storm. As if by magic, the individual act floats free of its social, economic and ideological context. It's a way of eliding efforts by some to connect Trump's unrelenting, toxic rants with recent acts of political violence.
And there's dilemma: to locate the violent impulse in the isolated lonely guy is to insist the violence is not, in fact, political, or even social in any meaningful way. It's just something that happens now and then.
But more starkly, no one's responsible for sending bombs or murdering the Jews except the two lonely men who mailed the bombs and fired the weapons. What people say--the words those two mean heard people say--is more background noise than elements of a toxic environment.
David, I'm pretty sure discourse doesn't work that way. Language is nothing if not social, which means even when sitting alone in his car, the voices in that murderer's head came from somewhere, were connected to the very real voices of others, perhaps in ways that legitimize anger or call him to action.
“Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most.”
This sounds like a pretty good summary of Red State America in 2018.
Replace "loneliness" with "isolation" and it gets easier to see how many rural communities (and states) view the world the way they do.
Tom W from Cambridge Springs, PA. wrote the best comment, hands down!
Thank you, Tom. You nailed it.
so then, mr. brooks, what is the answer when men kill their wives, their children, their parents, siblings, extended families, their pets, their neighbors? they cannot be considered isolated if they have a whole family or neighborhood as a support system... why do so many of these types of killings occur in fairly affluent neighborhoods? who do you blame then? we are living in a society that has elected fascist style political leaders and cowards who do not oppose them. you just cannot face up to it.
3
Quoting David Brooks
" the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic. "
I believe this statement is wrong---very wrong.
The chief struggle of the day is economic--it is the inequality of wealth that is the root cause of the isolation and despair of so many Americans. And that despair and the propaganda on Fox News make a toxic mixture.
It is too bad Bowers wasn't more isolated--isolated from Fox News.
David Brooks writes, "Every year nearly 45,000 Americans respond to isolation and despair by ending their lives. Every year an additional 60,000 die of drug addiction. Nearly twice as many people die each year of these two maladies as were killed in the entire Vietnam War."
Just a reminder that Vietnamese are people too. And that thanks to the old Cold War stoked by nationalists like yourself, well over a million of them were killed between 1965 and 1975.
See in light of your wholehearted support for the more recent American fiasco in Iraq that has contributed so much to the current sense of despair of which you speak, your amnesia on this score seems less remarkable--if no less disturbing.
1
"Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community."
I'd wager that most of those who really "buy into" the workaholic ethos are far enough "up the ladder" so that their workaholism is at least nicely rewarded materially. The rest of us are expected to "buy in", at least to a degree, or risk our jobs, or at least our job longevity and earnings potential...
1
Every country has lonely people. Every country has desperately unhappy people. Every country has lost souls. The USA is alone among advanced nations in having millions and millions of firearms. Yay, we are beating Russia and China in this as hundreds die every day.
As usual, lifelong Republican David Brooks ducks the issue through cowardice and expediency.
"These mass killings are about many things — guns, demagogy, etc. — but they are also about social isolation and the spreading derangement of the American mind."
Wrong! These mass killings are about one thing - semi-automatic firearms. It is very simple and it's clear beyond any possible argument. Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom have exactly the same society in all other regards than America's insane gun laws and they hardly ever have mass killings of the kind seen routinely in America.
That is definitive proof, reconfirmed every year, every decade, especially since Australia and the United Kingdom made it almost impossible for unfit people to come into possession of a semi-automatic weapon. If you want to keep arguing about it in the face of that evidence, that merely proves beyond argument that you will not listen to any evidence that proves you wrong.
Social isolation is a big problem. The suicide rate is a huge problem. The suicide rate using firearms just bolsters the argument for sane gun laws - and there is, of course, a corresponding difference between the suicide rates using guns in the other three virtually identical Anglophone countries I've mentioned. But those problems don't get columns in The New York Times.
This column is about mass shootings which means it's about gun laws which means Brooks have proven his irrelevance and insignificance yet again.
1
Maybe it’s time - past time, even - to take that next step and institute a universal national service requirement. Make it perhaps one year of military service, or two years of civil service (Teach for America, Peace Corps, etc). Going through basic training with fellow Americans from all backgrounds, or teaching in schools a long way from home both physically and societally, would do wonders for creating strong social bonds in late adolescence, would teach critical life skills (such as resilience and tolerance), and would offer all young Americans a sense of citizenship as a responsibility and not simply as a collection of rights.
9
In an article supposed to promote unity and community, why must the comments be so divisive and toxic? As Mr. Brooks states, "most of us are part of the problem we complain about." Can we all take a step back and realize that we each must improve, no matter one's particular affiliation?
2
@Grant
The only way forward is to point at the problem which Mr Brooks most assuredly did not do here, then correct the problem and hold to account those who intentionally caused the problem.
This article is more of the problem not the solution.
The majority of Americans have incomes that are inadequate or just enough to get through the month, stuck in boring, exhausting jobs with no future.
It is indeed economics that is causing American mass psychic depression.
3
I agree that in the history of the United States until this decade that the Democratic party and the Republican party have both had their turn at alienating people. BUT if the Repubs are male focused and the Dems are female focused there comes a time when a good psychologist needs to counsel that one side is no longer just 50 percent violating the basis of relationships. For this decade according to a careful political plan Republicans wish to own all the women, all the religion, all the money and all the guns and most of the violence,
"Guys like that are drawn to extremist ideologies, which explain their disappointments and give them a sense that they are connected to something." Our heinous killer of good Jews does belong to an extremist ideology and its name is called Trumpism. When Mr. Brooks are you going to
this? Until then, although I respect you, I see you as missing a Truth man-up gene.
You are an impactful, thoughtful writer whose columns I often share with others. Your most recent gem really hit the mark! I have committed and acted upon doubling my volunteer efforts to mentor young children as a direct result of your column. And I will recruit others to join me!
Thank you!
Bill Eastman
2
There's a lot to like in the individual prescriptions here. But it ignores the obvious driver behind the very statistics that Brooks cites up front.
We have never had a leader, or an entire political party, choosing to ignore their responsibilities as human beings by actively fostering a paranoia that is read as permission, even a command to act by nut jobs with guns and bombs. The violence perpetrated is coming overwhelmingly from the far right.
Republicans own every meaningful lever of power today. They remain committed to keep tossing matches on kindling and oil-soaked rags. Surprise - the fires are raging.
If you want fewer fires, stop tossing matches, then saying "But I didn't put the kindling there."
It really is that simple.
4
@Brian
I'm not sure if Republicans are deliberately fostering the paranoia, or if they are the paranoid one's themselves (?)
1
It is very rare that someone is willing to admit that we are all part of the problem. I think that the more we point the finger, demand justice, exalt the death penalty, the more we are convincing ourselves that it has nothing to do with us. Now I think that their might be two of us! Mr. Brooks, this piece is actually quite courageous, thank you.
1
If Mr. Brooks paid attention to what is going on in America he'd notice that many conversations that start as attempts to make "friends" or understand the other side are hijacked by, guess who, the extreme right. They act exactly as they did during Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings. They bring up irrelevant things to derail the discussion. And they act in concert. The one thing they don't do is listen or attempt to understand. Their actions are what chase people away or lead them to throw up their hands and end the conversation.
No one wants to yelled at, insulted, threatened, or whatever else the extreme right does. They win by intimidation which is why Trump is so perfect for them. They are fighting a war. It's a war they want to have. I've seen some of the posts and they are frightening and gruesome. You, Mr. Brooks, and some of the others like you have abetted this. Rather than coming out and saying that spewing hate is wrong you've set up straw men and concluded that it's okay because the others do things to deserve it. Tell me Mr. Brooks, what did the children in Sandy Hook do that deserved murder? What did the congregants of Tree of Life do that rated an anti-Semite bursting in to cut them down? the answer is nothing.
This is not about a lonely guy or an angry guy. It's about a society and political figures that worship guns and violence.
5
Mr. Brooks claims that the source of the isolation driving Americans to kill themselves, and sometimes to kill others, is not economic, yet even he admits that lack of meaningful work is part of why so many feel disconnected and worthless. He fails to see how the hyper-capitalist system he is so fond of is the root cause of the problem.
How can one not feel disconnected from one's neighbors when living in an economy that is a zero-sum game, where a few get the exclusive college, the plum internship, the high-paying job and the privileges that come with it, while the others are relegated to low-paid, little respected service work and living paycheck to paycheck? In a society where a few are winners and everyone else loses, your neighbors are your competition? How can one not feel worthless if one fails to achieve economically in a society where one's value is judged mainly by how financially productive one is?
David, if you truly believe community is the antidote to the fear and hatred rending our society, then you must wake up to the fact that income inequality and class resentment lie beneath these problems and the solution will require some form of redistribution that could address the reasons for the fear. Keep supporting unrestrained capitalism and you will see more angry, depressed people killing themselves or lashing out violently at anyone they fear might grab their share of the shrinking pie.
4
Where have you gone Mr. Brooks? As I read your columns, I see you -piece by piece- drift further into some abstract form of denial. I can see you wringing your hands and wincing in confusion as you try to make sense of the world within which you live. I watch you retreat into simplistic and frankly naive models of a world (and the people who inhabit it) you wish existed, but does not.
I hope you read these comments. But, from the bizarre and fuzzy Op-Eds you continue to write, I fear you do not.
5
@Christopher
Brooks publicly disavowed reading reader comments many years ago. I'm not aware of any change in that since. He speaks well...listening skills, not so much.
2
I checked the Wikipedia page on suicide rates in the US.
It does not seem to support the account in Mr. Brooks' article.
Suicide rates haven't changed as much as Mr. Brooks implies, according to Wikipedia. The WIki article breaks down the age groups differently, but it doesn't seem to support Brooks' number. That said, suicides are up.
And, then, in looking for underlying causes, one must consider the increasing availability of guns. About half of all suicides involve a gun.
Beyond that, I would have appreciated a link to actual research which involves some study of individuals who commit suicide -- asking why. My guess is that the high rate in middle aged white males is related to alienation, but that the increase in teens is something else.
1
@RickP
This is only anecdotal, but last week when I was in a shopping mall, I saw a mother and her late-teenage daughter. The mother was offended by a card game with a rude name. The daughter replied, "Mom, you just don't get my generation's sense of humor. We have a dark sense of humor because we know the world is going to end someday soon." I was shocked. It was just one incident, but it meshed with what friends and coworkers with teenage/ young adult children have told me. Many of the young are very much aware that global climate change is likely to have catastrophic effects well within their lifetimes, and their elders, who hold the power and money, have no intention of changing that. There is a sense of doom among them greater than any youth I've ever seen. Add to that hopelessness the intense stress and competition they face in even the short term, trying to become one of the few to make it into the successful class, and I'm not surprised their suicide rates are climbing.
2
We can criticize the limitations of Mr. Brooks's argument, but here's the important point that stands out to me: "here’s the hard part of the war: It’s not between one group of good people and another group of bad people. The war runs down the middle of every heart." Setting aside those with truly evil intentions, I believe that most Trump supporters are not bad people; their darker impulses have been manipulated by those who would exploit their anxieties. At least, that's how I reconcile those in my family who I know to be good people, yet have chosen the wrong side of history.
1
One way to bind people together is to have automatic care for the sick and injured, so that all are part of a community that takes care of them when they need it, and all they have to worry about is the medical aspect of getting better and not the economic one (winding up better but bankrupt). In other words, universal health care, as affordable as it is in Canada or Germany.
Some people are workaholics because they do not earn enough to take economic care of their families without working so much they have no time to be with them. Others are workaholics because their employers do not promote or retain those who do not show extreme dedication to their jobs. Individuals who are workaholics for either of these reasons must have good luck or exceptional resolve to escape their treadmill, and most people are by definition not exceptional. What will cut down on the number of workaholics is higher wages for low paying jobs (a higher minimum wage) and required long vacations and overtime for all.
It is up to people to build communities, but a larger and more powerful government can assure them the resources in time and peace of mind to do so. Radical individualism is both an ideology and a condition forced on us by our unusual (for affluent countries) social and economic structures.
The war between isolation and community is a war between Republicans and Democrats. Brooks hides from this fact, and veils it from his readers; readers who want it veiled admire him.
3
I can empathize with David Brook's struggle to say something meaningful after the synagogue massacre, but as a licensed psychologist and researcher for many years, I can say that the over-riding problem is not "mass loneliness" but the availability of guns. In our country of 325 million people, there are inevitably hundreds if not several thousand men (yes, men not women usually commit such massacres) just like Bowers with serious mental health problems that go undetected and untreated. But he would have posed no threat to anyone without the availability of personal firearms.
3
If our current predicament teaches us anything it should be that two different people can look at a single phenomenon and see two completely different things. Perhaps that’s where the conversation should begin.
I don’t claim to even begin to understand the lens through which Brooks sees the world. I do know this: he makes a lot of grand statements garnered from other people’s writings and from his own romanticized view of history.
His thesis today: “The chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic…” Here he puts the cart before the horse. Our social isolation and psychological torment are a direct result of economic forces, forces that are driven in the first place by ideological forces. The “New Cold War” he speaks of is nothing more than the “Old Class War.”
Brooks bemoans the “loss of meaningful work.” Well, who provides meaningful work? Economic forces. Forces whose obsessive goal is financial profit and the expense of social profit. And perhaps Brooks is a closet Marxist because alienation is one of Marx’s main themes. He felt the relationship between man and labor was inverted; labor became alienating because it was coerced by the need to survive rather than as means for people to realize their potential.
He chastises “radical individualism”- but that is the very foundation of the conservative mind. “People know best how to run their own lives” is a quote from Brooks.
Do “weavers” run corporations? I don’t get it.
9
"Maybe it's time we begin to see this as a war." Yeah, remember the War on Poverty, an effort by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s to reduce poverty and its blight on society?
The Republican Party has worked diligently since then to not only ignore the general welfare of our country, but further their own interests in the process.
Not a coincidence that today's column by Paul Krugman centers on "bothsidesism". If everyone is to blame, then nobody has to be accountable.
But Democrats have been focused on poverty for a very long time as Republicans have waged an under the radar class war on most everyone else.
3
Agree with David about loneliness and American experience. The aged in our society (and others) are particularly lonely in most cases and each of us can reach out to include them in our lives as a way to help this problem.
Mr. Brooks, I've often read your ideas on the loss of community structures and institutions in our country, especially churches and fraternal organizations. While I don't dispute those ideas, I'm not sure that the rise of angry white men compelled to despicable acts are related to the loss of importance of these structures and institutions. We've always had these people among us; disenfranchised and socially isolated, ostracized from their families and communities for their hate-filled, extremist thinking. What's different is clear to see: Their hate, in the past confined to themselves, is now part of a larger community that has legitimized and normalized their thinking and has harnessed that rage for its own purpose. Our own President is complicit in this. Combine that with ready access to the killing machines protected under the Second Amendment, and it's not surprising, almost inevitable, to see what's happening to our country. The only surprise is that it doesn't happen every day.
1
@kaylee and combine that with the internet and social media where one can go down the rabbit hole echoing your own biases and prejudices to infinity..."proving", of course, that you are right, and that most people seem to agree with you (even if it's a tiny minority)...
David, your Party has been nurturing and feeding off White Christian Tribalism for decades. Trump is just the uncomfortable product of the strategy perfected by low-brow manipulators like Karl Rove and Lee Atwater. Now, in recent writings you're trying to play social scientist and elevate this crass political effort as the byproduct of some more fundamental defect in modern society. Earth to David: this authoritarian demagoguery has been with mankind for centuries. And, as your colleague, Paul Krugman, has just written, thanks to your political party, Americans are facing another election where hatred is literally on the ballot. So, stop with the elite over-analysis, join the Democratic Party, and help to continue to make America even greater . . . for this nation's entire family. We can all hope that the Republican Party will continue its slide into that waiting dustbin of human history.
5
I adhere to the "stick" theory: You will never get rid of all the hate and insanity in the world-- so it's better that people are left to act out with sticks than with AR-15s (and worse including nukes).
As John Lennon said, You need to make peace profitable.
1
Now, since openly admitting -- in just the last couple of weeks -- being a "materialist/nationalist," it comes as no surprise that poor David Brooks should know a great deal about protracted loneliness. Get well soon, brother.
2
I'm very sorry, but every time David Brooks comes out with a column these days, he reveals the paucity of the so called conservative mind-set these days. I'll The same holds true for the rest of his ersatz cohorts, Brett Stephens and Ross Douthat. It is a sad spectacle.
6
Sorry, Mr. Brooks, but you are trying to find a way to avoid calling a spade a spade. The white, male, establishment republicans have created this problem. Don't try to make it about "forces of division". Call it what it is: Trump and his like (whom the republicans in Congress have failed to reign in) are stirring up the pot of these lonely white (did I mention that you forgot to say "white" in your 2nd paragraph, the other consistent characteristic) men and egging them on into action. There's a reason this is worse now than it was in previous years, but, I guess you refuse to see that and refuse to call out Trump for what he is doing to these "lonely white males".
5
Mr Brooks make important points we all need to think about and act on.
I won't get into the social welfare and economic distribution policies Mr Brooks party supports that almost certainly exacerbate the dislocation.
I have many gun rights advocates friends and relatives who also ask for needed reflection on these issues.
When I point out that by orders of magnitude our nation has many more guns per capita with lower regulations than any other developed nation, or to our own 30 years ago, which correlate statistically to increasing gun deaths, they, like Mr Brooks point to social and moral decline.
I point out that certainly Europe and Japan are not immune from the same social forces but do not share our high gun death rate. I also point out that per capita regional gun deaths in the USA correspond to ownership rates.
They also ask me to reflect on our social dislocation. I tell them I hope no one close to us dies while we reflect and ignore the obvious.
Mass shootings usually combine three elements: a crazy person, easy access to guns, and offsetting events. As a psychologist, I use the term "crazy" to avoid arguments about etiology. It is unlikely that we can do to stop all attacks, but I think we might reduce the number. In our present political climate, nothing is going to be done about guns. That leaves crazy and offsetting events to work on. It might be feasible to use an empirical check list approach to identify behaviors characteristic of shooters, publicize them, and ask citizens and mental health professionals to flag individuals who hit enough marks. (Being a loner gets you a point.) Yes, that is profiling. What's really different in our times, is the willingness of Republicans to use language virtually designed to set off the crazies. That's something that political pressure could stop, but no sign is it going to happen until most current Republicans are out of office. The coming election is critical.
1
@rawebb1 I have a loved one who is about to turn 19 and who should not ever be able to buy a firearm: he has several mental health hospitalisations as a minor, he was a violent and aggressive young person who abused animals and seriously assaulted teachers and peers. He has been obsessed with guns for the 12 years I've known him, and he was disappointed to learn that he is disqualified from the military, because he "really wanted to kill people."
I attempted to alert authorities to flag him but they wouldn't take the information.
There's certainly a suicide, anxiety and depression epidemic among the young in the U.S. today-with a strong argument it's related to social media, particularly among female teenagers. However, let's stop the false equivalency on a major issue. Those spreading division and hate are almost entirely right-wingers and Republicans-a redundancy I know. A large number are not lonely or depressed, just angry old white men, and a lot of poorly educated bitter white women also. Other than angry, I'm in that male demographic, and regularly hear fellow older white men of privilege gripe about things (immigration, etc.) that have no relevancy to their lives, including financial condition, whatsoever. There's an epidemic of meanness-not related to social isolation. (No doubt many of the mass killers are socially isolated).
2
In terms of strategies, training, and a contributor to the call to arms for weavers, I highly recommend Philip Zimbardo’s Heroic Imagination Project (www.heroicimagination.org).
What the Heroic Imagination Project most needs at this point to go to scale is more money to (among other things) expand and to go into middle schools to teach its lessons (its audience so far has been mainly high school- and college-level students). @Doug Miller
Good column. As another reader pointed out I too have heard people throughout my life expressing hate for the 'other' whether that person was black, Jewish, had different sexual preferences or was hated for his/her political ideology. What I call the politics of anger.
I have been called a Goody Two Shoes by many throughout my life and take what is supposed to be an insult as a compliment. Finding the good in others is a positive social interaction activity.
Social isolation comes from not being heard or understood. No-one wants to listen except the professionals who try to help get you back into the mainstream of life. The haters know we back away from them and their emotions because of the harm they can inflict. I didn't listen. Or I did, more than a few times, and they knew I didn't get where they were coming from. This led to more frustration on their part because they thought I was an understanding soul.
Too many people, none I know or knew, went from frustration into anger into hatred and then some took the leap into violence as release from all these debilitating feelings.
They saw professional help as a weakness and then paranoia set in alienating them from their own social network and the community. But, not every loner is a time bomb for violence or a sociopath. I think of these people having no shut off valves.
David,
That you fail to include the Republicans historical and recent distortions and attacks on the poor in this country in the form of abandonment based policy including much needed services to those who need them most, is typical. Don't know why I bothered to even read your column. You still refuse to put the ownership of hate and division on our leaders who could turn this around with acts and words of unity and support for all of the people in this country. Cruel lies, hate, dog whistles and policies that favor the rich, and then blaming the "other" for their result is beyond the pale, and yet, you ignore their obvious impact on our society. Honesty? I won't read you any more. You refuse to see truth.
5
Loneliness, schmoneliness!
The explanation is a lot simpler (and more nefarious):
The shooting and the bombings were carried out by Rightwingers who have been fed a constrant stream of lies, divisiveness, and hatred spewed from Republicans, the Rightwing media, and Pres Trump for the past 10 years.
Meanwhile, putatively "reasonable" Conservative pundits like Brooks, Douthat, and Stephens have ignored what their party has been doing. Rather, they've prattled on with grandiose mumbo-jumbo theories that make "excuses" for the truth of what has caused our country to devolve into hatred.
So, save your grandiose philosophizing. The way to stop the bombing and the shootings is simply to get YOUR Republicans/Conservatives to stop spewing lies; stop demonizing Dems and Liberals as unAmerican and "evil"; stop demonizing the press; call out the hateful rhetoric coming from the Rightwing media.
Once we've returned to some level of sanity and civility, then we can talk about loneliness. But first, the Right needs to stop the hatred.
7
Mr Brooks, heed your own counsel, and read the comments that 'others' leave on your commentary. You hold each one of us responsible for this so called cold war, yet fail, once again, to thoroughly and unequivocally denounce the president and your party for supporting this vitriol. The Democrats and largely the leaders of the party, have been trying to unite instead of divide. They are calling out the president on his divisive and hate-filled language, and repeatedly asking the Republican leadership to denounce the apparent embrace of the racist ideology by your party. How dare you lump the racist, violence filled, blatantly false rhetoric of the president and the echo chamber (even if we assume ALL democrats are living there) of the left? In one, there is only room for misogyny, racism, hate, intolerance of facts and science, and in another there is only room for intolerance of that very ideology. Hate crimes in this country have risen significantly since this president came to power. It's not the left who has to think him a racist; the racists think he is racist.
4
Brooks writes:
Most of us bought into a radical individualism that, as
Tocqueville predicted, cuts each secluded self off from
other secluded selves. Most of us buy into a workaholic
ethos that leaves us with little time for community. Most of
us live in insular media and social bubbles that provide us
with Pravda-like affirmations of our own moral superiority.
Most of us hew to a code of privacy that leads us to not
know our neighbors.
I challenge Brooks to go Trick-or-Treating tomorrow night in a neighborhood somewhere outside of the glass-and-tower Starbucks zone, beyond the manicured front lawn zone. See if his theory fits by quoting this paragraph to people, asking if they agree with it. I kinda doubt it, but it's an entertaining thought.
Paul Krugman’s current column seems like a well-timed takedown of David Brooks’ flaccid equivocating.
Mr. Brooks has been engaging in “bothsidesism” and “whataboutism” for years, convincing no one with his appeals for everyone (everyone!) to be civil.
It’s just these dark times in human nature, he says. He swears it has nothing to do with the entitled whine of white privilege he’s been (politely) screeching since he picked up his pen, or crayon, or whatever an infantile mind writes with.
3
David .....please stop!
You are wrong.....
Again
I used to read your columns and appreciate the themes
NO MORE!
1
Brooks left out a couple of details:
there is always a ***white*** guy, armed with a machine gun (whatever they are called) and war-caliber bullets.
Plus accessories.
4
Always a lonely WHITE man.
2
According to recent studies, the U.S. has seen a surge in terror-related violence, with 65 attacks last year, up from six in 2006. More than two-thirds were tied to "racist, anti-Muslim, homophobic, anti-Semitic, fascist, anti-government or xenophobic motivations.”
Hmm...now what happened at the end of 2016 that might encourage these folks to commit such violence? I wonder.
3
The modern economy and the internet have spread many divisive frauds, but it has also exposed many of them. Many of the relationships people valued in the past have turned out to be more exploitative than their defenders want to believe. The challenge is not how to recover old relationships, it is defining both new and incumbent ones in a way that can withstand the level of scrutiny and freedom present in the modern world.
This makes a few excellent points about one subgroup of haters but it seems worse than naive to think that you can completely separate economics from this kind of anomie. The concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands and the commensurate diminishment of resources for the less-lucky will naturally result in a feeling of disconnection to many from society as a whole. When Brooks supports traditional Republicans who accuse half the country of being 'takers' and enormous borrowing to finance tax cuts for the 1%, when he prioritizes the greed of the donor class over the need of the rest, he's helping to create the problem he laments here. You can't say, 'let's talk about the problem of alienated shooters' and elide the subtopics of economics and guns.
2
Complaining is for the losers. That’s just a bad, useless and ineffective habit.
If you complain, you are just publically admitting that you are incompetent to solve your chronic problems and that somebody isn’t treating you nicely. Why don’t you change them? You cannot because they are stronger than you.
It means that your real problem is your weakness, so start working on yourself. Get smarter, stronger and better organized, meaning keep learning, exercising and loving your neighbors.
By the way, what if that isn’t enough?
Well, the dozens million people all over the world have found an effective solution. They left their homelands and corrupted governments behind.
Have you ever thought about THAT solution?
If you cannot change the entire country, you can always move away, unless you really want to hang out with the racists, nationalists, haters, exploiters, misogynists, and biased people.
If you refuse to move, that’s just an admission you really don’t believe in what you are saying...
If you cannot solve your problems, whose fault is it anyway?
Do you really believe that the dozens million people would move here only to experience life-long racism?
They were actually running away from it...
1
It's easy to wander into deeply metaphorical territory if the
McGuffin of one's essay is a tale about a place called Tree of
Life attacked by somebody named Bowers!
Leave it to David Brooks to turn the obvious issue of one political party (his!) fanning the flames of racism and hatred for political gain into a hand-wringing bit of soul searching about our need for connection.
While I do agree with everything in this column, it is vintage Brooks - an entire column about terrorism that uses vague generalities to avoid the elephant in the room to avoid a clear discussion of responsibility.
One party has demonized immigrants. One party has a leader that has issued barely veiled calls for the jailing, and even the assassination ("Maybe you second amendment people can do something") of his opponent, and goads his followers to threaten the press.
But by all means, let's just talk about mental health in a generalized way.
4
This is NOT the derangement of the American mind. This is the derangement of white men. Most mass killers are white men.
I ask again: what is driving white men crazy?
1
David Brooks should recant his last essay “I am a Nationalist.”
He was trying to sanitizethe deliberate use Trump made of that word when aligning himself invisibly with White Nationalist Supremacists while coyly masking the dog-whistle for the extreme right as simple patriotism.
With the term “Nazi” being short-hand for the National Socialist German Workers party, the White Nationalist Supremacists deliberately intend this connotation: “Nationalist” is code for Nazi, 21st Century Style.
Brooks knew this, but in feigning even-handedness between conservatives and liberals, he fell for the linguistic trap that Trump and the Nazi21s had set for him, giving them even more cover.
“Moi? I am just a Nationalist, like Brooks!”
Making America Hate
1
You forgot one little detail, David. They're mostly WHITE.
1
Who but a 'David Brooks' would write something like this. I knew it was coming.
1
Blah, blah, blah. We all know this lunatic acted on a theme propagated by Trump and Fox News.
3
You're right Mr. Brooks, there are two sides here. One wants to provide health care to all citizens so that perhaps they could get treatment for mental disorders. One side wants to lessen the economic imbalance so that people will have time to raise their children or care for their elderly parents. One side wants to address climate change so that more won't be dislocated. One side wants to prevent the wealthy and corporations from buying elections to get what they want from the government. One side doesn't think you should blame shadowy "globalists" for people fleeing for a better life. Which side are you on, Mr. Brooks?
4
Dear Mr. Brooks, yes, sure it would be great if we could keep dis-affected white men from feeling so isolated and alone, easy targets for radicalization. But our current administration and congress doesn't even want to fund the schools we have or consider re structuring the college loan system. In fact they are doing everything they can to make higher education more expensive. While we are at it, there is no political will or federal money to re train all the older unemployed working age people in the country for new age jobs and careers. Coal is dead, it's over and everyone knows it except the Orange one, Hillary had a plan to help those people into the new century, but no, the 40% were too scared to let the nasty woman have the white house, so they voted for an incompetent con man. OK all of that aside because it's not going to happen any time soon, BUT you know what could happen.......we could get rid of the AR15.
A whole lot cheaper than re-educating a couple of million people. Think it over. It is SO much harder to kill someone with a knife, you have to get close and, imagine this, they might fight back.
1
Yup, it's all about one lonely, hateful, racist, vile, belligerent, violent, spiteful, narcissistic man. Donald J. Trump.
5
Well, then, we must get rid of the Ripper-in-Chief to make any progress.
Mr. Brooks,
May I suggest you start each of your columns with, "Vote For Democrats" You can follow with whatever theme you choose from there. Just trying to help you with your credibility.
1
This month we've had three events, the murder of the Journalist by the absolute Monarchy of Saudi Arabia, the attempted Murder of many Democratic leaders by mail-bombs and the actual murder of Jewish worshipers in Pittsburgh by males with the usual Paranoid Personality Trait Disorder common to most recent mass shooters At the same time we have a President with that same Personality Trait disorder. This President, who calls himself a Nationalist which is code for the National Socialist Party(AKA Nazi) specifically and Fascism in general. Their credo is that the state is the absolute power and their leader an absolute Dictator who demands cheerful subservience of the people. (or else) The lonely men you site were not Psychotic. They did the crimes as if marching to their Leaders orders. And we listened to our President vilify everyone of the people the Bomber attacked and who better to gun down than Jews in a Synagogue. These glorify the principles of the Nazi Party as detailed in Mein Kampf, a copy of which we know was always on the bedside table in Trump Tower, one of the few books he read. So let's stop dancing around the obvious and call these events for what they are, the prelude of a possible Fascist Putsch with the early skirmishes carried out by his followers. The big question is, who were their accomplices, you can be sure they did not act alone.
3
There is alot of lonely people out there who don't hate Jews and kill strangers at random. The fact is that the hysteria over the so-called "invasion" of children and and poor people who are following a route that makes the Appalachianthe GOP. trail is a ploy by the duce to get more of your frightened voters to the poll to vote for the GOP. Last night I heard that these miserable people were bring leprosy ( one of the least contagious illnesses there is) and small pox ( which since the WHO claims it was eliminated in 1956, the expert epidemiologists that make up the Trump team should share this with "nature" journal). This triggered Bowers to take his aim out on Jews because the Hebrew Aid Society had the effrontery to put humanity first. Abd now you protect your president by washing all that way with a feel good piece about how it was a distinct and not a proximate cause that killed these people. Some argued that the Nazi's suffered from missing fathers. You will do anything you can to see the GOP in absolute control.
Oh cry me a river. No one cares to empathize like this when attackers are not "lonely WHITE men". We just assume they're monsters to be shot, bombed or tortured.
4
It's so exasperating. So often these killings are following by descriptions of motive, of psychological problems. The problem that's staring is in the face that we, as a nation, refuse to confront is the disease of guns. Guns everywhere; guns to kill lots of people. We are not a notably sicker society that many other modern societies with their loners and resentful losers. But only here is it so easy to move from nightmare's fantasy to active horror. WE MUST GET RID OF THE GUNS!
David--quite frankly I don't care what drove an anti-Semitic lunatic like Robert Bowers to go on a rampage, slaughtering 11 Jews whose only crime was attending Shabbat services. Why is there this compulsive need to analyze the criminal's pattern of behavior after horrific acts of violence?
Just once it would be nice if we redirected our attention to the victims and what their families are going through for a change.
What is the difference between an anti-Semite loner and an anti-Semite loner with an AR15? Eleven dead Jews.
The US fails to address mental health issues.
The US fails to address gun control issues.
We have a pathological liar for a president, one who incites violence daily.
We have a complicit GOP congress in deep hibernation, silent, no checks and balances.
Expect more violence prone loner crazies to pop up out of the woodwork.
I’m not usually a pessimist but as long as there’s one party (or one individual or the far right media) sowing seeds of discord by perpetuating FEAR (the illegals are coming to take away your jobs or rape your daughter) OR they want to take away your freedom to protect yourselves with guns OR your taxes will skyrocket if there is health insurance for all AND a robust group of believers, this will never end. Hitler used fear to stir up the masses just as the newly elected President of Brazil is currently doing. Sadly and tragically, those sickening methods appear(ed) to work well.
Fine article, but lessened by the opening sentence referring to a "pile" of bodies. Surely, David Brooks, you could have used a different word.
There have been many independent individuals and families in this country throughout its history. I'd like to think our kind will outlive the latest batch of wannabe terrorist morons and sentimental right-wing columnists. "Weavers?" Please. Go weave yourself into something and leave me out of it.
Please NYT, can’t you see this man is not worth the space he is allocated in your paper? Yesterday he was a nationalist (or was it a patriot, or did that even matter), today he is pontificating about how to interpret the stage of society we have arrived in using all sorts of arcana but not blaming the obvious culprits: Trump and the GOP.
How much longer are you going to hide behind a useless diversity of opinions and keep this sophomore on the payroll?
Go on and publish this comment if you dare. At least show that you don’t discriminate when it comes to diversity of opinions.
5
@Blunt they wouldn't publish my comment calling for Brooks to be fired..
1
@Blunt I thought he should be fired for calling the murdered 'always a pile of bodies'..Unbelievable. I am sure their relatives would love to read that in the NYT> Lets see if they print this.
2
"Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community."
Meanwhile, healthcare gets gutted, unions outlawed or otherwise emasculated, minimum wage does not get indexed properly, at will employment flourishes, non compete clauses are used for sandwich shops, etc., etc.
An you say workaholism is a "choice". And that "both sides" are to blame. Really? Do you actually believe this?
210
Was Bowers an NRA member? Did he belong to a gun club? A church? Did he register to vote? Did he have followers on his web page?
Brooks left out one more ingredient that Weavers need to succeed - a good leader.
The Rippers sure have a hell-of-a leader - POTUS
1
Mr. Brooks:
Good god, not again! Another 3 card monte column. Tocqueville? Really? Do you realize that you do not use the word Jew or Jewish or the term anti-semite at all? Another generic breakdown in the social structure? Oh well, aren't they all the same?
What to do? Go to church, you know, the right one. Pay your taxes, of course. Use better table manners? This column is an insult to the decency you call for. You are starting to sound a little lonely yourself here. Can't happen here? Take a good look in the mirror.The name is Trump, remember him? The party is the G.O.P. Really, what are you going to do? This column is doing nothing. But, then again, you knew that when you wrote it.
This is no time for pulp poetry, Mr. Brooks.
1
Perhaps we need a Centrist culture and a Centrist party. Reject the extremes, and try to find a safe place for them. Say yes to the 2nd with well regulated guidelines. Put health issues back in the control of doctors and patients. Affirm freedom of personal beliefs and religion outside of government. Make America Safe and Healthy ... but don't put MASH on white hats. Or maybe do just that.
If these mass murderers didn't have military assault rifles, they couldn't kill so many people. Still, we haven't heard a peep out of our spineless politicians about banning such weapons. The Second Amendment has always been misinterpreted, even by the Supreme Court, and has resulted in more gun deaths than some wars. The Second Amendment was aimed at arming citizen soldiers who brought their own weapons to the fray. We are well past that time.
1
Who was among the first to write about alienation and its effects in Western capitalist societies, David? Yes, you know his name. It is interesting that while you draw most of the analogies in your writing from the debate between capitalism and communism, you seem to be in a state of denial about the central nature of that conflict. The end result is that, to take this article as an example, we get references to the Cold War, to alienation, even a somewhat clunky allusion to Pravda. Your central assertion that there is a divide between sociology and psychology on the one hand and economics on the other is, as, you are certainly aware, a denial of Marxist insights. Rather than continue on this course, you might make a greater contribution to your readers' understanding if you were to let the cat out of the bag and have a more transparent discussion of the present crisis. Something as simple and evident as the relationship between a sense of despair and not having meaningful work or the ability to feed, house, educate and tend to the medical needs of your family might help.
1
Poor Mr Brooks, in spite of the rantings of his demagogue-chief he just cannot, in post after post, admit Trump’s very serous faults; especially that Trump has, over the past three years, created a climate of hatred that encourages last week’s horrors of bombs and slaughter.
1
Mr. Brooks,
Did you hesitate when you wrote - 'lonely man' - as the title of this column? The Republican Party is a white nationalist party with hints of fascism. There is no more room for so-called intellectual conservatives. This is not the party of small government, low taxes, and business. It is a sham, funded by right wing ultrawealthy donors who are willing to do anything to shield their wealth through patronage. It is shades of the 1920's German National Socialists that thought that they could control Hitler and his followers worse impulses.
At some point, you have to pull up stakes and accept that the Republicans have moved on from you. You won't be alone - plenty of other conservative intellectuals have gotten beyond denial.
3
With a Ripper-in-Chief spewing hatred at rallies to roaring crowds, how do we repair the divisions?
Whatever his mental illness is, it also afflicts millions who do not kill. Access to guns is the blindingly obvious problem, the one we must fix.
Dear David Brooks,
The same day as this column appeared, your colleague Paul Krugman wrote an excellent piece on False Equivalence. Please read it. As the reigning exponent of False Equivalence--amply demonstrated in this piece--you are part of the problem. Try being part of the solution some time; you might just like it.
4
And we have seen that most of Congress are happy to be the Quislings.
1
So Brooks, are you going to continue to tacitly accept trump and his cabal of do no gooders or are you going to stand up to them?
"Most of us bought into a radical individualism that, as Tocqueville predicted, cuts each secluded self off from other secluded selves."
American culture, sadly. We know its not necessary for prosperity, yet it is celebrated as "exceptionalism". Too bad Mr. Brooks makes an important point then slides into sentimental goo.
Mental illness is nearly impossible to get treat for unless you are rich. Despite the number of people with some form of mental illness not too many commit violent acts. Even fewer do so consist with the hate being spewed by the president of the United States and his supporters.
Mr. Brooks, this is nonsense. Everybody is lonely, to some extent, and we are all a little crazy. It’s how you handle these eternal maladies of the human condition that marks character. I know poor people who labor every day through enormous financial and medical stress but still manage to be graceful and kind and giving. They do not murder innocents. As John Gielgud said to Dudley Moore in “Arthur,” “So you’re unloved? Welcome to the world, Arthur. We are all of us unloved.” But I grant you this: having a liar and solipsistic fascist eating our nation whole hardly mollifies our distress.
1
To David Broder's quote of Hari:
“Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact,” Hari writes. “You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most.”
I would add this: And the individual starts watching Fox News. And believes it.
Until David Broder acknowledges one political party is actually encouraging this kind of behavior, his observations don't carry the heft they could
One of the best opinion pieces David has written. Start training the weavers, now!!
1
Excellent discussion, Mr. Brooks. I do not see it as a new cold war, rather, it is very much hot, fanned by flames provided by Trump and his party.
It's the guns, stupid. Your last sentence has the phrase "call to arms" in it, but the only "call to arms" in America today is the call by Trump and the NRA and Mario Rubio and Ted Cruz and the other sycophants of the gun lobby to increase the number of guns beyond the 300 million already in private hands, and give them also to schoolteachers, bus drivers, churchgoers, babysitters, ice cream vendors, and any angry teenager or marginalized adult with a few hundred bucks and a way to get to a Walmart. There are plenty of asocial or unhappy or mentally ill people in Europe and Japan, but they can't buy AR15s or Glocks as easily as they can buy a laptop computer.
A warrior in WHOSE righteous cause? Whose David? Name it. Say it. Trump's! and HIS republican parties righteous, racist cause.
Mr. Brooks uses the phrase "lonely men" living "a life of solitary disappointment" to describe mass murderers, which might evoke sympathy for those men. But in fact, according to Gary Young, writing in the Guardian, it's not so much loneliness as "a deep sense of grievance. While most people avoid association with failure, these men are attracted to it. Their inadequacy is central both to their identity and their rage. They are not the men they want or need to be; they do not have the status they feel was their birthright."
So we're looking at unleashed male rage in these shooters, and they don't deserve our pity as a first response to their heinous acts. Feeling inadequate or not having the status you feel you deserve is no excuse for murder, Mr. Brooks!
1
"Most of us admire and want to be the teacher who reaches out to the lonely boy." It's more likely that teacher would regret reaching out after the accusations begin to fly. After 30 years as a classroom teacher I can assure you that all too many people are happy to believe the worst. We learn to always have the door open and witnesses present. The compassionate personal connection one might wish for is tempered by the ugly reality of false accusations. Good luck to us all.
1
I think there's irony in this because one of the best ways for a person to form a sense of community in a huge urban area is to join a church or a synagogue or a mosque. But religion is on the wane, despite all of the "God Bless America"'s in the politicians' speeches. I think if this man had belonged to a church then he wouldn't have shot up a synagogue.
What is wrong in our country now is not much different from what has been wrong for a long time. Our historic obsession with material goods and happiness engender intense bitterness and hostility in those who lack both. Violence was always endemic, but our firearms are deadlier than ever.
No Mr. Brooks, they don't just convince themselves. They become convinced by the right wing news machine, by their 'conservative' neighbors, and by our excuse for a president.
There are a lot of lonely people out here. It's not a coincidence that those that become murders are almost exclusively from the right.
We need to address loneliness and anonymity in society, but we can never accept it as an excuse for murder. Nor can we accept incitation of violence by the right wing.
The only organizing principal of the Republican party at this point is hate--hate driven by fear. They divide us one from another in order to distract our attention while they embezzle our future. No one that supports Republicans of any stripe can, at this point, be considered a loyal American.
3
Amazing that Mr. Brooks was able to write an entire column about the combatants in some abstract war without mentioning his beloved Republican Party, a major national political entity that has decided their power and fortunes reside in tearing the American social fabric to shreds. The Republican Party supports a transactional President who does not for a moment believe he should support anyone who would not help to keep him in power. Why on this grave earth should you do anything for a person or group who would not be loyal to you, might criticize you or threaten your ascendancy? War is the wrong metaphor, Mr. Brooks. Warts on the body politic is more accurate, warts that need to be excised through the democratic process. No argument that mental health issues and the social isolation of people, especially those in their teen years, need to be a focus. But those who would gain power by taking advantage of such social ills are the scourge of the rest of us. It is not us against them, Mr, Brooks. It is them!
Guns and social media networks. We need to have a serious national conversation about the pernicious nature of both or we're doomed.
Sadly, Mr. Brooks, the problem is cultural, a feast of meaninglessness brought to us by "thinkers" such as Nietzsche, Freud, and the post-modernists who tell us we are moist robots or meat puppets building our lives on Russell's "firm foundation of unyielding despair".
Why would you expect people to treat each other well when dehumanization is the cultural dogma ?
It is interesting to note that Brooks states the “suicide rate is dropping across Europe.” Now why would that be? It wouldn’t have anything to do with those generous social policies that are reviled and vilified by the right wing in this country, would it?
In many of the happiest European countries religion is all but gone. And yet, they are happier and their suicide rate is dropping. So going back to church communities is not going to be the answer. Instead, most Europeans have a good life now, here in the real world.
If Europeans or their children get sick, they will be cared for and not become bankrupt or be forced into the indignity of putting out soup cans at gas stations to beg for money for treatment. They have decent amounts of vacation and all have the same amount of vacation no matter how much they earn. Everyone gets the same parental leave to be with their newborn child no matter their social or economic status. And you and your baby are no more likely to die in childbirth simply because you earn less money than someone else. Every job that is available comes with a salary that can be lived on with dignity. And if you have no job there is help to retrain and find you one. They will be cared for when elderly. The justice system works better. The list could go on.
As it turns out, all of these policies the GOP has brainwashed people with as being bad are actually good. Interesting that Brooks accidentally admitted that.
1
"friendless in high school and a solitary ghost as an adult"
I had times when I felt that way. Now very old, I sometimes wonder what will take me, cancer, heart failure, dementia? I have had the idea that if it's cancer I will take out somebody hateful before myself. Just a thought, after which I try to find something to do to increase funding for high schools. Americans think their kids are getting good educations in high school. The kids learn sports and social competition. Lavish schools with funds for everything except sports. It will help. Good schools pay attention to all kinds of creepy misfits like me.
“the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic.”
As long as we live in society, and we have feelings, we will always have sociological and psychological struggles. The struggle at hand is ideological, David: how are these outcasts able to acquire the weapons that allow these horrific shootings? More importantly, why are some “intellectual” columnists coming up with bogus arguments to defend the gun laws and maintain the status quo? The struggle is against intellectual hypocrisy. It’s that simple.
3
Sounds a bit like social scientific theory and or psychology. I thought you were a political columnist. In the past I looked forward to Friday night News Hour with you and Shields, not any more.
David I’m sure that your article will bring out all of the NYT readers who are experts in the field of American self-destruction. It will be enlightening I’m sure. For me I’m very confused, really sad, and just stunned about the ever steepening upward curve of violent acts by fellow Americans. I read a fair number of your corespondents comments and quite frankly it’s frightening - quick to critize one side of the political sphere or the other, very angry about things perceived to be bad by one side or the other, use of angry rhetorical stories about each other, finger pointing and shouting down the other group. Sad and scary. I try to live a good life, try and understand others, let them have space, help my friends when I can, know and understand I can fix very little, and love my family and love my country. I have no other insight into our future.
Let week, Mr. Brooks was extolling the virtues of nationalism, apparently confused over the difference between nationalism, simple patriotism and nostalgia for one's neighborhood. Like many, he seemed also to have forgotten the sad experience of nationalism run rampant in Europe prior to WWII and how the siren call of nationalistic propaganda brought nations to their ruin. It is shocking and disgraceful that someone like Brooks could try to attribute this latest massacre in Pittsburg to a lonely man or a country of lonely people: "Killing sprees are just one manifestation of the fact that millions of Americans find themselves isolated and alone." This killing spree and the recent spate of bombs must be laid squarely on the nationalistic, divisive and hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump and those who provide him with aid and comfort through their financial support. The political climate Trump has created in this country gives license to haters, but is being hedged in weasel words by many in the commentariat. We should all join with Tom Steyer in calling for the immediate impeachment of Trump for incitement to violence against the American people.
1
Brooks describes a country with social problems that are manifesting themselves in in white Nationalism, a belief system that many Republicans are all too easily seduced by.
People don’t “buy into” workaholism. The Republican Party has deliberately created an economy that requires endless labor merely to afford decent shelter, education, and health care, so that a tiny elite can hoard obscene wealth.
Abandoning antitrust laws, crushing unions, shredding the safety net, importing illegal slave labor — these are all distinctly Republican policies enacted only in America that have had the completely predictable result of destroying our society.
1
Thank you for your continued and thoughtful analysis of the social ills in our country.
The most important lonely man in the world right now occupies the Oval Office - a man who, by most accounts of those who know him personally, is bereft of the capacity for genuine friendship.
Do the math.
You forgot to mention the other thing always found at these scenes, an AK-47. If lonely men didn’t have easy access to assault weapons they couldn’t harm as many people.
You also forgot to mention their connections to radicalizing media sources like Fox News and Breitbart that feed on their sense of alienation and anger.
1
Yes, yes, yes. Finally, someone is getting down to the roots of our turmoil. As a psychiatrist and the CEO of an organization dedicated to the prevention of suicide, it is very clear this virtually silent epidemic of suicide indicates there is a profound social, psychological and spiritual deficit in our culture. So much of the political and ideological torment is because we are fearful and not connecting with each other. Our organization, Natalie's LIght, believes the answer is reaching out, making eye to eye contact and asking, "how can I help?" In a wonderful little book by Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir, she concludes with the following: "To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind." The simple, sometimes silent gesture of just being present for others, will save a life.
1
Thank you for this article. It made me think of the morning I spent in an inspiring public school in Queen just last week. The school (MELS) serves students grades 6-12; it is one of the most diverse and integrated schools in the city. It is an unscreened, district school and follows the EL Education/Expeditionary Learning model of teaching and learning. It graduates nearly every student and gets nearly every student into college. What took my breath away at this school -- and what leaders attribute to its success (in addition to exceptional teachers) -- is its focus on community. Every single day of every single year, every single student begins the school day in Crew (your family at school). About 8 students are in Crew together with one teacher (Crew advisor) for a period of two years; then you get a new Crew. Crew builds connection, belonging, trust, respect, relationships across difference -- the building blocks of a vibrant social community. It is a force of connection, and part of the solution, as David Brooks writes. Here is an effective strategy, or structure that could be adopted broadly. It is worth noting that this is a school that is committed to preparing students to lead lives of civic engagement. There are wonderful public schools like MELS doing this good work -- preparing young people who are not solely focused on individual achievement, but on civic contribution -- in communities across the country. They give me hope.
I am a public school teacher.
Every day, the teenagers with whom I work speak clearly about the alienation and loss of hope they feel about our society. They know that fair and equal opportunity will not likely be theirs, as large corporations outsource jobs and force part-time work on their people, and they know that the cost of college is reachable only at the price of a huge debt.
Teenagers know that our politics are disconnected from the problems that matter: poverty, equal justice, climate change, economic opportunity for everyone, good schools, health care for families that live on a shoestring even if they don't qualify for Medicaid, the cost of housing.
Teenagers know that many adults say one thing about how to behave toward others, but act differently. They have sensitive ears and eyes for hypocrisy and they detect it nearly everywhere. Even if many adolescents are a bit too sensitive to it, they have a point: our society's leaders frequently say through their actions that there is no standard of right and wrong, no expectation of decency, no demand for a civic conscience.
Of course people feel cut off. Our young people feel especially isolated.
Here in Colorado we have a teenage suicide epidemic. Why? It's complex, but one cause could well be a loss of hope in the future.
Wake up, America.
1
I wonder how much of this relates to the fracturing of the family. Recently I was reading an article about the absolute poverty of single mothers and I was thinking ‘Why does anyone put themselves in that position?’
Maybe it relates to that American ethos of extreme independence, brought into the family? Other countries may have less marriage than the US but they have more co-habitation. I read once (and unfortunately I can’t site the source) that 40% of American babies are born to single (not married or co-habitating) mothers whereas only 20% in Canada. That’s a huge difference, especially given that social services in Canada would seem to make it easier.
Even in Canada though I see the effects of our atomized lives — people working longer hours just to survive, seeing family less, having smaller and less connected families.
There’s an economic aspect to this — if people could afford to work shorter hours we’d be further ahead. But there’s a worship of independence, strength, self-actualization and even feistiness that might make long term connection harder. Women work not just for money but in case of divorce and women’s careers may be part of what makes connecting harder. I know in my family there was no grandma baking in the kitchen; siblings were too exhausted to maintain long term traditions. We’re in a brave new world of work for self-actualization and security but you can’t add half the population working an extra 40 (or 60) hours a week and lose nothing.
1
And we are presented with the perfect unifying issue - climate change. At least Brooks could be specific on that issue -
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/opinion/trump-republican-truth-climate-change.html
I want to recommend that people read a book called "Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life." (Bellah.) This books promotes, as nearly as I can recall, the fostering of connections in society, leading to a healthier social environment.
1
It involves a sense of collective purpose or mission. If the idea is to have good and reasonable medical care for all then the mission is to accomplish this. If the idea is that one side is a communist and wants a handout and the other is hardworking and deserves to keep all of their money so the "takers" cannot get it then we have an entirely different mission. We have decided that the governments mission is to protect certain groups and punish the others. The very wealthy have assured their position by buying the government and the masses by electing Trump and others to attack the "enemies".
Mr. Brooks, I think you’re right that lonely men and disintegrating social tissues may be at the root of the problem—but that’s like talking idly about not having enough fire-retardant insulation in the walls while watching the house burn down. The emergency at hand is the fire itself, fueled by the oxygen of hate-filled rhetoric from our leadership and the kindling material of too many weapons designed specifically to kill as many human beings as possible in the shortest time. To not address these causes first is to not acknowledge the fire, the pain it is causing, and how dangerous it is at this moment.
1
Mr. Brooks keeps coming back to the same theme in his columns and opinions about the problems facing the nation, namely the loss of a sense of community. He dismisses the economic factors altogether. I would disagree and argue that the loss of economic security and the stresses associated with this loss are as much a factor in the state of our nation.
Provide the people with a healthy safety net. Protect their health through universal healthcare. Protect their jobs through minimizing employment at will and a strong unemployment insurance system. Invest in education instead of the military. And reduce the proliferation of guns through sane policies of gun ownership. And watch stress reduced and community restored.
7
I'm amazed and disheartened that the majority of the comments are so negative. I thought Brooks's article was excellent and moving. What is more, the article felt like a call to action for those of us who are both rippers and weavers. Who of us can honestly claim we don't have tendencies to rip and weave, depending on our current mood? We're all guilty. But we can try to weave more, and we can educate others to weave, not rip. At its core, Brooks's article reminds me of the Tale of Two Wolves. Which one will we feed?
There have been mass murders in the US long before Donald Trump became President. Those mass murders are increasing and they are not being instigated by people from other countries. More recently, they are committed by Americans on Americans. Trump is an American and his political success is enabled, in good measure, by our isolation from each other. His continued success will surely be fueled by our continued national discord which is fueled by our fear of each other.
Yet David Brooks opinion piece here is less about Trumps machinations than our very real societal challenges. What Brooks is examining is the growth of a pervasive personal isolation that is undermining our cohesion as a society. Increasing suicide rates and opioid addiction are valid indicators of a society in deep distress.
We need to come together. No, we don’t have to agree. But we will have to listen to each other.
1
While I certainly applaud your diagnosis of the situation, this seems to be a recurring theme and a reiteration of things you’ve said before. There are instances where you have provides examples of individuals or communities of ‘weavers’ but why not use your platform to make that call to arms every chance you get?
I believe that this problem cannot be resolved by simple half measures and individual actions. This requires a radical re-imagining of the American ethos. The individualism you link to de Tocqueville is in many ways a cancer in the soul of our country. A person cannot live in isolation. We must somehow give people a vision of a world where connection, community, and personal sovereignty work together for the benefit of all. We need to think again about the common Good.
But we are also psychologically incapable (or at least not very good) at doing this for such a large and diverse community as the United States currently is. While we clearly have large issues to deal with, that require large government or collective action, I think this would be best served by enmeshing people in healthy small scale communities where they can learn and grow. I imagine a neo-Jeffersonian ideal where people live and work in small communities whether they are in cities or rural communities. Technology and remote working would support our ability to create a new world where we build strong connections to those in our immediate vicinity, or to create these communities.
Sorry, David, but radical individualism, workaholic ethos, insular media, social bubbles and codes of privacy are not characteristics of any of the family, friends and coworkers with whom I interact on a daily basis. If these are the types of people with whom you associate perhaps you should consider traveling in different circles. In the meantime, you should curb your enthusiasm for spreading the blame around and focus your attention on the purveyors of hate and division.
3
"The suicide epidemic is a manifestation. The suicide rate is dropping across Europe. But it has risen by 30 percent in the United States so far this century. The suicide rate for Americans between 10 and 17 rose by more than 70 percent between 2006 and 2016 — surely one of the most shocking trends in America today."
There's really clear evidence that this is because of the availability of lethal means in America not the prevalence of isolation as you imply.
2
David Brooks has rightly pointed out the
malaise sweeping American socieity. It
goes way back to early 1970s when Vietnam
war created gulf between the young and
the older elite, destroyed the trust and the
money corroded the politics alienting not so
rich unable to donate to the politicians.
Newt Gingrich saw the division and stoked
it further to gain power. Continous barrage
of hatred particulalry from the right has
created a divisive society with many people
are lost for meanings in their lives. They,
unfortunately, sometime decide to end their
life but also take out other peoples'. Sadly,
we don't have the leaders who can unite
but many to exacerbate the division and
exploit for their gain.
1
Nothing new about this "cold war". You make it sound like this "struggle" will go on unabated and or unresolved for a significant amount of time. I want to finish the civil war once and for all David as soon as possible.
There have always been lonely, enraged and deranged people in American society. The difference today is that these people have access to guns, and lots of them. Republicans are unwilling to address this issue.
5
And tacit support from our President.
I'm really disappointed in David Brooks--this is the first article he's written since the shooting (that I could find) and instead of admitting that Trump is mostly responsible for the hateful climate in the country, he's trying to avoid it by blaming depression and mental health. Lunatics are real, but that is a totally different issue. We may all struggle with being both rippers and weavers, but even if we secretly hate the other guy, we don't all get up in front of the whole world and preach that it's okay to hate, like Trump does. I mean, okay, I'm half ripper and half weaver--but isn't it my responsibility as a human being to try to nurture the weaver in me and suppress the ripper, and aren't most of us mostly successful? Trump does just the opposite, spewing hatred and blame on others.
8
A point of view worth considering. But mass killings are not a problem of loneliness, mental health, or hate, or even testosterone. These are present in every country, at roughly the same scale as the US. But the frequency of mass killings in our country is unique among the prosperous nations of the world. The problem here is the gun culture, the availability and frankly the worship of weapons that are used in these attacks.
4
People with mental health issues are being scapegoated for both the failure of our government to put common sense limits on assault-style weapons and for the President's often divisive and inciting rhetoric. The leadership of our country needs to take ownership for their perpetuation of these horrific acts of violence and hate.
7
Thanks for that, David. One of your better columns in a while.
The sort of figure you write about here has been with us for a while. Ever seen TAXI DRIVER? Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, and Robert De Niro (ironically, one of alleged MAGA bomber Cesar Sayoc's targets) tapped into something central to the character of the numerous alienated, lost, and lonely individuals in society in the 20th century when they created Travis Bickle, as well as giving us a disturbing harbinger of what was to come in the 21st.
1
Lonely men may well be the tinder, but right wing talk radio, Fox News, and Donald Trump provide the flame.
14
More pap from Mr. Brooks. [Remember last week's column extolling the virtues of "nationalism"?]
Admit it, David. You missed the "Never Trump" train and you've been trying to justify your views and indeed yourself ever since.
You can howl and yowl about "loneliness", "breakdowns in society", "mental illness", etc. and I agree, they all exist and they are all problems. But when you try to assign reasons for what happened last Saturday, two are pretty obvious:
1) The Republican party's tolerance, and indeed encouragement, for language which functions as dog whistles for white supremacists.
2) The lack of reasonable gun laws in the US.
It's simply ridiculous not to own up to this.
9
"I keep coming back to this topic because the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic."
David, you are truly tone deaf. More of the "it's all of us, not just one side" nonsense. Have you considered the consequences of economic failure in this country or economic underachieving? Does poverty lead to esteem issues, isolation, self-loathing? This piece is a sad spin on current reality.
5
I have personally witnessed or heard racist and anti-Jewish speech from people who are not solitary, isolated or lonely. Weak character and toxic morality exist at all levels of income and social status. It is unfortunate too many of our fellow citizens are alone. Because the president and the Republicans traffic in hate, racism, voter suppression, fear of the media and critical thinking, they have unleashed the worst instincts of too many people.
234
What a contrast between this and Paul Krugman's piece this morning! Mr. Krugman rightly laments and condemns bothsidesism. Mr. Brooks, as always, tries to be all things to all people, avoiding pointing fingers at anyone. Once again, Mr. Brooks says... absolutely nothing!
12
Hear, hear..how to turn things around?
It's a bit ridiculous that Brooks is blaming the massacre on an unfortunate, but common social problem, loneliness, instead of on anti-Semitism, encouragment by vile immoral leadership, and free availabilty of guns.
7
There is something that Mr. Brooks left out of his “lonely man” narrative: Someone sold the lonely man a gun.
6
We have always had mentally deranged individuals, perhaps feeling desenfranchised and trying to take revenge on what they believe is an injustice, or looking for fame. What we have not seen until some two years ago, is a president who not only tries to rule by dividing us, but whose verbosity in lies and insults openly incites to violence when addressing his base. It began with his 'racist' lie that Obama was not born in the USA, and now by declaring the press as being 'the enemy of the people'. Trump is a fraudster and an awful disgrace befallen on us...by our huge mistake in electing a known liar and crook, a demagogue and sexual predator, seemingly proud of his deeds. Trump's worst nasty trick, which shall outlast him, is the loss of trust in democratic institutions, and in each other.
4
Maybe David Brooks should face the fact that the "American Nationalism" he embraced in his last column has a lot in common with the "White Nationalism", "Christian Nationalism," and Neo-Naziism that animates many of these fanatical killers.
3
Another excellent essay by Brooks.
I'm starting to recognize more and more that the problem to our politics has very little to do with politics, and much to do with interpersonal connections and community, and the mere ability to see one another as brothers and sisters.
4
While our president rages against Democrats, journalists, immigrants, Latinos, the poor, the disabled, the young, the old, women.
I imagine that women suffer from loneliness and isolation just as often as men. And, as a mental health professional, I know that rates of depression are higher for women than for men. So: Where are all the female mass murderers and terrorists? No, David, it's not loneliness that drives men to murder scores of strangers. It's a combination of testosterone and the feelings of rage that grow out of intense white male entitlement when others who aren't white and male simply seek to exist in public spaces. Combine that with the hateful, inciting rhetoric spewed by our "leaders" and you'll find these sort of acts of terrorism continuing to happen. And they will be perpetrated almost exclusively by white male terrorists.
365
@Sally
Spot on.....one add would be the availability of Guns to us testosterone ragers. If all we had were pool noodles to hit each other with.....we'd still use them....but the results would be far different.
33
@Sally Excellent comment, excellent logic applied to David's slippery column.
26
@Sally you make an interesting and useful point. I don't know what the statistics are on such outrages, but it seems as if they are pretty much always -- always -- men. And as David says, I think, they always seem to have something like the same profile -- marginalized from "ordinary" social life and very, very angry; nursing an internal narrative that some group or force is responsible for their condition and wanting get back at those in spectacular, "they'll be sorry when" self-immolating fashion. If as you say -- and I have no reason to doubt this -- women experience depression at least as often as men, then is it a lack of externally-focused resentment, that keeps them also from picking up a gun? I wonder if any work has been done on this -- I will have to find out. But thank you for your observation.
8
David, good lord! What planet are you living on this morning? Yes, our society, like virtually every other, always produces a certain number of misfits who are victims of social isolation. But in your current column, you have blatantly avoided citing the reason why social isolation and resulting acts of violence are running rampant today. Who created the extremist ideologies which you admit are explanations of those acts? Not once in this column do you name Donald Trump, the grand master of it all, and his weak-willed Republican fellow travelers. I suspect that you know as well as I that the current spike in tribalism, ultra-nationalism, and me-against-them-ism, comes from the political climate created by the Trump philosophy which promotes distrust and division and hatred of those who are not of “my tribe.” Yes, as you contend, there are always guys like the current Pittsburgh anti-Semite. But what was it that prompted his violent action against a congregation of decent people who happen to be Jewish? In your failure to make the obvious connection between Trump-inspired divisiveness and that horrible event on Saturday, I have to conclude that you’re in a state of serious denial.
6
As usual, Mr. Brooks succumbs to analysis-paralysis and avoids the clear differences between the 3 types of monsters: serial killers, mass killers, and political killers. We usually conflate the latter two when, while seemingly similar, have important differences. The mass killers have no political agenda. At most like Adam Lanza, the Newtown killer, they admire Anders Breivik solely for the sheer number he murdered--77--and hope to match that. We still don't know Stephen Paddock's motivation in Las Vegas. From Columbine to Aurora to Parkland we see young men, even boys, somehow "getting even".
But the political mass killers are different. Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, Eric Rudolph, Breivik, Dylann Roof, Robert Bowers and Cesar Sayoc had literally convinced themselves that their actions and "sacrifice" were needed to save "White society". They all exist in a poisonous universe that we ridiculously tolerate under the rubric of "free speech", when we do NOT tolerate, indeed work to root out similar poison labeled "radical Islam" (and I see the Orlando nightclub shooter as no more representative of Islam than these bozos are of Christianity).
Yet the roots of their hate, while always there, have been "nourished" by the making of a wacky, delusion, right-wing propaganda network, Fox, "mainstream". And Fox fed the further right kooks, like Breitbart, which mainstreamed Steve Bannon. So it's no wonder a neo-Nazi branch is flourishing, and they believe and tout KILLING!
171
@Dadof2
Bravo!
3
@Dadof2 One cannot believe that Brooks "succumbs" to analysis-paralysis. After so many tragically wrong conclusions about his own political party, it's evident that he retreats there deliberately to deliver something that appears well reasoned and buttressed by someone else's thinking, while starting with a feeble thesis and risking no attempts at insights.
8
The lonely man, stirred by his only friends, InfoWars and FoxNews, is stirred into a frenzy and is compelled to act out. How different our country would be if hate speech wasn't generated by the highest office in the country.
7
The "lonely man," like poverty, is a by-product of civilization -- one which is getting worse as civilization advances. E.g. Muhammed Atta, the leader of the 9-11 terrorists.
1
The horrid Trump is definitely emboldening these lunatics on the fringe. They observe that a human train-wreck like Trump can bubble up to the top job in the government and this gives them their ghastly sanction.
3
we need to replace some of our radical individualism with social collectivism to create a more compassionate and connected society.
3
The Republicans love to arm these lonely men. More weapons for these lonely men. That's their motto. offering thoughts and prayers. That's mean and cheap. Trump made it even easier for them. One of his first gruesome acts.
3
To explain is a way of giving oneself comfort.
David Brooks is an incorrigible explainer. But he shapes (and selects) the "facts" to fit his case.
Individualism, loneliness, lack of community -- oh yeah, that's what make killers of the innocent other.
Look at our government predators, our bought so-called representatives, and look at what they do to our society and what they foment.
4
It occurs to me that Trump is a very lonely man.
4
Particularly since Hope Hicks dumped him. That's when the cracks started to show.
It's the subtext of every rally since: He's the Robin Thicke to her Paula Patton.
Brooks cites Johann Hari to the effect that "loneliness causes you to shut down socially... you start...to take offense where none was intended, and...to be afraid of the very thing you need most."
And then says "That sounds like a pretty good summary of American politics in 2018."
Absolute balderdash. When Trump calls Mexicans rapists, criminals, and drug dealers, the offense is intended. When the Trump administration steals children away from immigrant families, the offense is intended, and what the families then fear is not something they need.
When thousands of Trump supporters chant "lock her up" at his rallies, or laugh and cheer as Trump mocks relatively weak people, they are not "shutting down socially." They're finding social connection in a hateful mob.
Brooks simply cannot admit that he's been wrong for years about the civic ills of the US. He claims over and over that our national problem is our refusal to listen to reasonable centrists such as him. Circa 2018, those claims come across as at once deeply narcissistic and totally irrelevant to reality.
7
Well there is some hope. Mr. Brooks, who has written often about American exceptionalism, now sees that it is not the exceptionalism he hoped for. It’s leading the world in suicides, homicides, gun deaths, dropping middle age life expectancy, and general loneliness.
But the rippers of the fabric are not to be blamed according to political persuasion.
Really?
The party that made us yearn for that “shining city on a hill” ,that extolled rugged individualism over community, that made it glamorous to be filthy rich while teachers have to work two jobs or even get food stamps, that party was the more divisive. I don’t need to tell you which political party got us into this sad state of affairs.
Almost every time I go to a state or national park here in Texas, I find a beautiful building or bungalow or something built by the CCC in response to the depths of the Great Depression. And I reflect on what enduring structures we can build out of necessity, divorced from malice or greed.
4
Others have pointed out that these mass murderers also share easy access to assault weapons. I'd like to add that many also share a few other things in common: 1. race; 2. gender; 3. a sense of aggrieved entitlement; and 4. the mistaken notion that some other group (African Americans, women, gays, Muslims, Jews) is the cause of their problems.
3
so this is the new david brooks..... scared to death of the results of republican propaganda but still unable to say it directly. think about this.... we have most likely not had a fairly elected republican president since GHW. W 2000 appointed by a politicized supreme court. 2004 lots of evidence of election fraud in ohio and voting machines owned by a republican partisan. 2016 hello putin and voter suppression laws written by republicans. there is no modern counterpoint on the left to these antics..... and they continue to be a threat with the midterms. the only solution is for people to vote in numbers that make it too hard to steal.
4
"Most of us are part of the problem we complain about."
Exactly. And the only way for each of us to begin to understand the truth of that statement is to tell compelling, evocative stories where no one is guiltless. Sadly, though, those are also the most challenging and, so, the least likely to gain an audience or even to gain the support of those who should know better.
2
I agree with you. Do we dare look in the mirror? There we will see our face full of fear. And there we’ll see our face to be the same face of the refugee, the opiate addict, the suicide, the lonely and isolated of humanity. If we have the courage to be vulnerable, we have the opportunity to see ourselves in each other.
Sure, Mr. Brooks.
First you're a nationalist -- I wonder if you're reconsidering that label now?
Now you want to approach 3 specific acts of hatred in the span of a few days in our country as being about lonely men.
How can you possibly write this column and not mention the primary force in whipping up hatred and division in our country?
It's as if you don't want to see, what's right in front of you.
A prime example of acolytes being inflamed by Trump and Fox News' hateful rhetoric was the man who went to the pizza parlor in DC in December 2016 to free the captive children being held by Hillary Clinton in the basement of the restaurant.
Turns out there was no basement in the restaurant, and Hillary was not running a pornographic operation out of said restaurant.
I am sick and tired of Republicans pretending that this hateful rhetoric from the Republican president, from Republican pundits and from Republican followers of the president isn't bringing us to a very dangerous place in our country.
These lonely people you describe are being triggered by vile and horrid language, from the most powerful man in the world, Mr. Brooks.
By the way, this has happened before. You might want to look at Germany in the 1930s to see another example of a group of people being whipped into a frenzy, which lead to terrible acts of inhumanity.
Perhaps next you can write a column about the power of propaganda, Mr. Brooks.
732
@me Brooks is running away from the real problem by talking about isolation and loneliness as the source of the violence plaguing our country. The true cause is the racism that exists in the hearts of many Americans. A hatred of people who are non white, or Jewish, or are from Latin America. Yes, and this hatred is just like that believed by the Nazis.
And the spark for the resulting attacks is staring Brooks right in the face, the words of our president who has supported white supremacists all along. These haters have always been out there in America. They were just waiting for a leader to give their feelings justification. And they found that leader in Trump. And worst of all Americans are now armed to the teeth with 300 million guns floating around the society and no feasible way to keep them out of the hands of the mentally unstable. So week after week Brooks tries to find some intellectual justification for ignoring the real reason America is so divided and how people on the right have taken to very violent means to try and intimidate those they disagree with. Maybe if someday someone close to him is impacted by the hatred being spewed by the right will he finally admit he is wrong. Until then he goes back to his ivory tower to find another way to avoid the obvious. And that is, that Brooks is part of the problem.
46
@V
My first thought after reading Brooks' column was also about the Nationalist column he wrote last week.
To pivot to the bowling league trope after the massacre in Pittsburgh is disingenuous at best.
19
@USS Johnston I have heard many, many, many more antisemitic comments from leftwing types and POC, including African Americans and Latinos than I have ever heard from ordinary, working class white Americans. Many more.
4
Rampant ageism, particularly in the workplace, means many people at or close to retirement age are tossed aside casually and cruelly as not relevant or with it enough to keep up with our rapidly changing culture. As one of those people, I went from being comfortably upper middle class to nearly destitute. It's a hard fall when the ladder is pulled away and not many people seem to care when they find you down and broken. Many see an opportunity to exploit you further. Faith and the love of friends have helped me keep it together and to accept my new circumstances. But if you are going to go about diagnosing cultural ills, please don't leave out the cruelty and selfishness of the millennial generation. I hope this changes before they grown old.
Late stage capitalism and a white suprematist in charge. Let’s speak the truth here. These recent tragic events were the work of white far right terrorists .Time to name names. If it was a Muslim or a person of color who entered that synagogue we would not be discussing alienation we would be discussing extremist ideology.
4
When liberal progressive Democrats express hatred toward “those evil mindless Trumpists” —> Trump wins!
I am a lifelong Democrat. Born into a family of Pittsburgh trade unionists back during the Truman administration. I watched John Kennedy deliver his inaugural address on a black & white TV screen in 1960 and voted for George McGovern in 1972.
Yet I acknowledge and accept every single American voter who is an ardent follower of Donald Trump as my countryman. And so is Donald Prince-of-Lies Trump himself. He is my countryman.
It can be no other way.
Attempting to out-hate the hateful and corrupt never, ever works.
We are better than that.
America is better than that.
We will win at the ballot box, under the rule of law.
We will remove the misguided pathological liar from his would-be throne and repair the damage that he and his twisted compatriots have wrought. We will work together with our political foes to restore our democracy.
“With malice toward none With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
— Abraham Lincoln, 1865
2
“Poverty is a form of violence, the worst kind” - Gandhi
If you want to know what’s going wrong just look at the graph in figure 2 in this article on inequality by the Economic Policy Institute.
https://goo.gl/w2btYa
From 1945 to 1972 GNP went up 100% and so did the median wage.
(the wages of each group, across the board, doubled - poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, upper class and rich).
Since 1972 GNP has gone up another 150% but the median wage has remained flat.
That’s 45 years of hard work pushing up that GNP 150% and yet no raise, no improvement in standard of living.
Family income went up only by pushing more family members out into the work force or working more hours.
From 1945 to 1972 we had demand side economics.
From 1972 to now we’ve had supply side economics.
The only person who supported demand side economics in 2016 was Bernie Sanders. People like Mr. Brooks called him a radical.
You want to return to a non-hate society go back to demand side economics.
If you agree with Gandhi’s quote the violence in our society comes from the top 1% who keep insisting on supply side economics. That appears to include Mr. Brooks.
1
‘Nearly twice as many people die each year of these two maladies as were killed in the entire Vietnam War’.... the last time I checked, an estimated 1.3 million died during the Vietnam war. Does Brooks only consider Americans when he thinks ‘people’?
3
What they all have in common is automatic weapons. AR 15, automatic hand guns. Can't kill too many people with a revolver or shot gun, or 5 clip 30-30. So let's get real. There will always be unhinged, bitter believers in loony theories, and the criminally depressed. We don't need to allow them to be armed like a Marine. If you can't politically outlaw them make everyone who owns automatic weapons to buy insurance when the buy automatic gun and show proof of insurance when buy ammunition. Plus $200,000 to anyone killed by an automatic weapon from owner or insurance carriers. You watch once insurance is involved real political force on safety and safe owners.
159
@dave
The insurance is a great idea and the first time I've seen it.
9
My girlfriend casually mentioned this idea to me not long ago--and I think it's brilliant. Let gun owners have their guns. Similar to insuring cars, you'll have to have insurance. People will watch what they do with their guns and be more careful. And if someone's family is the victim of gun violence, they will all least get something for their pain and suffering. The wonderful irony is we can all watch the invisible hand of the market crush republican gun arguments.
13
How does using the image and language of war to discuss any human problem help to solve it?
1
Mass killings.....Guns. Domestic Murder.......Guns. Suicide.....Guns.
Guns are the root.
Simplify the strategy, don't confuse it, don't wax on "Cold Wars".
People want to create a false narrative to explain "why" America has more murders & suicide, per capita, per person, total, pick your filter, than Japan. But Guns are the culprit. People might not like the answer, but they sure do look silly arguing around it.
This is a small bore into the mental, emotional and physical world of DT. Mental illness, delusions, emotional emptiness and illusions of greatness. A very lonely man driven by those 26% of core supporters who share his feelings of victimhood . There is a fine line between being a victim or survivor. The Republican Party has used a core strategy of divide and conquer for years . Paul Ryan “makers and takers” ...... “winners and losers” . DT is the icing on the cake. The fact that Republicans have chosen to go down the rabbit hole into trump world shows how fungible truth and power have become in the ether of the internet where people live in their world of fake news and manipulated acceptance.
I don't agree at all that the violence we are now seeing is the product of deranged loners. To be sure, the perpetrators were deranged loners, but their derangement was fed by the deranged nonsense coming from Trump, other Republicans, and right-wing media outlets about the "caravan" and other immigrants from Central America. These are poor, vulnerable people, many of them children, fleeing violence in their homelands. They are not dangerous invaders who must be stopped by sending thousands of troops to the border. The profound disconnect between the reality of who these refugees are and the Republicans' lurid portrayal of them is the kind of thinking that made the Holocaust possible. The SS was able to murder innocent men, women, and children in gas chambers and crematoria because its members had been taught that the victims, despite their innocent appearance, were the deadly enemies of the German people. That is where Trumpism leads if it is not stopped, and that is why this upcoming election is the most important of my lifetime.
Re-establishing or creating new "thick" bonds of community that take in the most alienated among us seems a long battle, against big odds.
I wish it weren't so easy to see how we could turn to more efficient and more immediate "force[s] of connection" like monitoring, re-education, or more direct social/economic reward and punishment...the sort thing that the Chinese seem to be fine tuning these days. We already have a president who tweets about "countries, which seem to have almost no control over their population"... something he seems to think either normal or desirable.
Resisting the "forces of division" that can make way for dystopian "forces of connection" needs to happen in order to fight the longer war of rediscovering or reinventing American community.
The next battle is Nov. 6th.
Thanks David, It's useful to be reminded of where our individual and shared well-being actually resides; in the efforts we make to routinely interact with each other.
1
As the author of "Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age," I appreciate DB's shout out to the wise man from Normandy -- still the greatest witness of American politics of all time (with Emerson and Whitman completing the podium).
I am also writing from one of the great weaving capitals of Europe, Lyon FRANCE -- a city that has its act together in many ways that most American cities are far from achieving any time soon.
So, yes, here's to the weavers!
It's not too late to get started on repairing America's social fabric. America needs to rediscover the meaning and value of trans-generational solidarity, once the mainstay of the community spirit that Tocqueville so admired.
1
Mr. Brooks, to call the murdered individuals 'a pile of bodies' is the most insensitive, arrogant, cruel and hurtful comment I have read in the New York Times, perhaps ever.
3
David Brooks identifies the perplexity human life and our drifting American society. I won’t add to the list - but I’m not blaming anyone or anything for our predicament.
So I’ll talk about the Jews I have been observing for my 50 years. As a non-Jew, I didn’t pay close attention when I was younger. However, when my first child was born, he ended up in a Jewish pre-school for three years. After visiting secular ones hawking everything, we happened to walk into a nearby temple pre-school nearby and I knew instantly that it felt right. All my nominally Christian children spent three years there. Why?
Well, Jews have retained their traditions, which in turn, confers identity. This matters! To an outsider, the odd clothes and Saturday walks to synagogue appear inconvenient but they serve a group purpose. Jews seem to lead dignified lives of quiet purpose. They don’t proselytize nor are they bent on conquest unlike Christians and Muslims. Many marry out but somehow 2500 years of shared history are not lost in the transaction. Want to marry a Jew? You will end up converting to Judaism. This is a striking fact.
I am not optimistic about the future of my country. We have tried to be everything to everyone and ended up with a big-tent economy. A great one, but still. But the Jews carry on, minorities everywhere they live, but solidly moored, and able to surf the vicisitudes of an ever-uncertain life.
1
Although Mr. Brooks makes an astute observation about the negative forces impacting Americans, he overlooks the root causes and factors that distinguish the United States from other advanced countries which have far less violence and fewer mass murders. The US stands alone among advanced countries in failing to pay a living wage, as opposed to subsistence “serf” level wages. We also lack the paid parental leave, low cost medical care, lost cost child care, minimum vacation time, and low cost education that are routine in every other advanced country. As such, the majority of American families struggle to make enough money to pay for the basics of life, and suffer from a toxic combination of stress, anger, fatigue, and lack of time for family, community and self.
258
Only rich people should have children? In a country where the few hold most of the wealth? Really? How about addressing the real problem of corporate greed, and the policies and government officials who endorse those views?
33
@From Where I Sit
This belief is what fosters isolationism and extremism. We have a value system that favors making wealth vs fostering care. Nurses, teachers, home health aids, baby sitters, care givers are all at the low end of the pay scale. Less skills! You might say. But are there? The skills of nurturing and patience are indeed skills — necessary and rare. Yet not valued. At least in terms of payments.
31
Are these factors root causes? Or are they spurious correlations?
I'm very much interested in 'evidence-based' policy making, but that means we need to be careful about our claims regarding 'causal' factors vs. correlating factors.
3
1. If you read Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by JD Vance, you see lots of family connection in the American heartland. Unfortunately, abusive, violent, alcohol and drug-fueled connection.
2. The ethno-nationalist political fringe is quite good at creating connection for "losers," so emphasizing connection without respecting basic human values can lead to Nazi cults rather than civic society.
3
There is a causal effect of loneliness and missing the signs of a serious mental illness. Mr. Bowers obviously suffers from some delusional form of disease of mental illness by his bizarre rants, paranoia, and the atrocities he committed.
Let's call it for what it is-mental illness accentuated by the thoughts of Donald Trump. Did President Trump cause this massacre–of course not, but did his rhetoric and paranoia put thoughts into a very disturbed mind? Possibly.
The problem with isolation and mental illness is that you may need a family member, friend, community to guide you into treatment when you are escalating into delusions. This is a disease, not evil, not caused by a lonely life. Since David mentioned suicide and drug addiction, let’s not forget that stigma and lack of health insurance coverage prevents people from getting help.
Unfortunately, we don’t know if anyone ever reached out to Mr. Bowers to get him mental health treatment. In the meantime, Americans are left at the mercy of gun owners in this country with the hopes that those behind the trigger are mentally sound. Not too comforting to know that we have a population of paranoid people out there accumulating an arsenal of weapons to defend themselves against innocent Americans.
“Weavers” can’t protect a society from “Rippers” when the GOP refuses common sense gun laws and lack of expansion of mental health treatment. Let’s call it for what it is, insane, cruel, politics.
1
As usual, an interesting, thoughtful, independent-minded piece, taking a different angle from much of the current commentary. Thus, I'm going to quickly close this Comments section before the deluge of liberal readers figure out a way to attack this as Republican talking points. Bye.
1
I live in Mexico half of the year. It is not a political statement, I just like summer weather. But I know that country very well. Mexico has problems, some very serious problems, but those in this country who love to denigrate it seem blind to our own difficulties. Other than that daily life in Mexico is much more relaxed, friendly, stress-free, social and less hurried than typical American life. People call out to others on the street and stop to chat. They don't look upon their fellows with suspicion and fear. Outside of cartel hot spots violent crime is quite uncommon, which means the majority of the country. If you think that I am claiming that life in Mexico is generally more pleasant than life in the United States, you are correct.
3
The chief struggle of today is not sociological and psychological, it is spiritual. Our current increase in social problems correlates directly with the decline in church attendance in the last decade, which is considerable. Without a relationship with God, people truly are alone. As the book of Micah states " He has shown all you people what is good..And what does the Lord require of you?...To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."
Mr. Brooks, passing the Affordable Care Act, using government to try to improve healthcare for Americans generally, is politics working in the function of a weaver. Cutting taxes, mostly on the wealthy, while increasing deficits, is the work of a ripper.
Your persistent attempts to find equivalency between the political poles in America has become nauseating, and undermine whatever insight your columns have.
3
Mr. Brooks' statement that "Nearly twice as many people die each year of [suicide and drug addiction] as were killed in the entire Vietnam War" is potentially misleading. It's true if you only count American military deaths in Vietnam (just shy of 60,000). But if you count all *people* killed (civilian as well as military; Vietnamese as well as American; etc) in that conflict, you're looking at estimates from 1.5 million to as high as 3.5 million killed -- mainly Vietnamese, who after all are people too. Nor does the comparison hold up if you compare the number of people killed globally by suicide (828,000 in 2015) and drug addiction (450,000 in 2015) to total Vietnam War deaths (1.5 to 3.5 million).
I point this out not to downplay the seriousness of our country's current struggles with suicide and opiates; plainly they are public health crises, and it's criminal that our country invests so little in preventing and treating them. But armed conflicts are also public health crises -- big ones -- which having not had a war on our soil in 150 years we Americans tend to forget. (Let's hope the current administration doesn't bring us one!) Downplaying the immense destruction our country helped visit upon the people of South East Asia does not help.
The american economic system delivers huge benefits to the hustlers , workaholics and ruthless competitors. It’s always been like that and it created a dynamic , monetarily wealthy society hollow at its core. It’s harsh and cutthroat and regards people who can’t or won’t play the game as losers who get what they deserve.
Egalitarian social democracy, prevalent in many European countries delivers a far better quality of life for a large part of a society.
So in effect it is the economy stupid, all over again.
3
Speaking of government, the rippers currently own the White House, control the Congress, and have a strangle hold on the Supreme Court.
Maybe next week the weavers will win a chance nudge the rippers a bit out of the way.
1
There are dog whistles, bird whistles, a problem with over prescriptions drugs, falsifying information on employment applications, etc, etc. And, there's economics.
I watched a documentary about big pharma. I think our healthcare system needs reform. According to NPR, a woman was charged 48,329.00 American dollars for an allergy test.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/10/29/660330047/bill-of-the-month-a-48-329-allergy-test-is-a-lot-of-scratch
https://savethemichaels.org/michaels-story/
Add to this analysis the strange dynamic of an “Elected” Leader
who is a clearly diagnosable Sociopathic Personality Disorder who is allowe, by his Status, to manifest all his active symptomatology, in his Sociopathology, to publically and daily,
spread his said pathology over the Public airwaves....uninhibited
by Censure. Meanwhile, we, the People, are under the said “Leadership” of this ubiquitous Mouth. At 81, I cherish my minimal right to quietly Vote again and Always.
1
Excellent...you got to the core problem today. Thank you
Mr. Brooks, you quote Johann Hari, “You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers."
I think Hari is writing about Donal J Trump.
Mr Brooks, can you please stop trying to be the neutral man in the middle. loneliness does not create murderous rage. It does not lead sane men and women to commit mass murders. That is the most simplistic explanation for what is going on in this god forsaken country. Unstable, bigoted men and women are being encouraged by the dangerous rhetoric of the personality disordered man in the Oval Office and by the radicalization of the Republican Party. It is lunacy to not hold the president responsible for what we have witnessed over the past week. And by extension mr McConnell and his repulsive cronies.
1
This column reminds me of an article I read years ago after the fall of East Germany and the reunification of the country.
A middle aged East German women reported that while she welcomed the change, a rapidly developing fear was taking root, manifesting itself in her feelings of disconnection, isolation and the sense of being truly alone.
As the Republican plan of “starving the beast” materializes (introducing huge deficits to spur vast entitlement cuts) I fear that these episodes of isolation that Mr Brooks accurately describes will become more frequent. And the by-product of the reduction in government programs (especially healthcare where bankruptcy or your life are the frequent choices for many people) will lead to even more frequent and more heinous episodes like the Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh.
I am a political independent, but I wonder if conservatives really understand that government policies or the lack of them can greatly add pressure to these social ills. They can also help relieve them as the ACA, while far from perfect, has in many cases.
This notion that less government spending ALWAYS leads to a better society may have serious consequences on the mental health of the many people in this country who live every day on the economic and mental edge of survival.
1
David has an argument to make here, as far as it goes.
And not only David has made it--we have Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone", and, after all , Hillary did say it takes a village. So the argument is not limited to any one political philosophy.
But I think this argument doesn't go far enough in locating the roots of all this anomie. To me, it's the logical result when the overriding ethos of a society is a Calvinist, Social Darwinist, profit-uber-alles libertarianism that promotes a savage individualism, a toxic "I me mine".
When a society becomes so competitive, and has no mechanisms to soften the falls of those who don't do as well in the competition (i.e., universal health care, reasonable minimum wage), it seems no great leap to imagine those not doing as well suffering massive blows to self-esteem, self-medicating their physical and psychological pain, resenting those that are "winning", also resenting those that are competing with them from "below", and lashing out at the "unfairness of it all".
If we don't want people to live lives of quiet desperation, we really should work on making the majority of lives a little less desperate. Unfortunately, in the US today, one political party has completely dismissed that whole idea in the service of augmenting its resources, in the mistaken hope that greater resources will prevent it from a paranoia-driven but quite possible backlash.
Although even those resources won't save them in a 4-degree rise world.
3
One reason suicide is epidemic is the actual act has become easier with the epidemic of guns.
1
For pity's sake, Brooks!
"Most of us bought into a radical individualism that, as Tocqueville predicted, cuts each secluded self off from other secluded selves. Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community. Most of us live in insular media and social bubbles that provide us with Pravda-like affirmations of our own moral superiority. Most of us hew to a code of privacy that leads us to not know our neighbors."
I don't think so. Being an individual does not mean cutting yourself off from other individuals. If we are workaholics, it is mostly because we're paid too little in our regular jobs to cover the bills.
These are manifestations of the individualism and go-it-alone ethos taught us, lo these many, many years, by none other than David Brooks and his merry band of pirates who have have changed the outward manifestation of what America is.
Inwardly, we are the same old boys and old girls who went to school together and remain together along with the numerous outsiders who appear at the edge of such groupings.
That politicians have seen opportunity among the least successful of us has not changed who we are and what we will do when genuine crises arise.
1
The show "The Purge", about one night of government sanctioned violence is unique in that it condones violence rather than show violence as evil. This is a first for mainstream viewing. It is also very disturbing. It is a sign of the times. Even in fiction, portraying violence this way is abhorrent. Still, it is symptom.
1
What about guns? In every case, every case, of gun violence the bottom line is if there was no gun the crime wouldn’t happen; 11 people would still be alive in Pittsburg. Approximately 16,000 people (annually)who use guns as a means to suicide would be alive. I find myself fearful and depressed because I know that nowadays there’s a gun in every pocket, there’s no safety from that, none.
1
Thoughtful analysis. What happens when we think about suicide as a social phenomenon rather than an individual’s problem? How about mental illness as a social disease? Rugged individualism affects all of us in the community—but so does our response to the Pittsburgh shooter as a loner. The Times’ lead story reflects our separation: He “was a volatile nobody desperate to become somebody.”
David,
Not to worry, in America, these lost individuals have every right to own an assault weapon. In fact, their rights usurp too many others to the right to life.
2
1. "I keep coming back to this topic because the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic."
2. "The suicide epidemic is a manifestation. The suicide rate is dropping across Europe. But it has risen by 30 percent in the United States so far this century."
Again Mr. Brooks's bitter adherence to a divided view of what truly supports community, writing one op-ed after another stenting to prove by anecdotes of Americans struggling to preserve or build up their communities despite economic and sociologic adversity.
Brooks's and the 'moderate conservative's' drum-beat: man's psyche, the character is something separate from economic forces, but how to explain the above suicide statistic? Are Europeans massively more community oriented than we? No isolating personal electronics, history of divisive tribalism? Hah.
Post war European leaders saw that long-term societal/community stability along with liberal values could only arise by all having some measure of personal security through a guaranteed social safety net. With such large, complex societies today, we must collectively dedicate our nation to forming this foundation as a basis for community. Blinders off, Mr. Brooks!
4
Thanks, David Brooks. Your best article yet, and I thought your article preceding your nationalist article was your best. Keep it up. This is the topic of our generation, America.
We have two serious problems on our hands as a culture, going forward. The largest problems we face as Americans are twofold.
1. We don't know how many millions of Bowers, Dylan Roofs, Elliot Rogers, Steven Paddocks and Adam Lanzas are out there. It is safe to say, using statistical extrapolation, that there are millions of them, at minimum, in a nation of 325 million people.
2. We don't know how many guns are in circulation in the USA. More importantly, we don't know how many military assault rifles are in circulation. NOT EVEN the FBI, DHS, ATF, or any independent agency knows the true number. This should scare every American to the bone.
Estimates vary widely, but they indicate that there are between 275-350 million firearms in circulation. Estimates are that there are between 3-25 million AR15 and Browning/Sig military assault rifles in circulation. I spent the morning doing this research on Google. That is my source.
So far, we have only been exposed to the "lone-wolf-psychopath", who has an arsenal in his bedroom or basement, and has a psychotic "break", and takes his hatred and repressed violence into the public sphere, via machine gun.
My fear is how many of these sociopath-psychopaths, instead of being totally isolated, are connected and organized...........
One idea I would add to your discussion of isolation and depression is that we can begin by helping our children grow up in a caring world where they feel valued.I have observed that babies and young children search the faces around them- if you give them a big smile they will smile back.I am talking about smiling at children in stores, sitting in shopping carts waiting at check out counters.This may seem small in the total of the lives they must live but it does take a village to raise a child and we should all adore and support children.
1
David, conservative minds would be better served by you if instead of trying to promote squishy cultural pluralism you used this column space to deliver hard facts about why immigration is actually a net positive for this country: demographic crunch.
"Illegal" immigrants contribute $2bn PER YEAR to the Social Security Trust, that they will never collect. If those folks are deported en masse, how will R's make up that shortfall? Likely by cutting benefits and not by raising the FICO contribution cap.
Notwithstanding the financial support immigrants provide to our elders, there is also the sheer fact that we need more people in order to make sure our elderly parents' diapers get changed.
Then there is the fact that immigrants are far more entrepreneurial than native-borns, regardless of what country we're talking about.
I'm sure Mr. Brooks' brain is far sharper and filled with erudition than my own, I am sure he can find even more facts to support the assertion that immigration is a hard net positive for the USA.
Yep, and guys like the one who cause such unspeakable death and pain at the synagogue in Pittsburgh would be much less dangerous if they did not have such easy access to weapons that can kill many people in an instant. Again: why is it the the number of mass murders is so incredibly lower in Europe than in the US? The difference is gun laws. Do something about guns, because, honestly, it is much easier than fixing the human condition of desperation and exclusion from the über-capitalistic society of the USA that leaves such damaged souls behind. Make it harder of people to get guns, and you will have fewer gun massacres! It is that simple. Indeed, it is irresponsible for American politicians to not have already approved such laws.
1
A problem I see is that 'weavers' are being exploited by the air waves they trust. That they're addicted to. Cable news (narrow, hyper-focused, breathless), via their lucrative format, stir tribalism and disgust far more than it needs. And in place of real trouble-shooting. I hope weavers can bring themselves to observe this, and stop watching.
From afar, I am so saddened to see the poisonous discourse, from top down. This political, divisive, hyperpartisan madness is so destructive. I just don't foresee any return to civility, chaos is cash and cash is king.
Follow the money! It's always about the money.
Suicides are down in Europe but up in America, and David Brooks doesn’t understand the reason? Poor David Brooks is like a doctor confronted with an epidemic but mystified as to its cause when, in fact, it is right in front of his nose. In Europe, workers get paid vacations, a living wage, health care, child care, and free higher education. For Republicans, the death (of others) is better than the cure. For half a century, Republicans have opposed every effort to build a nation that values community and caring over greed and guns. Brooks has mostly cheered these efforts. The results are predicatable. Many of the losers in this economic survival of the fittest choose to end their lives, some with pills and some in a homicidal rage. Want more evidence of Republican indifference to suffering? David says, “Nearly twice as many people die each year of these two maladies as were killed in the entire Vietnam War.” Millions of Vietnamese were killed in the war. They, too, were people.
1
"The chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic." The Women's March and the March For Our Lives and sexually abused women telling their traumatic stories to their Senators are these examples of a Social Movement in the making or just ideological screams, mobs? Are the participants weavers or rippers? And those who gather together at the vigils; and those who advocate armed guards at places where Americans gather to worship, to learn, and to shop; who are the rippers and who are the weavers? Penelope, in the Odyssey, "... set up a great loom in our royal halls and began to weave, and the weaving fine spun, and the yarns endless..." Her two fold purpose for her weaving was to put off her suitors' marriage proposals and to make a death shroud for Laertes. And so in America when we have a "Ripper-in-Chief" who claims to be POTUS, the office historically known to be occupied by the "Weaver-in- Chief", so what are the weavers weaving; a death shroud, just being active to fend off the unwanted, or a flag proclaiming liberty and justice for all?
Brooks identifies a significant problem, but misses much of the cause.
Isolation, humiliation, shame, loneliness and simmering anger are the precursors to violence.
These qualities arise in boys who are lost or beaten down in a society that privileges competition over cooperation. Trump is the ugly poster boy of a culture that separates us into winners and losers. Some of this is explicit and some implicit, but the effect is the same.
It starts in schools and families, where boys become broken if they are not sufficiently strong and aggressive. Not all, of course, turn into bombers, but the phenomenon is destructive to too many.
Charter schools punish boys. Corporal punishment is horrifying, but still tolerated. Not enough is done to embrace and love all of our children.
Our adult society will heal when and if our treatment of boys is more enlightened and loving.
This is our work.
.
Philosophically speaking: just as we have a model for governance at the national level (a Constitution and three branches governing with checks and balances), we need a better model of individual human identity. Consider a model of three continuums: being = body + soul, awareness = mind + heart, connection = self (psychology) + others (sociology). By including the dimension of connection, this model is an improvement over previous models and can help individuals better know who they are.
Politically speaking: “There is no greater folly than wisdom spun too fine.” -B Franklin. The left has gone too far and there needs to be a political correction to the center-right.
1
(your) Perception is (your) reality. We are all living in Plato's cave, looking at shadows cast through the little openings, if these openings are filled with images/messages of impending doom (Fox news, the Don) the resident of the cave might freak out.
David, will you just become a Democrat already? You always loathe the destruction of community but fail to mention the Republican emphasis on competition (capitalism) and destruction of the social safety net and deregulation etc. that brought that on. Democrats want to restore that basic sense of community and humanity.
"There’s always a pile of bodies at these massacre sites. Whether it’s at a synagogue, church, nightclub or school, there’s always an assault weapon, or a bunch of them. There’s always the survivors clutching each other, weeping in little clumps outside. And there’s always one other thing.
A lonely man."
A man? Yes. A "lonely" man? Possibly. But above all, and least ambiguously an angry man. An angry man in a society where there's a major media industry devoted to keeping him ginned up and angry; a gun industry devoted to keeping him armed; and a president and a political party that rely on his anger to stay in power. If David Brooks is looking for a sociological explanation for violent hate crimes, that's where he should start.
1
Epidemiologists always look for conditions that foster germs and vectors that spread it when diagnosing and combating potentially deadly epidemics. In medieval times, it turned out to be bacterium infected fleas piggy backing on rats that were hitchhiking on a boats disembarking to ports all over Europe and Asia that bit unsuspecting victims, killingestimated 75 and 200 million people.
Today, minds disturbed by the germ of soulless, isolating, unregulated capitalism possess bodies that purchase and use combat weapons from a ubiquitous selection of unregulated guns designed to kill scads of helpless, innocent, precious human beings in quick succession.
1
We need a president who doesn't condone/encourage racism and bigotry and who doesn't appeal to the worst in his followers. We need members of the president's party to have a spine and live the values they claim to hold. We need about half of us not to enable the president. From what I can tell, the most tangible thing I can do is to vote for Democrats. Beyond that, ...?
https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/prevention_programs
There's community awareness education to see signs of alienation in classmates, workmates, and family members. We can always take steps to notice and care about those manifesting symptoms of mental distress. We must take away shame of mental health issues, the brain is both a delicate and resilient organ and can malfunction just like any other physiological ailment. It can recover with treatment and support just like any other recovery process. Depression can cause alienation habits, and yes, loneliness can cause depression. Both ways the solution is the same. Insightful column. One helpful read recommend:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413760-the-upward-spiral
1
Another excellent, well-thought-through column from Mr. Brooks; it brings to mind a prescient sociological study from many years ago, “The Pursuit of Loneliness” by Philip Slater, foreshadowing the subterranean trajectory of our chosen American way of living.....which is now no longer in the shadows.
Wow! I think Brooks’ thoughts hit the mark and am surprised by the responses. Of course I fully agree that having firearms so available gives the isolated person a means to express their rage. My responsive thoughts ran more to how each of us can reach out to those isolated, maybe mentally ill persons.
Thanks, David.
Another point of view: "All of these hate crimes seem clearly linked to the climate of paranoia and racism deliberately fostered by Donald Trump and his allies in Congress and the media."
There are plenty of weavers out there. They have always been during the most troubling times in history. There were weavers during the Holocaust; weavers during other epidemics of racial and ethnic genocide; weavers in the battle against slavery.
They try to fill the gaps of failing social and political systems; they engender change that is often so long-term that they themselves don't live to see it.
In America, right now, the national political system is run by a demagogic, narcissistic leader and party and it is failing the weavers--those who reach out and those in real need.
65
Isn’t it time to turn our attention to two major culprits: chemically polluted environment and loss of work for millions of people through greedy globalization. I speak to Amazon in India, the Philippines and people in my country, out of jobs, are committing suicide or overdosing on opiates.
BROOKS: "I keep coming back to this topic because the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic."
Now I know why I keep criticizing David - because he's wrong. Most of life is about "economics": the things we own, the foods we can eat, the health we can or can't have, the home we can or can't live in. Was the struggle against the Nazi's sociological? No, it was "economic": keeping your property, keeping your life. Was the struggle in communist countries psychological? Sure, a part - but we all know the West won by beating the Soviets at the standard of living game.
"The chief struggle of the day" is the result of simple relative standards of living between America and rising countries like India and China, with automation added on top. They are as smart as us, they work as hard as us, and there are 7 times as many of them (in just China and India) than us. If we're all connected globally now - and we are - America can't (and shouldn't) maintain a standard of living 10, 20 or 100 times higher. So they will get richer relative to us and we will get poorer relatively. It's unavoidable, and it is appropriate. Many who aren't told the truth will feel bad, and the GOP will play many of us for fools by pretending that other forces are primary (immigration, etc.).
Brooks supports this dishonesty with every single column. My faith is only maintained by the fact that the Comments are always so much more intelligent and perceptive.
1
As always another insightful article!
Your piece is chilling, David, for the war you speak of is being waged, and it's not just psychological and sociological. At this moment, battlements are being erected here in the United States. The southern border region will be peppered with army bases prepared to fight an "invader" charging at us from 1,000 miles away.
As a white man, I am promised connection. I am safe. No one will deport me; no one has even threatened it. My Latina wife (a naturalized citizen, for what that's worth) feel no such surety. My 7 biracial grandkids were all born here, but I understand the Republicans are determined to make their citizenship precarious.
When Dylann Roof killed 9 black Christians at worship, right wing web sites did, in fact, call him a "warrior." Much like ISIS, which claims responsibility for any individual killer willing to salute their god as they massacre innocents, the sites you discuss in your article, in effect, do the same, lionizing mass murderers in the name of their fascist, white Christian campaign.
Trump has taken sides and has enlisted our military in their cause. Your article, David, is chilling both for what it reveals and for what is misses.
122
The one thing that works to curb antisocial behavior is being shamed by somebody you care about. Fanaticism is not a mental health issue. It is a simple fact that on the right there is nobody willing to standup and say "shame on you" for thinking hateful, damaging things about religious, ethnic, or gender-related minorities. In fact, part of the reason Trump is so popular is that many, many people --all on the right-- get a little thrill when he spews out some insult that they don't have the guts to say in public --but wish they did.
Brooks and all of the right-wing apologists are as responsible for events like this massacre as any single group in society. Yet, he calls for us to change our behavior?
Shame on you David Brooks.
1
Mr. Brooks, bloody terrorist massacres are far from a "cold war." You make good points about social isolation and despair in America, but your abstractions about "rippers" and "weavers" has limited value without being specific. Who is attacking, who is dividing, who is trampling on rights and decency, who is grabbing power and money at every turn? Leaders must be held to account, and Trump and the Republican party and unhinged conservative propaganda organs are refusing to take responsibility for the fearful, hateful climate they are fostering. Without being specific in your language, you are passively permitting this to continue. Loving our neighbor as ourselves is indeed the answer, and is the opposite of war.
52
David, I always sympathize with your anguish over the shambles we are in. But you and all of us who like to discuss and listen will have to dig deeper. We are the elite, we try to look at the global picture in conversations everywhere from classrooms to worship services. Voting is our immediate priority next week. But you know quite well it 's not psychology vs. policy. It' all of the above. Economics affects psychology. Fairness is a lofty goal that takes work, and Trump has no interest in putting in the time. The courts and the free press have been keeping us together since Jan. 2017, replacing stones in our foundation as he topples them. He is usually a step ahead. Imagine yourself running for office, how hard it would be to put your message into a speech to a weary electorate looking for security and fair health care. After taking back as much as we can next week, you and the rest of us will have to dig much deeper for our response.
You know what else is always found at massacre sites? A bizarre interpretation of the 2nd amendment that seems to think The US has absolutely no means to regulate firearms. You forgot that part. You know what else you forgot? Any mention of a president who incites his base to violence. You forgot that too.
3
Mr. Brooks, I implore you to cease with the relentless armchair psychology. It's almost predictable that whatever the issue is, you'll reduce it to the problem of "isolation and loneliness" in America.
Here's what your opener would have been had you dispensed with your "deep thinking" and instead written with some reason and clarity about what really happened.
"This week a violent anti-Semite went on a rampage in Pittsburgh and murdered 11 Jewish people in a synagogue. This was a direct result of our easy accessibility of guns, coupled with the ongoing validation of the most extreme forms of white nationalism offered by our vitriolic, demagogic, dog-whistling president, and the complicity of the Republican party that bows down before him."
Now that I've given you your opener, see if you can write a reasonable column.
1
Hate eventually infects everyone. Having it preached from our leaders is toxic to all. Poor or rich, religious or not, lonely or loved, we’re all subject to fear. There is no freedom when we have to fear others and worst of all, are asked to do so by our leaders.
1
Oh please. There have always been crazy old guys, hermits, the people who scream at kids from their porches as the kids go home from school. People who blame the rest of the world for their loneliness, and have no desire to contribute to the well-being of others. You can't therapize or drug that inclination out of them. Just try to keep them from trying to destroy the rest of us.
1
When I read about the displaced residents of Bay County whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Michael complaining about the inadequacies of the FEMA response, I checked to see if Bay County supported Trump and his band of"needy people are losers" accomplices.
About 70%, like all the FL Panhandle.
Mo Brooks says if you live a righteous life you wouldn't need much Medical care. Now the residents of Panama City are learning that the principle of social assistance programs and insurance is, you pay a little in and if you're lucky, you get nothing back.
D. Brooks column makes me a little ashamed of my response.
Am I the only one a little tired of Brooks speaking for "most of us?"
Maybe a little less psychobabble and a little harder look at the economic and racial stratifications and polariziations in the Age of Trump are in order.
4
"There’s always one guy, who fell through the cracks of society, who lived a life of solitary disappointment and who one day decided to try to make a blood-drenched leap from insignificance to infamy."
David, you missed the point : It's the economy
When billions of desperate poor people in Mexico, China, Bangladesh, Kenya want your job, it is easier and easier for Americans with no special abilities to fall through the cracks
That wasn't the case 50 years ago
Taverns are the countermeasure against "lone strangers."
2
If we know that loneliness or social estrangement is a growing problem in America, we also know that a wide range of mental illnesses are related to this isolation – both as causes and effects.
We know that deeply depressed, isolated men often lack the courage to confront their illness, because it is too painful.
These men may self-medicate with alcohol or drugs, or they may convince themselves that someone else is causing their deep sadness.
If these sad American men are white, they are fertile ground for bigotry. They come to hate blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and Jews.
We know that such disturbed men take refuge in an anonymous internet, which confirms their worst fears. These men often amass lethal weapons to defend against the people who are planning to attack.
One of the non-delegable duties of our elected officials is to know that sick, unhappy men with weapons are out there and are very dangerous to our society.
President Donald Trump tells outrageous lies about non-existent threats and crises. He uses the word “Nationalist” to describe himself as being different than or beyond being a conservative. He uses “Globalist” to describe a high-profile American Jew, George Soros, who gives generously to liberal causes and candidates.
Donald Trump knew the Squirrel Hill shooter was out there, waiting to be needed. Trump’s irresponsibility is directly responsible for the tragedy at the Tree of Life synagogue.
Oh, yes, what could possibly be the cause of the isolation and division in our society?!? What could possible drive angry white men to kill innocent people? Certainly it can’t be the GOP mantra of might makes right, false individualism, magical thinking, hyper-masculinity, and with-me-or-against me? It couldn’t have anything to do with the right’s incessant conspiracy-mongering and blatant disregard for facts?
No, it couldn’t be those things, just like climate change is a Chinese hoax, taxes cuts for the 1% are good for the middle class, poor people deserve to be poor, Globalists want to destroy America, the wealthiest nation in the history of the world doesn’t have enough money for infrastructure, healthcare, or education, and Christ preached the prosperity gospel and hated immigrants.
And the answer definitely isn’t the liberal mantra of “the measure of a civilization is how it treats its weakest member.”
Keep searching for that answer, Dave, you’ll figure it out eventually.
3
Like too many Americans, Mr. Brooks seems to think that history began yesterday. I assume he was born in the last century. Hasn’t he heard about the Holocaust and the gulag? Were those Nazis who slaughtered my grandmother’s family also lonely, disaffected or in need of mentoring? Did Putin’s former organization, the KGB, consist of young men sobbing at night into their pillows? And why did the Kurds and the Iraqi army shed their blood to defeat ISIS when all the militants needed was a hug? Ideological violence is as old as humanity and has to be fought by political and legal means. The unfortunate gun policies in the US mean that antisemites and racists don’t need to form underground militias to obtain deadly weapone in order to carry out their violence, but otherwise they are no different from Nazis, radicals, Islamists or anybody else infected by an extreme ideology. As a Jew, I am furious at the murderer of my people and all I want at this point is the full force of the law to be brought against him and everybody who shares his despicable views. I don’t forgive and I don’t forget. Lonely? Disaffected? I don’t care.
1
I’m an old guy. Nobody of any importance. I live in a dusty old farmhouse with three dogs and two cats. But, believe it or not, I have a plan that might ease some of the hatred that plagues us. It doesn’t involve armed guards or more police. Doesn’t even cost anything.
When you’re out if the house, in a store or office building, or walking down a sidewalk —> look people in the eye. Say, “Good morning.”
Don’t be in so much of a hurry. Nod at people. Smile.
Strike up a conversation. Ask folks how they’re doing.
Listen to what they have to say. If someone seems to be in trouble, offer to help.
Trust everyone, until they give you some solid reason not to.
Keep a couple of jokes in your pocket to tell the people who are waiting in line with you.
Respect people. Don’t fear them.
I’ve never met anyone who has too many friends.
The guy taking his turn at the cash register, the young guy buying a box of Pampers and gallon of milk is going through all of his pockets looking for another dollar and eight cents.
Hand him a dollar and a dime.
He’ll give you a perplexed look, so tell him, “Hey buddy. This is America. We’re all in this together.”
Then smile.
He’ll get it. And he’ll wait for you in the parking lot to apologize for being too shocked in the store to remember to say thank you.
The way to stop hatred is to send this simple message to everyone you meet:
“I can’t win if you’re losing. You are not alone. This is America. We’re all in this together.”
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Thank you Tom W.
Imagine our beautiful society if all of us did as you suggest. I try to be friendly but admit I could do better.
I have learned that a smile can not only lift up your own face but the other person's face too and possibly infuse that person with a moment of joy.
@Tom W
9
@Tom W
Thank you Tom. Absolutely, we are all in this together and we need to remind ourselves and all our contacts of that every day. I wintered in a gated retirement community for 8 years: all prosperous, all retired, all mostly healthy. And now most of them are for trump and against blacks, immigrants, latinos etc. When I was there I was appalled that they were all afraid to go to a great farmer's market in the next town just because there were African Americans living in that town. Back in New England for the whole year now for five years and believe me, snow and ice are preferable to short sighted prejudice neighbors. Bring on winter. and may the sunshine thaw their hearts and make them love all their neighbors.
22
@Tom W I hope I run into you sometime,not for the dollar but for the jokes and a good chat.
18
Horse Feathers! There are plenty of senior citizens up here in Maine who are socially isolated, yet they don’t buy guns or other weapons and go around killing people.
However, I do take your point. Our society is one which enables this kind of isolation, makes it possible to be an outsider. What to do about it is the question.
1
We're divided because there is profit in keeping it so. Does anyone think that FoxNews, Rush, Hannity, want Americans to make up and get along? They'd be out of their cushy, lucrative jobs. No, they will keep fanning the flames, as long as they can get way with it.
5
The high suicide rate in the US is related to Gun ownership. States with Gun control have low suicide rates. Europe does not have this problem.
2
David Brooks,
Robert Bowers would be perfectly happy to have killed us both as well last Shabbat.
It isn't just loaners who are dangerous anti-Semites. Sometimes groups of them congregate and get someone who has a perverse form of charisma elected and then...well, you've seen what can happen.
We are both lucky our parents were born in North America and not in Europe. Others of us weren't so lucky. We were also lucky that we were not in Etz Chaim Synagogue in Pittsburgh on the morning of Cheshvan 18, 5779. Eleven of us were not that lucky.
This --aside from Brooks's habitual attempt to hold Republicans blameless-- is exactly backwards; this particular loner was harmless as long as he was a loner. It was only when he joined the FOX/Limbaugh/Smith/Trunp community that he became "informed", supported and emboldened enough to act.
2
The issue today is about the divisive leadership of our country. The trigger was, clearly, pulled by that lonely little man in Pittsburgh, or last year in Las Vegas. The bombs were mailed by some fool living a van in Florida,.. I cannot argue those facts. But the voices of outrage that gave them license; their "tipping point" so to speak, comes from the bully pulpit of Mr. Donald Trump and his echo chamber of right wing extremist broadcast organizations. This is no longer about free speech. It is about conspiracy and murder. Trump may not be pulling the trigger, but he is loading the gun. I have no doubt of that.
I think you are doing a service, with the path you've taken. Please keep it up. I don't think it's a popular view; but it is a very constructive view. It's a very difficult view to promote. It is also extremely positive that a Conservative has chosen to emphasize positivism and community. Thanks for that.
We’ve become a weak society. Our forebearers muscled through the Great Depression then stopped fascism in its tracks. They built a Transcontinental Railroad then used it to settle the West. The mined coal and manned assembly lines for pennies and they did it on a sixth grade education. But now, everyone is entitled to college, a trophy for participating, a good job with weeks of vacation plus every holiday off and much, much more. All without a word of criticism being offered.
1
"Division - connection" Another philosophical treatise from the man with the moral development of a young child. Black - white, dichotomous thinking.
I wish there weren’t such a distrust of the weavers in the workplace - a belief from the solitary conniver that we weave for our own good rather then the good of us all. Or that weaving equals weak... weak willed and weak minded. There are many weavers Mr Brooks - but there are few organization that value us (even in Higher Education).
Again, the Elliot Stabler in me says that there was some trauma in Donald Trump's childhood. That 'tearing' the columnist mentioned had to have happened in Donald at some point in time. Yeah, I know there's all that blah blah about not diagnosing someone you haven't examined, but this man is a special case. Someone who literally thinks that he has to cover everything with gold is covering up something, and it ain't good. When his actions betray a dark heart, the gold is just that much more glaring.
You missed the boat, David. This may be in part about lonely disaffected people in part, but its mostly about the Pandora's box of hate that Trump and the Republican's have opened and continue to shake upside down until its empty. The President's continued drum beat of hate and the false equivalency to the rest of the political arena is our problem.
Nothing wrong with kindness and compassion but the real cause of social alienation is lack of economic opportunity and social mobility, leading to a major segment of the population one paycheck away from despair... Can you imagine the stress? So you turn to drugs or you get violent or you just decide to end it with a bang or with a whimper...
Is it a coincidence that significant social isolation is occurring
as wealth inequality has deepened to the point at which our culture is comprised of a few haves, some in the middle, and a whole lot of folks working just to meet expenses, or, indeed, who are working, sometimes multiple jobs, but are unable to make monthly expenses? I think not; it's more causation than correlation. I don't disagree that social isolation can have substantial negative consequences, particularly with how folks relate to each other, but any analysis that omits the widening gulf--actually, statistics support calling it a chasm--misses a critical consideration. And why should Mr. Brooks omit the economic consideration? His politics do not allow such an analysis.
"Most of us hew to a code of privacy that leads us to not know our neighbors."
I disagree and contend that Television isolated Americans and continues to enrage them.
Television made people paranoid of crime and neighbors, and drove them indoors where they absorb even more Television terror.
"Most of us bought into a radical individualism that, as Tocqueville predicted, cuts each secluded self off from other secluded selves. Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community. Most of us live in insular media and social bubbles that provide us with Pravda-like affirmations of our own moral superiority. Most of us hew to a code of privacy that leads us to not know our neighbors".
I don't disagree that those individuals most susceptible to the contemptible rhetoric spewing from Donald Trump and the alt-right are isolated individuals. But who knows what prompted that isolation; it is not unlikely that mental health issues, whether caused by chemical imbalances or a history of neglect and abuse, caused their isolation.
But I totally disagree with Brooks's stated premise. What "most of us" who embraced "radical individualism" is he talking about?? Certainly not my friends, neighbors, or co-workers who manage to lived reasonably well-balanced and social lives. I don't disagree that this description fits a number of people, but Brooks has to learn to stop wildly over-generalizing.
Yes, getting these loners into a group setting would probably help them. Of course it would have to be carefully overseen so it didn’t spin out of control. The phrase “well regulated militia” comes to mind.
To the extent that we are all responsible for the state of our politics and economy, both horrendously corrupt, yes, the healing must occur in our hearts. We allowed ourselves to be moved by our fears and grandiosity to usher in the Reagan Restoration of robber baronism, with a strong propaganda of Exceptional Nationism to salve insecurity. A great sales job by the Great Salesman, on behalf of his plutocratic and corporate masters.
And Reaganism - along with its counterpart, Thatcherism - was abetted by neoliberal "Democrats" and New Labor, both parties hijacked by center-right conservatives: Clintons, Obama, Blair. With variations of windowdressing and gloss, it's pretty much been a continuum since the 1970s.
Some time ago I started musing whether democracy could survive rampant, rapacious vulture capitalism. Now I wonder whether human civilization can survive it.
Brooks points that "mass killings are about many things — guns, demagogy, etc." but does not take the additional step to identify our demagogue-in-chief who has been and continues to be unable to control his tirade and lashes out at anyone and anything at every opportunity he gets. If that does not earn him the title of demagogue-in-chief, nothing will.
Brooks goes on to point out that social isolation drives people towards extreme ideologies. He writes, "Guys like that convince themselves that by massacring the innocents they are serving as a warrior in some righteous cause." This is a perfect example of what inciting is all about. A leader with a large audience keeps on accusing random people and things, and sooner or later someone picks up on that cause. The result: carnage.
There is no question in my mind that Trump has a significant part to play in inciting these mass killings and I am disappointed that pundits like Brooks don't make that explicit.
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@chickenlover,
Brooks was saying we're all responsible and you're pointing the ginger at the Boogeyman. I accept my share of the responsibility and so do a lot of others. But it only takes 10% of the population to refuse vaccination for an epidemic to break out.
2
Mr. Brooks has woven another in his long list of commentaries in which his thesis is that we all share responsibility for the current state of affairs that divides us.
His constant "equalization" thesis is wearing thin.
My I remind him, only a select group gave rise to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, Breitbart, Drudge and Fox News. Now, they have been bested by even more fringe groups.
Only a select group uses dog whistles to appeal to fear and resentment in people over the last 40 years. Thank you Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.
Only a select group actively and consistently persue efforts to surpress and deny Americans their right to vote.
Only a select group passes tax laws for the good of themselves.
Only a select group relaxes regulations that make our air and water and soil less clean.
Only a select group has waged a campaign to infect the judiciary with like minds to the point that only they believe it honorable and trustworthy.
Only a select group stand silently behind their leader while he denigrates women.
Only a select group sits on their hands ( or write about equalization ) while the leader of their party proudly proclaims he is a nationalist, sending yet another dog whistle to his followers, and thus fully unleashing the dogs of hate upon our country.
No, Mr. Brooks, I disagree. In our current sense, actions and words are not equal. We are all not to blame. Most of us are fully capable of indentifying the root cause.
3
If someone could combine Brooks' thoughts on loneliness and isolation--and radical individualism--with a realistic appraisal of how socioeconomic struggles feed into these problems, instead of repeatedly arguing that there isn't an economic component to all of this as well, then that person would really have something that all of us would need to read and understand.
But this dismissal of economic factors always leaves the analysis half finished.
Why do people like Brooks think people become workaholics?
Do they have any idea of how wages continue to lag behind expenses, even in the best of economic times?
Do they understand that health care costs are among the reasons so many people live in fear?
Do they understand that the kind of education that might allow a lot of isolated people a little more perspective on the human condition (and their own situation) is very expensive for most people?
For a lot of people, trying to get enough money to live IS the central struggle. Relationships, unfortunately, have to take a back seat to it most of the time.
DO NOT THINK OF THIS AS A WAR!
Wars are, or at least should be, existential struggles in which it is all to easy to say that "the ends justify the means". As serious as the problem that Brooks lays out is, much of it has been caused or least sustained by people who believe that the results of some action or law are so important that ii is alright to break any or all of societies norms. Both sides of our partisan politics have been guilty of this and it has lead to our current fragile state. Let us not perpetuate it.
Thank you, Mr. Brooks. I know you are always trying to get us to pay attention to our better angels.
My angel is telling me that what McConnell conservatives want is States Rights, an avenue for voter suppression and the ability to persecute those who are different in complexion, sexual orientation, faith, or belief in science.
Those same conservatives want an end to regulation, another way of telling corporations (including agriculture) to pollute the air, soil and water if profits and stock prices are up.
And those same conservatives keep misrepresenting Social Security, and Medicare as entitlements. Despite protestations, their goal is to privatize those very creations of society that have lifted many millions out of poverty.
My better angel, and yours, is screaming that modern conservatism has made the ultimate Faustian bargain, with an id driven snake-oil salesman.
Give voice with plain words to your angel, soon.
Maybe we should just stop with the waging war mindset, it seems as though whatever we war on just gets stronger.
You write, "the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic." Are they not connected?
It may sound as an oversimplification, but in any war be it against another country, be it against the "other" or be it against the self, the first thing that has to be done to declare a truce is to lay down your arms.
David Brooks is one of the great thinkers of today. However, this column lacks an important element. That element is the characteristics of distinction among divisive elements and sharing ones. Bothsideism is alive and well in this column. That is not a good place for a great thinker, who is a would-be great communicator, as I think Brooks is.
Currently, I feel that my brothers include Brooks, Ross Douthat, Bill Kristol and some other conservatives because, although I see them as wrong on "small government," I share with them the actual intention to make others happy rather than sad. These intentions are also central to Nicholas Kristoff, E. J. Dionne, and to Nancy Pelosi.
It should be stated and not glossed over that the intention that other people generally be happy is not a part of the actions of Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, or Mark Meadows. Jews and Muslims, browns and whites, can take action to share or to separate.
"Guys like that are drawn to extremist ideologies, which explain their disappointments and give them a sense that they are connected to something."
They can easily be identified by the red hats and contorted faces at Trump rallies.
1
"...because the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic."
And the socio/psychological pressures drive some people to the extreme poles of political ideology. Then, the opposite sides demonize one another making it difficult to resolve important social and economic issues. The resulting political impasse creates a negative feedback loop where unresolved social and economic issues further exacerbate social/psychological problems. This process accelerates the downward spiral we are experiencing.
"The weavers just need what any side in a war needs: training so we know how to wage it, strategies so we know how to win it and a call to arms so we know why we’re in it."
If the weavers don't do their work, then totalitarians will be invited to restore order, usually by increasingly draconian methods. The totalitarians will be invited in democratically. IMO, they could come from either the left or the right, as is shown by history. I know that many will disagree that the totalitarians could come from either side. Naturally, both left and right believe that they would never be totalitarian. Each side sees themselves as virtuous and the other as the root of all problems - and we are back to the disordered mind mentioned in the article.
You can be alone without feeling lonely. Feeling comfortable alone with yourself is not a sign of psychological turmoil. Alone time in your own head is actually quite healthy and rejuvenating. Haven't you ever said to someone "I just want to be left alone right now."
Socializing is exhausting. Some people thrive on human interaction. However, everyone has a threshold. Mine is low. My favorite hobbies involve few if any people. There even hobbies where you are alone together. Take Yoga for example, you are often surrounded by lots of people but you are very much alone in your head. Actually, most of the time I'm intentionally avoiding people. You don't hike ten miles into the wilderness for inane conversation.
By contrast, you can surround yourself with friends and still feel utterly alone. The mere presence of the social gaiety around you is even more depressing. You know you should feel happy but you don't. That's what depression feels like. The perpetual absence of joy. Faking happiness for the sake of other people only leads to more unhappiness.
Despite Brooks' repeated efforts to convince us, community is not the answer to all life's problems. Community itself can become an unhealthy addiction. If you find yourself over extending your social obligations or compulsively checking your social networks, maybe you need to unplug from your community a bit. It's not good for you.
David Brooks is getting a lot of pushback for his lonely man thesis in the comments with some arguing that the Squirrel Hill shooter was not a lonely man. I think the commenters are correct up to point. The descriptions of the shooter that I read suggest he was not lonely, but they also tell us he was socially estranged. He’s the guy you politely listen to as your brain races to figure out how to escape. He has no close friends. What he does have is access to so called virtual communities which are not communities at all. They are interest groups, places where people can “gather” with others.
Many of these groups are harmless, some promote good works, but some are dens of hate and rage where people (white men?) get to feel accepted and welcomed. In the past, social estrangement might have played itself out in suicide, or domestic abuse, or institutionalization. These days, our embittered social outcasts can garner hundreds of likeminded “friends” without leaving the confines of their rooms or vans. So, I think Brooks is on to something. If we can’t find ways to provide people the healthcare they need, and the community support they as human beings deserve, we will continue to see these violent outburst in synagogues, churches, schools, concerts, and offices simply because these are the centers of genuine community. The places where they do not feel they belong.
First, it not individualism that is to blame. The conditions that drive our disconnection are self-inflicted; or rather inflicted by a gerrymandered group of legislators who do not enact policies for the common weal but who work solely to maximize profits for the 1% at the expense of the 99%. Public policy decisions have left us here; not any moral failings of the classes who bear the brunt. This is, along with so much of current conservative thought, is a lazy recycling of victim-blaming. And I, as a conservative capable of critical thinking, am sick of it.
1
Somehow Brooks manges to ignore the effects of lezzer-faire capitalism. Ever since Reagan, the rewards of the American economy have moved increasingly upward. When the business (stock) owner is the only legitimate stakeholder in a business, working people suffer.
People permanently put out of work take drugs and kill themselves. The right wing propaganda campaign pins the blame on "the other" rather than laws and tax schemes that disadvantage workers.
1
“there’s always an assault weapon, or a bunch of them”
I don’t know if we can fix the problems of loneliness and isolation but we should be able to address the problem of availability of assault weapons - or we should, at least, want to
To the victims and the surviving members of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the "new cold war" referenced in the title of your column, Mr. Brooks, must not seem so cold anymore. This should concern every American, especially given a presidency that willfully foments conflict rather than healing or assuaging it.
There’s some truth to Brooks’ proposal that social isolation contributes to anti-social acts. But one has to wonder then what political culture or political philosophy or agenda of political policies is more likely to isolate the individual and undermine the web of shared values, share responsibilities, and mutual assistance.
Every crime is committed by an individual. That's true whether the crime is some small petty larceny or a massive human rights violations committed by nations. Even in those instances there is an individual that gives the orders and other individuals that carry them out.
But this obscures the nature of the violence in America today. Much of todays violence is ideological. These are crimes of ideas and causes, not crimes of personal gain.
The ideological basis of these crimes always begins with defining some group in society first as an outlier, then as an enemy.
America was not part of the fascists movement in Europe and so we thought we were above the social degradation that produced the horrors of that war.
But we were wrong. We refused to look at our own history and still do today. We refused to look at our small demagogues who trafficked in fear and othering and instead clung to the belief that we were a society of individuals, not a society that valued the rights exercised by individuals, but a society none the less.
That distinction is crucial. The "lonely man" that David writes about is a social phenomena. He might have feared Native people or African Americans, or Asians or Latinos who became incorporated into "his" country. And he was eventually told they were his enemy.
No matter which, his troubles were their fault. Trump's rhetoric is simply that of one more demagogue in a long line. The difference is that we never voted the others into the presidency.
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Isolated and alone Americans and violence in America? Isolated and alone Americans and suicide? Too much individuality in America and not enough connection? The solution is to play down individuality and increase forms of connection so violence and suicide decrease in America?
Throughout history power in society has decided forms of connection in society and who gets prominence in society, who gets to be recognized as "individual". Power in ages past would force "connection" as much as possible on the masses, such as religion, because there was no other way to control masses of people.
The modern age is distinguished, among other reasons, from the past by power in society so technologically advanced there is less and less reason to force forms of "connection" on the masses; in fact power today prefers to shatter the masses in fragments, isolate people, actually increase individuality in a negative sense, somewhat like creating solitary confinement, so the masses cannot cohere in any sense against power.
The forms of connection in America today are largely the in groups, obviously political, and a person either joins in a prominent group, in which case the person gets individually recognized and gets group connection (gets it all), or the person gets left out, is hemmed in on all sides by bureaucracy, law, little box home among millions, and internet which is obviously surveillance and control, marginalization system, as much as possible communications system.
"the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic"
Many of the world's sociological and psychological problems are effects of late-stage capitalism. Here in the USA, predatory economic practices have hollowed out the middle class and left many with few prospects. There is plenty of blame to go around, but it's the GOP that just gave a huge tax cut to the wealthy in order to rationalize cutting the *earned* benefits of seniors. I could go on.
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Reading many of the comments here, many of my liberal friends are making Mr. Brooks' point. They see all Republicans as evil. One can support part of the President's agenda and not the man. Most Americans want community, in fact it's those civilizations that have the idea of family and community that live the longest. This is a problem in a multicultural Society; if we don't united over something (nation, religion, etc.) we will fall into out tribes, and then we all lose!
1
One of your better pieces for my tastes. The lonely man thesis has a lot merit. But what I would point out is that the GOP does not like mental health counselors any more than they like teachers. Low pay and no prestige. The GOP rewards cut throat businessmen instead. Out for profits and themselves they contribute to the anxiety and insecurity of the lonely man.
GOP congress people generally don't support mental health funding. That's bleeding heart liberal fluff. Cut that for tax cuts for the 1%. These are the values and priorities of your republicans brethren David.
It is not since the age of Phil Donahue and Oprah that we have had a positive social view of psychotherapies. You made an important point when you said, "mental health issues are at least as much about problems in life as one’s neurochemistry. They are at least as much about protracted loneliness, loss of meaningful work, feeling pressured and stressed in the absence of community." Time Magazine had christened the past decade, as the "decade of the brain". Talking brains instead of minds, emotions and personality has served to mystify mental health professions. When they talk neurochemistry instead of the way you do here they get further away from the answers not closer.
The need for psychological help is greater than ever, but the fact that help is out there has never been less known or supported. Values and priorities in funding need to be brought back to a humanistic foundation.
As usual, David Brooks' column is a mixture of truths and falsehoods. He is absolutely correct to locate social isolation as a source of loneliness and depression. He may be wrong to link social factors to the mass killers, as these folks are not much like ordinary depressed people. Many of them have a quite different form of mental disorder that they have had since their early years. Depression and isolation result from many factors.
But the real problem here is the both-side-ism. In our current social and political divide, one side wishes to reach out and embrace, the other wishes to demonize and destroy. Brooks here reprises the "fine people on both sides" meme. The idea that we all somehow wish to reach out is belied by our recent politics. The synagogue bomber didn't want to reach out and neither did those who inspired him. The Jewish doctors - members of the synagogue - reached out to him and nursed him. Let us not forget elementary moral distinctions.
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The causes of hatred, bigotry, and violence are many. There are always marginalized people, misfits, bullies and bullied. And there is always loneliness, disconnectedness, feeling pressured and stressed, and for many a lack of meaningful work.
There has also always been community, friendship, family, loyalty.
And there is always some balance among these.
So what is different now?
One difference is the increased transparency about what is going on -- we are all more aware of those better or worse off than us (leading to jealousy or fear of challenge), and differences of our beliefs and values.
But a huge factor affecting us in the U.S. in a malignant way is the attitude of the Republican Party -- from Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to McConnell's oath to destroy Obama, to FOX News and Donald Trump.
Here we see a brazen willingness to lie, deceive, manipulate, and ridicule all in the name of preserving some fantasy of a golden age that was not very golden, but which was rather an age, to a greater extent than admitted, of misogyny, bigotry, hatred, and fear hidden beneath a facade of men wearing cookie cutter suits, with cookie cutter haircuts, concealing privilege and all too often violence and condescension towards everyone else, including their wives, some of whom drank the Kool-Ade.
Reaching out to build a loving community is fine.
But understanding that some are more to blame than others is also a necessary first step. Just compare Joe Biden to Sarah Palin.
1
Another apologia and pseudo-intellectual rationalization in an attempt to avoid the obvious. Guns! If one were to look at statistics from the American Psychological Association, I'm pretty sure the percentage of people suffered from serious mental disorders would be sobering. Considering that fact coupled with the specter of easy access to guns, the tragic events we have been experiencing are hardly surprising. Mix in a little toxic stew from "the Don" and we have an epidemic of violence.
Mr. Brooks would do much better to vehemently oppose the sea of guns inundating our society. However, I suspect that would go against his Conservative creed.
1
Thank you, David. We are in fact interdependent. We ignore that reality at our peril. Independence is not a law of nature. It is a plea for freedom from oppression.
So conservative ideologies of "self-reliance"---not really Emerson any longer but more like get off my lawn, stay away, you're not welcome here---have nothing to do with creating this social sickness? Let's add that conservatives refuse a working wage, take away health care, under fund childcare and education, and want to eliminate the last lines of defense for retirement. Conservatism is the pathology, David. No disciple of Buckley and Kristol will ever understand this.
3
Whenever the feeling that resources are growing scarce begins to pervade a community, the rends start to appear. They were always there in a nascent form but groups now begin to sort themselves out along racial, ethnic and religious lines as a hedge. Scapegoating soon follows and then violence. The usual targets are, perversely, the most powerless, and the ones least able to remedy the problem. No doubt, there are many wealthy people in this country who are quite amused to see the plebes tear themselves to pieces and leave them alone. As long as the peons use the pitchforks on each other, everything is fine.
Every time you read an article about helicopter parents, school quota anxiety, and the need to incur ever higher student debt to get a minor leg up, it's really a tacit admission that most of the country believes it will soon be fighting over the crumbs left for it by the .01% and their children must be prepared for Armageddon. Reducing inequality would "cure" a host of society's ills.
It's hard for me to believe that other countries don't have their share of lonely people. Disturbed people. People who are disappointed with their lives.
However, it is the U.S. that has cornered the market on lonely white men with arsenals of AR-15s, Glocks & other firearms who go out & kill innocent people in rages of hate.
It's the guns.
3
Suicide is not always a response to "isolation and despair," which implies some sort of calculation. It is frequently the result of insufficiently treated mental illness -- which you decided to treat as a separate issue in this piece.
You can't connect suicide to "a derangement of the American mind," throwing mass murderers and people who kill themselves into the same category, and just leave it at that.
Are isolation and mental illness connected? Of course. But let's be clear about the proximal causes of suicide in most cases. Potentially deadly mood disorders and other forms of mental illness are common across the globe. Suicide is not a specifically American phenomenon, and its causes are not easily reducible to the collapse of the nuclear family and other institutions David Brooks mourns. I believe you can, however, directly link suicide to treatable mental illness in a majority of cases.
To that end, we must recognize that economic restrictions play an important role in exacerbating psychic ailments for many people. The widespread lack of access to mental health treatment is tied up in the economic questions that you say are not salient. This is a place for our government to step in, not your phantom social institutions of midcentury America.
There is no "cold civil war", Mr. Brooks. Stop trying to sow more discord.
The vast majority of Americans want to stop the hate-anger-fear-Lies,Lies,Lies-WAR message The Con Don and his Robber Baron brethren operatives are trying to promote - including you sadly.
WE THE PEOPLE are coming together to support and help each other. WE are voting for Socially Conscious Women and men who will serve and protect 99.9% of us - not the stolen/inherited wealth "entitled" who are trying to destroy OUR lives.
Perhaps it's time for you to retire. You seem to have swallowed the Robber Baron message fully and regurgitate it out to the world. It's a dying message that will NOT be tolerated in OUR United States of America.
Not now. Not ever.
7
David's Thesis, "the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic", creates a separation between the issues, yet they are more likely to be inextricably intertwined. And if so, we cannot address them separately. They must all be addressed together, bound into a single package. If so, then there must be one central issue that connects them all. David posits "Radical Individualism", like many others before him. But the break down of community is not due to radical individualism. We have struggled with a balance individualism and community from the beginning. I would rather posit "Globalization" as the major force in breaking up the community. When labor became a commodity, then community had to be devalued.
1
How do you reconstruct the sociological and psychological strands of this society with a leadership and a party who are committed ideological and economic warriors. Although maybe viewed as feeble by some pundits standards, the democrats in general and Sec. Clinton in particular attempted to preach unity, community, and tolerance---where did that get them. Being strong and ugly appears to be a winning formula.
4
I get what David Brooks is saying here, but much of this column reminds me of the short-lived "reach out" rhetoric after the Stoneman Douglas school shootings (or was it one of the many others?). Telling us that we can avoid these acts of violence by sitting with the kid who's eating his lunch alone in the school cafeteria ignores the fact that the kid has all too easy access to just about any guns he wants.
6
Loneliness, insofar as that which “loners” suffer rather than creatively celebrate, is certainly a problem that can criminally affect any society. The slant of this column seems to be that the suffering loneliness of loners is chosen by them, and that that’s their free choice as individuals, if not fault. The other side of it though, that wasn’t evident to me from this column, is suffering loners may be such for other reasons than their own choosing, such as being excluded by an in-group because they, the loners don’t ... well, fill-in the blank(s). There’s a lot talk about inclusivity as a thing to do rather than the expression of loving goodwill. And at the end of the day in this country, being particularly special is what’s, more often than not, valued. Welcoming the stranger, an ancient ethic of the People of Israel actually, is not what we, largely a nation of immigrants, seem to be doing well. Why? is the question. Worse, we have a president who’s regular rallying effort is to make matters worse.
2
It's Interesting that this is on the Heels of the Frontline Facebook Piece. Social media may inform, whether correctly or incorrectly, but it's ability to foster community does so without contact with one another. Is that true "community", I don't think so. But we now have a world foundering with it's use.
2
"...the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic."
And yet our schools are chronically underfunded and teachers must take second and third jobs to survive. Mental health services are unavailable to many, out of reach financially or geographically. We disparage the liberal arts and push graduates who have focused on them into dead end, poorly paid service industry jobs. Etc.
I disagree with Brooks. It's almost entirely an economic struggle. It's about the economic choices we make via public policy (which, in turn drives the marketplace). And these choices must change.
12
Reading this column I was struck by how much of it is in the passive. Lone individuals who are victims of things that happened to them. In refusing to name the problems and identify causes, Mr. Brooks also absolves those who are guilty, including members of his own party. Who has turned a blind eye to the disappearance of mid level jobs, of safety networks that support people in difficult times? Who has supported corporations that have decimated small towns? And Mr. Brooks remains silent with respect to race. Who has given such license that anti-Semites feel so emboldened? At least, he doesn't blame women, which has been an undertone in other columns. But then again, he also fails to see another parallel that connect many of these men and terrorists: domestic violence. Enough with the "world we have lost," which never existed for many and was a facade that covered up the sins of the father.
10
David, you’ve astutely hit the mark re: the social isolation prevalent in vast swaths of our country. It also manifested itself in different ways with the young and urban, as I see in many of the people with whom I work these days. The atomization of society leads many to find connection online, which is often a viper’s nest.
I do take issue with your willingness to downplay ideology here, though. Especially in the wake of the events of last week. Sure, there are cultural and psychological factors that lead to living in a society that so easily manufactures violent killers. But this most recent round of violence is very much ideology motivated. As with your previous column on “American nationalism,” I think your desire to construct a deeper meaning from what we’re going through as a country is making you miss the forest for the trees. We’re in an era of political violence propagated by the far right. We know how this plays out because we’ve seen it over and over again - in this country and abroad. Let’s not downplay this.
5
Unfortunately, Bowers and Sayoc, jr. found community and solidarity on-line in hate communities.
Maybe the problem is isolation and the poor choices for solutions? Shrinking your isolated world to the virtual world of tv, video gaming and on line Faux communities might not be the best solution.
And bubble wrapping so that the only people you talk to have the same narrow interests as you is probably not the best solution either.
PS I agree with the others who have pointed out the mistake about Vietnam War casualties. It may seem niggling but Americans tend to avoid the larger effects of our military activities, which then makes the resulting blowback always kind of a surprise.
1
It's in the last works of this opinion piece that David Brooks writes about the weavers and it immediately brings to mind two Young Adult books by Lois Lowry - The Giver and the less known, Gathering Blue (the sequel). Maybe people need to step back and read these books - about passing along story and finding the perfect dye to weave the king's rob.
We need to weave trust back into society. Watch toddlers run around yard playing without a care about one another's skin color, ethnicity or religion. What does that tell us? What we don't already know - so much is taught. Distrust, bigotry, and some inherent right to lash out are taught to some, but not others.
It is the others that must prevail here. As Michelle Obama said when they go low, we go high. We surely need to go high. But doing so means including the child who appears or actually is friendless in that school building, encouraging parents to have their children engage in social situations with other children and most of all teaching tolerance.
We don't need social media hate sites that fuel people like Bowers. They should be banished. It's not about the first amendment. It's about making a wholesome society. Where do these ills come from? This depth of hate?
As a middle school Assistant Principal, I saw my fair share of conflict and bullying, but there was always de-escalation and resolution. We need adult centers for this sort of intervention. The violence and hatred needs to stop.
There is a certain irony here, that Mr. Brooks' paean to community-building is anchored to his assumption that it's up to each individual to build the community.
Try as he may, Mr. Brooks can't seem to pry himself away from his own fixation on personal responsibility and his deep-seated faith in the rugged (but compassionate) individual.
The social norms of interpersonal behavior are set at the societal level, not at the individual level. The prevalence of self-interested individualism in America is systemic and results from the profit-oriented organization of a business-dominated society. Personal loneliness and alienation are inevitable costs of the process (which, as usual in capitalism, are externalized to the social environment).
The economy depends on personal consumption, so what kind of social reinforcement would you expect to see, other than reinforcement of individual behavior? There's no profit in communitarian behavior, and that's why it all depends on volunteers.
Nothing will change until enough people discover that their lives simply *cannot* continue in this way. And that may require a social melt-down.
3
Could it be that we've been sold a bill of goods about how individual responsibility can be the answer to all our woes?
If we rely on people to fix what's wrong in their lives and they can't or won't do what's necessary, there's no possible good outcome.
1
David, may I suggest that Vietnamese people are people too. Yet you wrote "Nearly twice as many people die each year of these two maladies as were killed in the entire Vietnam War."
I too believe in American Exceptionalism. But if your cited "Nationalism" led to the above mistake, I'll pass.
12
If David Brooks really wants to stop lonely dangerous people from killing innocents or committing suicide, he would do something to stop the truly insane and criminal gun lobby in our nation. Loneliness is a very sad and increasingly common symptom in virtually every modern nation on earth, but far less deadly in countries where lonely people have no easy access to every sort of automatic weapon.
4
David? While I appreciate your larger point, you're showing your colors in vivid hues with a glaring omission.
"Every year nearly 45,000 Americans respond to isolation and despair by ending their lives. Every year an additional 60,000 die of drug addiction. Nearly twice as many people die each year of these two maladies as were killed in the entire Vietnam War."
People. Not "American soldiers," but people.
Implying that the deaths that were not of American soldiers, including of our allies, were meaningless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties
I have no doubt that this narrowing and minimizing of the war's toll was accidental-- that you didn't mean to say that only American deaths are meaningful.
What's telling is that it didn't immediately occur to you that this statement can't possibly be true.
A "nationalist" indeed.
9
Note to self: be careful with wording when taking others to task for their wording.
To be clear: accurate wording for David's assertion might have been,
"Every year nearly 45,000 Americans respond to isolation and despair by ending their lives. Every year an additional 60,000 die of drug addiction. Nearly twice as many [Americans] die each year of these two maladies as were killed in the entire Vietnam War,"
or,
"Every year nearly 45,000 Americans respond to isolation and despair by ending their lives. Every year an additional 60,000 die of drug addiction. Nearly twice as many people die [in this country] each year of these two maladies as [were killed serving this country] in the entire Vietnam War."
1
This is not one of David Brooks' best columns. His thoughts can not explain division in our society with a simple Durkheimian explanation of individuals becoming alienated and isolated. It's more than that. Like others said, its about propaganda, bad leadership and the propensity to celebrate American individualism in a selfish or greedy way. Its about Fox News and right wing radio hosts with limited education giving approval to the working class and less educated to accept conspiracy theories while voicing their opinions not based on facts. However, we are indeed in a state of anomie, and as a country we will have to address this problem squarely. That is, shall we continue to provide guns to everyone or should we not? Should we openly sanction and censure people who show a profound ignorance with government, politics, economics, political science, sociology, etc.? Think about this: If you lie or plagiarize on any paper you write in college just once, you are totally sanctioned and suffer the consequences. Now think about the 30% of Americans who give license for this president to lie? It all starts with a lie, Goebbels will tell you that. David should be more specific about the forces of division.
8
@Hank Przystup
If you want specific 'sociological and psychological" "forces of division"- look up Cognitive Dissonance and Moral Shock. New Social Movements. THIS is what Mr. Brooks is referring to.
If we are to explain extreme ideologies and terrorism through the lens of mental illness or loneliness and despair in men, then what does this say about jihadists? And what does it say about our governments military response to it? What does it say about gangland murders? Loneliness is not a legitimate reason for mass murder so let’s not rationalize it that way.
The common denominator in violence against innocents of this caliber and scope is the XY chromosomes with guns.
4
@Issy Look up Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. That may help to explain the 'motivation' behind jihadists.
This was a good column because it makes one think about American society and what needs to change so that we can all feel more connected and hopefully bring in the lonely, isolated soul.
However, I still can't get over your last column. Are you still calling yourself a nationalist? It's unfortunate that you choose to give credibility to what is typically thought of as white nationalism: where whites-only & autocracy are considered good things.
2
It’s true that each of us has power to engage a bit of the solution. We all need to take more responsibility for the outcomes of our country (if the oligarchs and political cheaters will let us).
But you forgot to say “Mr. Trump, tear down this wall...”
Does Brooks think that Donald Trump, the Republican Party, FOX News and the Right-Wing media have helped in raising our sense of community and spiritual consciousness?
While there certainly are other factors (like technology) that have fostered this problem, it’s beginning started with Reagan who trashed the idea of community for the “greed is good” mentality. This opened Pandora’s Box for Republicans who have taken greed and oportunism to the Nth degree, stoking hate, fear and division in the process.
Yet David is still a Republican, wringing his hands. Shameless.
5
Everyone I know has heard a clarion call to arms since 11/8/2016 and it's getting louder.
Regrettably, nice doesn't sell. Sizzle sells. Outrageousness sells. Boring does not sell. Brawls sell.
3
Wisdom of the desert California.
I read Mr. Brooks columns often and disagree with most of them. As long as we have a mentally deranged president and Republican party more interested in dividing the country, rewarding greed and ignoring the will of the American people we will continue on the death spiral of a once great nations demise. There have always been disgruntled loners Mr. Brooks, but now we arm them with weapons of mass destruction. The Republican party beholden to the NRA is as complicit as the murderers that we read about on a daily basis.
7
The analysis Brooks offers as a cause of these individual's violent acts is valid, but far more emphasis has to be given to the outside messages feeding these people. The level of hate, false accusation and "fake news" spewing out of the right wing media and our own president is the thing to focus on now.
1
"And there’s always one other thing. A lonely man."
WRONG. There are always TWO other things. A lonely man and a GUN.
15
Intolerance and separation grew through the GOP. The main thrust was the war on drugs, but their was also an intolerance taught to older americans so they would drive their children away. Tough love I think you Reaganites called it. You insist on your children being in your cult and you expect them to sit at your feet and admire your wise counsel. Separation drove consumption and everyone was encouraged to find happiness in possessions. You all said you believed in family values but your family values were only for those that conformed to your cult and your belief in unfettered capitalism.
Tolerance and respectfulness are not something that conservatives know anything about. Capitalism without controls only creates death and destruction, and we can see it plain as day. Your tears are fake. It's all about the money and it was always just about the money.
4
@Chris What about the lonely man in Florida with 11 home-made pipe bombs?
When I first read David Brooks's "Bobos in Paradise," it liked its initial explanation of the phenomenon of a guy riding down the highway in a BMW, wearing a pigtail, smoking a joint, listening to Dylan on the tape player, on his way to a real estate deal –– the merging of the Yuppie sensibility to that of the 60's. Or maybe it was always there waiting to pop out. Brooks didn't know, then, what to think of it, and he is still pondering.
What Brooks can't wrap his brain around is that the 1970's sort of marked the departure from the 1930's New Deal practicality whereby the rich were not in complete charge of everything. Now we are back to that with the top 10% of the wealth owning about 75% of everything. The simple fact is that our public institutions have now been hollowed out in the name of more profits for the rich. This has social consequences, such as the need to own an "equalizer" –– a gun –– and the loneliness of economically useless individuals.
Perhaps Brooks is a lonely man also, a man so wrapped up in his own head and his own ideas, that he rejects any notion that collective thought can come up with some answers for the collective public body. But, of course, this would be socialism even if it had nothing to do with the government taking over companies. Just thinking about public issues is now construed as "socialism."
6
Eye opener: suicide rate is dropping in Europe, while in the US, it has risen by 30% over past 18 years?
This is shocking.
Would love to know the source of these stats, and take/see a deep dive into the factors driving this 'statistical divergence'...
Side note: why are major publications like the Times in the habit of dropping statistics like this into an article without citing sources? Or at least providing link to source? This seems like poor practice, even for opinion pieces, considering the current climate between news outlets and our government.
4
Right --- it is not about a political climate that promotes these kinds of acts, it is about individual mental illness. Sorry, but I have a lot of trouble believing that people are more prone to mental illness today than at other times in our history.
86
The point you miss is that in the past our society had a commonality and a social infrastructure that supported individuals and allowed them to feel less isolated from others. This is pretty much decimated in this age of Tribalism (as I think many of the comments on this article clearly illustrate). I have struggled with extreme isolation and the Pandora’s box of troubles that have sprung from that condition. Your mind slips in odd directions and you do become hyper stressed and depressed. Since few people today seem to prefer actual face-to-face interactions with their fellows, is it any wonder the socially cut-off seek recognition in the most horrific manners?
36
@Marc Denser living, increasing tribalism, rising social disparity and legal hurdles, increasing chemical content in foodstuffs and environmental pollution, perhaps it's not so much that people are more prone to mental illness today as that there are more factors contributing to it?
4
@Marc There is a great book called Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger. It makes a persuasive argument that's similar to this column. If anyone wants a deeper understanding of this issue, it is worth a read.
3
Weavers are at work on both sides, straining society to the ripping point from every edge, strengthening and moving the tribes, of which we social animals are all a part, toward war. The bulwark is the rule of law. When that is lost, the most heavily armed tribe takes its place. This nation has been there before.
The glimmer of hope for peaceful resolution comes this time from the new “peculiar institution” being fear and hate. These don’t constitute property, the kind of thing that can be defended. As a “way of life” they will fail to cohere a tribe in a protracted struggle. But not before exhaustion dissipates them. The sign of that ugly process coming will be the failure of the rule of law. Watch this space.
15
I agree that the suicide rate and the narcotic drug rate rise correlate with the massacre rate of innocent people as in Pittsburgh this time. I think these horrific events should be termed suicide murders as the perpertrator kills himself or is killed at the end of the massacre in most cases.
On Monday this week MarketWatch segment of the Wall Street Journal had a graph showing how there has been a disconnect this millenium in the USA between GDP growth outstripping median income growth by 30 %.
David Brook's point that European suicide rates are dropping is telling.
The Right in America has often waved around F.A Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom as one of their Bibles of Economics. Obviously they have not understood his book 's point. Hayek always warned about state control of the means of Economic Production, as manifested in his time by Russian Communism. However he always believed advanced societies had an obligation to provide Healthcare and education to their population. He believed in economies that functioned more like Australia, UK, Canada, France, Sweden, Norway, Germany etc. We Americans can argue about how much regulations of capitalism works best for our society; but, if we want a healthy society we need to accept that we need to provide affordable healthcare, and education for all citizens. For those Americans who do not want Government healthcare and education, they can buy their own private insurance and send their children to private schools.
92
David implies that political differences bear little relevance to the dysfunctional nature of our society, that we all share responsibility for the distrust that divides us. His thesis captures part of the truth; in this tragedy, some measure of guilt stains almost all of us.
That said, the distribution of responsibility indicts one party far more than the other. The Democrats have not adopted an agenda designed to split society into winners and losers. With respect to tax and healthcare policies, the party seeks to foster a more egalitarian system, in which everyone will share more equally the costs of government and enjoy protection against the potentially devastating financial impact of illness.
Republicans, by contrast, championed a tax law that benefited almost exclusively the economic elite and attempted to repeal a healthcare law that offered some protection to the most vulnerable groups in America. Their immigration policies, moreover, foster disdain for people whose skin color and religious beliefs differentiate them from the white Christian majority.
Couple these legal priorities with a president whose words and actions depict the US as a society under siege by representatives of a hostile and alien culture, and the distinction between the two political coalitions comes clearly into view. While Democrats have contributed to the overheated rhetoric that has debased the current campaign, they have not attacked the diversity that defines America.
81
@James Lee You are so right-on. David Brooks has an uncanny quality to ignore facts on the ground seeming taking a high ground. It is impossible to be both high grounded and low grounded at the same time.
9
;@James Lee
The perspective you have outlined is oversimplified. The Democrats are more covert with their support of corporate interests over those of the working class and poor. For example, If you research the "Grand Bargain" that Obama was proposing to Boehner during the budget impasses that occurred during his tenure, you will discover that he endorsed measures that would erode "the entitlements", in return for some reduction in the republican supported tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Also, as of last time I checked there were a greater number of deportations under Obama than there currently are.
The problem is that the political stasis is not as "black and white" as the democrats have led you to believe and his is part of the element that prevents political cohesion and collective political action.
2
@James Lee. What was the adjective Hillary used to describe Trump’s base...” degenerates??” I agree that Trump operates out of a unilaterally biased base...but many who oppose him are just as biased. I happen to be one of the people who feel like vomiting anytime Trump starts to speak...I have visceral reactions, what scares me the most is the polarization that your comment represents and my hatred and frustration represent...there has to be another way.
4
You are spot on here, David. Our brain/nervous systems need connection to other humans in order to function properly. Nothing contributes more to this problem than our addiction to screens. We take two sides to the gun debate, rather than look squarely at the systemic problem of which we all are a part.
If you really want to do something positive about the political situation, commit to some regular screen-free social time. This is the meme that needs to spread.
29
@Barbara
if you are working 2 jobs just to pay the blls, (minimum wage or slightly above) it is no wonder there's no time for church, and /orthis suggestion to be carried out. Get real.
a big oart of the problem is that the "wildly successful economy" has left out too many Americans bifurcating our society. Just ask the angry women who are paid 30-40% less than their male counterparts for the same job...and are told they are lucky and have to learn to live with it.
2
I have not experienced so much fear and paranoia since the 1960’s. I could explain the causes back then because I lived through the fear and paranoia brought by constant threats of worldwide nuclear annihilation, escalating war, assassinations of political leaders, demands to fix social and legal inequalities in what was supposed to be a democracy. Today, I can find no tangible rationale to explain causes for societal malaise, except possibly fear and paranoia centered in bases of power to whose advantage it is to foster despondency/dependency in society.
I am not encouraging thoughts of some worldwide conspiracy of the powerful, but I am suggesting the sickness lies with the politically powerful who want to remain so.
National tragedies, such as drug overdoses, suicides, and mass shootings, can only be sufficiently and equitably be addressed by positive national policies. Nuclear proliferation was addressed to the relief of the world. Racial and gender inequality were addressed. Poverty, healthcare for the elderly and the poor, providing affordable healthcare have been addressed. Why isn’t government responding today to national tragedies with positive measures? Why are current majorities in the US Congress and in many State Legislatures causing more anxiety, more fear, more insecurity, more negativity in society with promises to eliminate national policies that have worked and refusing to address problems they can?
34
More pop sociology from Brooks that dodges the issue as usual. It's statistical probability. We have a large population of mentally unstable people in the US. How large? Well the seriously crazy segment is estimated to be around 2% of adults so 5 to 6 million people. But we also know as many 50 million are taking mind altering drugs. The sources of their instability are numerous and include political anger. So tens of millions of potentially unstable people who have fairly easy access to the 275 to 350 million guns in circulation (depending on whose estimate you believe). The consequence is regular mass shootings defined as four or more people killed or wounded. They happen almost every day but most pass un-noticed outside local media. Only the major ones like the recent outrage in Pittsburgh but still the Republican political class who Brooks represents refuse to take action because they are in thrall to a base that is deeply committed to resisting serious gun regulation. Indeed Brooks' party has constantly used it as a wedge issue to motivate their base.
65
The forces of connection is what binds the country, not the left or right. Speaking and listening to each other results in solutions, not condemning each other. That gets everyone no where in a hurry. Neighborhoods and communities binds; rash rhetoric from Washington's and NY elites, either right or left is what divides us.
Mr. Brooks, I believe that disconnection can lead to dissociation; and dissociation to violence.
But I also believe you have the driver wrong. You blame stark individualism around the dissolution of our communities - a failure of people to gather in churches and charities and neighborhood barbecues based on personal individual philosophy.
We have jobs that take us out of home towns, move us around, separate families. We have an economy that requires both parents to work, and given rise to children being raised in a patchwork of daycare solutions, but stripping neighborhoods of neighbors: no one is home, not even the kids.
Life is expensive on an hourly wage. Just ask me, I'll be happy to explain.We work to cover bills, not to self-actualize.
Our breakdown in society mirrors our elevation of corporatism, of a new aristocracy, of bifurcated rewards for hard work. Serfs never really had community either.
We'd do better with Marx's opium of the masses rather than real opium to turn to; but the key here is that Marx recognized that trampled people turn to anodyne panaceas. For some it is religion, some it is weed, some it is opioids, and some it is the freedom to mire oneself in hate.
Blame the dissociation on the willful elevation of corporatism, materialism, corruption, authoritarianism.
103
Kathy in Hopewell. Great name of your town and excellent addition to Mr. Brooks piece. Add this to his and the problem multiplies sadly.
5
@Cathy
There seems to a reluctance with most commentators, not just David Brooks, to mention the Big C. No, the other Big C, Capitalism. One doesn’t need to be a revolutionary to see that there is the financial imbalance you describe so well. During the last Gilded Age, this country addressed a similar imbalance with anti-monopoly laws and worker protection laws. Being a reformist at heart, I hope that we can do the same during this period, what many call a second wave of the Industrial Revolution (computerization). But first we’ll have find a way to be able to speak about our economic system with equanimity. Again, wonderful comment.
2
@Reader Rick - I see capitalism as a part of the problem, but more from the definition we have adopted - that the free market is divine; that people with assets must be somehow better than those without; that wealth equals merit; that the given distribution is also somehow divine in nature and "redistribution" - assigning value to labor, or citizenship, or human existence rather than on ownership - is somehow unnatural.
Capitalism is just a method of distributing resources based on trade, on value represented by trading. It need not be toxic: we have made it so.
1
There is something unwritten yet seemingly present in this essay by a writer who for years has been writing in a civil manner, which surely we can all agree is good, and that is that unfamiliarity breeds contempt. Refugees are pretty scary, if all you know of them is that they may come from places justifiably frightful. People with tattoos fit into a category. People with Volvos do as well. Mr. Brooks wrote about this many years ago. I know when I see a heavy set white woman with tattoos and a cigarette I tend to move pretty far away from her, and almost never grant her any humanity, which I am ashamed to say. I know when I see a black teenage boy with his pants around his hips I get far from him too. The distance I put between us serves a good purpose, in the short run. But if I repeat this self segregating orientation to the world day after day, person-who-seems-weird after person-who-seems-weird, what I end up with is acute unfamiliarity. I have begun to tell a story about those other people. Back in 1996 I decided I would never buy a home on a street where I saw Dole for President bumper stickers. I was very much part of the problem, not finding any commonality whatsoever with anyone I'd objectified into some easy to define category.
20
@czb We all need to differentiate between our aesthetics and our politics. I also eschew contact with those I find aesthetically unattractive, but I would never vote or act to deprive them of their civil or human rights, to deny them health care, a living wage, or even to live next door to me. It's important to understand that our taste (good or bad) is not the same as our social obligations.
3
I agree that we do need strong communities and we need to reach out to our fellow community members to build strong ties. And, as an adult, I've lived in several inner cities and each and every time I've grown roots in my community and felt connectedness and purpose.
However, one thing my communities have always shared is a commitment to others. And our society, since Newt's revolution, hasn't been focused on a shared commitment to others.
Newt and Republican focus has been on a commitment to amass power and strip most of protections needed in a society to prevent individuals "from falling through the cracks."
The new deal, social security, medicare, civil rights - these were not born with one party trying to amass power. They were born out of generosity of spirit, out of commitment to each other.
Yes, individuals have a role to play in developing communities but then our government has a role to play to shore up gaps, fill those cracks.
55
Being exposed 24/7 to news cycles, to our social media, working 24/7, and losing our balance in this world has caused the world, and in particular our country to fall apart at the seams. It is part of what isolates us.
We aren't paying attention to our community because it takes two people working in a household to survive. No time for socializing in person, no time to pay attention to what our politicians are doing or not doing to improve our lives economically, educationally or spiritually.
Allowing our attention to be diverted from families and friends
by a constant barrage of our senses, from the likes of Trump and the Administration spewing their hate and lies.
We are the only ones who can stop the madness. We need to slow our pace and pay attention to what really matters.
But how can people do that when we are constantly occupied because of our economic circumstances having to work two jobs to make ends meet, worried about having Health Care or food.
The answer, I think, is for all of us to look at what the Congress is doing or not doing and elect people that will make sure that government is doing there job for all of the people.
That would be one less worry on our plate.
Oh one more thing, Separation of Church and State needs to be enforced. Religion should play no part in ruling citizens public life. We can all follow what ever Religion we want, but Religions should not have political power to push their beliefs through the Political process on citizens.
1
Loneliness and mental health issues are not an American phenomenon. Most advanced countries in Europe and around the world suffer from the same slow weakening of their social fabric. What makes America unique is the unrestricted access to guns and ammunition which can make the reaction to mental health issues much more lethal than elsewhere.
4
“I keep coming back to this topic because the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic. The substrate layer of American society — the network of relationships and connection and trust that everything else relies upon — is failing. And the results are as bloody as any war.”
True, you write with good heart and a humble soul, but I would want to point out especially to our government, policies such as Social Security, Medicare for all, and an education system that doesn’t lead to individual bankruptcy, will have a salutary effect with the lost and lonely and despaired. These are programs that make one feel good about their own country, their neighbors and even the outsiders wanting to come in.
7
There is some truth, of course, in what is written here.
I noticed a string of sentences, each with a "most of us.." lead in, and I am wondering where the data is on all of that. They are some serious generalizations. " Most of us bought into, Most of us live in..." Are you sure about all that? Where's the evidence?
5
Anti-social behavior is nurtured, it doesn't occur on its own. "Forces in society that nurture attachment, connection and solidarity", that's what leads to a massacre in a Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Forces that are obvious to everyone except Mr. Brooks, who seems to believe that radical individualism is what lights the fuse, not forces in society that nurture attachment, connection and solidarity to evil.
4
Wrong. There hasn't always been "a lonely man." Massacres are a modern phenomenon made possible by the easy availability of military-style weapons (and, of course. hyper-violent films and video games, media coverage and right-wing propaganda that fuel paranoid fantasies).
Modern America didn't invent loneliness, and sermons from the pulpit and op-ed columnists aren't going to eradicate it.
Let's deal with the real issues.
9
S2. Yes add on all you mention. Constant propaganda, maybe we could at least stop this and gun control now. Isn’t in hard to realize there is no mechanism to police the airwaves to be really fair and balanced before airing? Fire in a theater is a constant drone these days in media of all kinds and assault weapons in circulation is the insanity of the nation, which again is unimaginable.
''...who fell through the cracks of society...'' - One cannot fall through anything when they belong to a society that is bent on hate, violence and the ultimate extremism - killing.
I am also disappointed that there is another column from a person of privilege (regardless of ideology) that does not even mention the means to which the violence is carried out (firearms) and call for some sort of reduction/clamping down of said means.
We are all products of are environment and if we are bombarded daily with hate (especially from a President) and calls that ''other'' is to blame for all means of problems, then those that want to ''belong'' are going to lash out.
They didn't fall through the cracks, but rather broke through the bounds of decency and what it means to be a human being.
19
''...who fell through the cracks of society...'' - One cannot fall through anything when they belong to a society that is bent on hate, violence and the ultimate extremism - killing.
I am also disappointed that there is another column from a person of privilege (regardless of ideology) that does not even mention the means to which the violence is carried out (firearms) and call for some sort of reduction/clamping down of said means.
We are all products of are environment and if we are bombarded daily with hate (especially from a President) and calls that ''other'' is to blame for all means of problems, then those that want to ''belong'' are going to lash out.
They didn't fall through the cracks, but rather broke through the bounds of decency and what it means to be a human being.
1
The nightmare of Homeland Security and the blowback of the War on Terror is when the mass killing is done NOT by a loner, but by someone recruited to a cause.
Suicide bombers don't act alone. They are rigged like a living bomb by a team.
The terrorists who kill so many in all of our wars act as teams, not loners.
In California, we already had a husband-wife team of shooters, December 2, 2015, when 14 people were killed and 22 others were seriously injured in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
Loners are a distinct problem, but there is a bigger problem lurking, coming our way, as blowback from our wars.
The problem Brooks defines here is the lesser problem, the one we'll wish we had if we keep on down this road.
3
How ironic that as the world becomes increasingly connected electronically, individuals are becoming increasingly disconnected from one another insofar as human interaction is concerned.
6
Another epistle in the sermon-book of David Brooks on community, and its central need to the emotional wellbeing of human beings. There’s a lot of truth in it generally, but I wonder whether its absence goes very far in explaining the murderous acts of the antisocial, the apparently politically-motivated and the murderously rageful.
It seems to me that it could explain the motivation of Stephen Paddock, the 64-year-old mass murderer who killed 58 people and wounded over 800 in Las Vegas last year – in an apparently apolitical rampage. Here was a highly intelligent man, a disengaged loner who for years had done nothing with his life but professional gambling. He may have awakened one day and realized what an empty life he had led, so out of step in his isolation with his potential as a human being. He apparently had no real rage, but may have wanted simply to make a mark, having realized that at 64 he wasn’t going to have the runway any longer required to earn legitimate distinction. And he had no connections to a community that might have acculturated him into a recognition of how depraved his contemplated actions really were.
But people have been disconnected from community for all of human history, in isolated agricultural and other types of solitude – did they feel a need to find urban numbers and murder them? Did they need to commit suicide in appreciable numbers? Were they forced to weave convoluted victimization myths and seek revenge against those whom they …
7
… blamed? For the lack of moderating and pacifying connections to community?
It seems to me we that we need to look at other risk factors to predict those who might be most at risk of committing what superficially appear to be politically-motivated, murderous rampages.
In America they are white, Christian (by upbringing even if not by serious conviction) and male. They tend not to be very intelligent even if they may not be below-average in IQ. They tend not to be physically attractive. They’ve been taught that they’re owed social perquisites by sole virtues of their complexion, their religious matrix and their gender. They find, usually early in life, that those qualities no longer are enough to grant them such perquisites, and they realize that they have no other inherent qualities that would earn distinction, or the capacities to develop such qualities. Yet they’ve also been taught that “winners” ARE distinguished in some manner.
What is the likely developmental arc of such individuals? Wouldn’t they actively shun a society that denies them the distinction they believe they’re owed but are denied and cannot earn? Wouldn’t they actively seek victimization myths that gave them a rationale for their circumstances and develop deep-seated hatred of those selected as scapegoats (not relative to living a life but relative to achieving what they’re taught is required distinction)?
How far is it from such a rageful mind-set to buying up weapons and looking to wreak vengeance?
6
I appreciate this article and agree with much of it. The part I have a hard time with is where Mr. Brooks states something to the effect of “we choose to be workaholics”. That is not the case in my life and the lives of those around me, and I don’t believe the data states people are choosing this state of affairs either. We are, myself included, working 1, 2, or even 3 jobs in order to keep afloat. And I hold a masters degree and work in mental health. But none of that negates the other truths that this article contains. Social isolation is a societal and cultural problem and I see the evils of it everyday in the lives of the people I treat. Thanks for discussing this.
18
Maybe David meant that people labor under the feeling that their corporate associates are “family”. Until they are let go in the two-quarters-out thinking that drives the short term thinking and stock options of CEOs. Then their family is gone, with no nurtured community friendships to fill the gap.
Hi David,
The materialists seem to have won the day. Too many of us are drowning in possessions and know more about our credit score then our neighbors. We can identify a thousand Brand logos, yet can’t identify five tree species based on a leaf. Convenience beats connection and efficiency to often damages the soul.
Do we learn to open our hearts to each other and the natural world or do we stockpile more weaponry and build the fence higher. We each get to choose every day.
Knowing you are lost can be a first step in finding yourself and turning our attention to building the kind of world we’d want for our children and our neighbors children.
9
There is no single cause or single profile of the solitary, lonely person. Some people are social rejects from earliest childhood .. and after years of rejection - either the subtle kind or the brutal kind - have learned to remain solitary (because nothing short of their continued isolation or suicide will placate their 'fellow' humans). And sometimes it's grey: rejection by most, acceptance by a few, and so while there might be a social 'bond' or sorts, it is highly tenuous. There is no cure for the human condition - except to stop perpetuating the species.
4
I believe well-laid out, diverse viewpoints are necessary and welcome, and this is a good example.
5
Families, workplaces and churches used to be venues for real world social connection - birthday parties, softball games, pancake breakfasts. Today, more and more of our daily interactions are characterized by remoteness, lacking physical connections as folks change jobs and homes so much more frequently. Family ties are stretched. David has pointed to a threatening symptom of the disease our society - yes, Trump is merely a symptom, not the underlying cause. Commit to building social connections locally in each of our communities - that is the path to cure.
8
@Bill Bluefish. Symptoms sometimes share the role of furthering a phenomenon and thereby become themselves part of the ongoing “cause.” As weakness results from infection, it’s effects accelerate the strength of the malady itself. Social connections won’t cure the root of our decline as a democratic and civilized people any more than they did in Central Europe in the 1930s. Trump is an “accelerant” of the decline as well as a symptom. His subtle messages are clear: second amendment people will know what to do if the election is rigged, opponents are really bad people and should be locked up and certain people should be “body slammed.” Kindly educational mentors won’t reverse the present phenomenon; the morally deranged loner will always be with us. The purveyors of hate and those verbally licensing them need to be defeated at the polls along with all of their meek allies.
Beautiful column. Just a bit off point.
I agree with most but not all. I would only add that isolation deliberate stoking and inflammation available guns....equals avoidable tragedy.
Even if we fix the isolation gap that many of us feel, the proliferation of guns is what escalated this from regrettable state of feeling into lives destroyed.
It doesn’t bely your greater point, which I love, but it’s like bringing out the lemons and only the lemons to demonstrate the reason why there is now lemon merengue pie being sold down the street.
Tons of people are lonely and even paranoid, and angry. Some subset of those may even be mentally ill. They’re not all shooters.... but add a gun into the mix and I can guarantee you that the likelihood of gun violence just went up exponentially.
First it’s about gun control... because even in the happiest of times, there are still people with mental health challenges.
Then it’s about mental health....
.... and then it’s about garden variety social malaise which is where your essay must resonated.
24
Thanks David. What you observe is very true. People who are cut off, isolated, but connected to social media, find a trove of like minded people in this realm of cyberspace. They are a faceless presence of viewpoints. It gives them the feeling they are connected via social media to all these people, so they do not feel they are isolated. As soon as they wake up in the morning, they check to see who and how many people responded to their social media posting - facebook instagram gob message boards twitter and whatever else is out there. They feed each other. They literally live in alternate parallel worlds. Even religion spirituality is fulfilled through cyberspace, no one needs to go anywhere to attend an e-sangha for instance, or listen to gospel or chants. Just download it, stream it, anytime anyplace.
8
Actually, I have been remembering when my father helped out with the Salk Vaccine Sugar Cube events. The distribution was free and community wide. The police forces were involved, malls and other public spaces were given freely. Doctors were available to talk to any parent who had a concern. Good and prevention all around.
And Dr Salk refused any compensation for his vaccine. None. Nada.
This is one part that we have lost. Government at its best and trust in other institutions.
Not Nirvana, by a long shot in that this is a white girl’s privelgef memory. I am not sure how it went down in other areas. But it was something.
The Golden Rule, tbe Beatitudes, the Four Noble Truths and other ideas- if we ALL followed just one and were kind to each other. What a difference that would make.
20
Mary in Ohio. What you write is exactly where our country was for sure, civics, respect for others and virtue was part of family and school teaching. In my home my father told us we were most special to him and my mom the same way all kids are most special to their parents. I heard the message, appreciated it then as now. It’s not so hard to teach our children right and wrong and all you experienced as I did. It’s important to be a good citizen and proud of your country too which is hard to be today as violent and mean spirited observed today.
1
Why don’t we weave some gun safety into the fabric of our society?
In most western societies loners fall to extreme ideologies or extreme ideologies form loners, most likely its a dual process.
But in no other western society have loners so easy access to mass killing weapons.
We need to show compassion, towards people who are lost but we also have to be prudent and prevent carnage through gun safety laws, it’s also a dual process.
A truly compassionate society actually doesn’t need guns to provide a false sense of security, a compassionate society is a safe society for all.
23
No Mr. Brooks, most of us have not bought into the fixed binaries you so love to create.
Most of us live somewhere in the middle of the continuum between individuality and community, calibrating our choices based on our interests and the degree of inclusion those around us extend, but never static or fixed in one extreme or the other.
So it has always been and so it likely shall always be.
18
@JBC does Brooks not acknowledge this very point with the following:
"It’s not between one group of good people and another group of bad people. The war runs down the middle of every heart. Most of us are part of the problem we complain about."
3
David consistently overestimate the curative power of words and underestimates the damaging power of the dollar wages of the working poor.
My guess now is I may not live long enough for him to read some decent macro-economics on the missing money which the last tax bill gifts to the ultra wealthy. Use that money instead for peoples living wages and suddenly depression, drug addiction, and even suicide will dramatically decline.
We need to distribute income like we did in the fifties, sixties and seventies to get whole again. Then hate will recede and optimism will return.
64
Your unifying vision, that of The American Dream providing for all people, no longer provides sufficiently much for sufficiently many. This should obviously be expected to cause "sociological and psychological" problems in many people, particularly those who identify most strongly with the individualistic ideals underlying said Dream.
But surely the roots of this failure of The Dream to provide are ideological and economical, no? I suspect that the big divide here is between the half of Brooks that clearly sees the naked failures of individualist approaches and the half that stubbornly refuses to admit that centralized solutions are required.
13
"Most of us bought into a radical individualism" ?
Of course, you meant "most of right-wing America," which extols as the ultimate virtue this notion of an atomic self.
54
“The war runs down the middle of every heart. Most of us are part of the problem that we complain about.”
Indeed. What’s so disheartening is to see just how easily a very large number of Americans have fallen prey to the forces of discord and division, how easily grown women and men have been influenced and galvanised by the madman on Pennsylvania Avenue.
13
How many roads must David Brooks walk down before he admits the problem is the Republican party that he refuses to disown?
The Republican party that stands in the way of sensible gun legislation that would stop exactly this kind of gun violence, and would reduce the number of gun-related suicides.
161
I think it's a recurring mental block, a complete denial on his behalf. To say that Brooks poo-poos current events is a total understatement. I imagine that as our current state of domestic Trump-inspired terrorists might someday march down our streets, Brooks would follow, pen in hand, noting just how liberating it all seemed, a true watershed moment for the disenfranchised.
3
@John And the corporate mindset of never being off work. Not that many people would have the 'workaholic' mindset if given a chance to work 8 hour days, but that ain't gonna happen. Pure republican ethos, baby, so now both parents have to work in order to have a couple of kids, own the house and 2 cars. Don't have the brains to make big bucks? "Too bad for you, go live in your van, Loser, you deserve to starve and die slowly." Time to get involved with your community? Most people don't even get enough sleep, let alone time to donate or enjoy a hobby. Plus, community outreach programs? Too expensive for republicans, let the church deal with it. (They only pay for political favors and military things.) Oh, you say you're tired of your religion not giving you any satisfaction? And why are they always asking for money? Well, you just don't believe hard enough, brother, just keep believing, and harder, and everything will be OK. David, quit flogging the dead horse. Republican ideology will breed this kind of Lonely Guy by the millions, so stop trying to pin it on "everyone's heart".
4
@rocker
Well put.
2
All of this may be true and toxic. But adding easy access to guns is just throwing fuel in the raging fire of emotional isolation leading to increased suicide, massacres or often both.
15
The "chief struggle of the day" is also cultural - about truth, evidence, science, letting people make their own decisions.
6
The is much to admire in this column, especially the hopeful optimism that we can all be positive agents of change. (Sounds like Obama but to say that would be heretical for Brooks). But again, Brooks refuses to call out Trump and the Republicans for shredding our social contract and our political ethos. It is almost as if Brooks believes that there is no relationship between what he sees as our economic wealth and our epidemic of loneliness, suicide, and drug addiction. Our corporations have sold out the American worker and vast swaths of the American mind just so they could maximize their profits. And Republican politicians have been their handmaidens. Zuck and Facebook are the perfect examples of this. Facebook claims it is bringing people together even though it is clearly among the most divisive forces the world has ever known, and as long as the profits roll in nothing will change. In the 1950s people did believe that what was good for GM was good for Americans. Nowadays, we all know that what is good for corporate America is bad for Americans. Brooks, in his zeal to be a uniter, refuses to acknowledge the deep economic roots of our social and political crisis. Are we supposed to think that Trump and his merry band of thieves care one whit about Americans like the Pittsburgh shooter or the sad magabomber. They don't. All they want is to enrich themselves and consolidate their power. Brooks knows this but won't admit it.
74
He's not a lonely, isolated man. He had a number of acquaintances beginning with our president who nurtured his hate, gave it a vocabulary, a focus; he echoed the president's words in one of his hate-filled messages. He had people who enabled him - Fox News, Steve King, Chris Farrell. He had a multitude of friends on Gab whose messages he could scroll through on an hourly basis, all encouraging the hate he was nursing. It's too easy to call him isolated. It lets all of them off of the hook. If we thought of him as a terrorist cell, we would be rounding up all of these friends and acquaintances and interrogating them, looking for the connection and holding them as well as him responsible for the attack. But no, it's easier to paint him as a lone wolf than see the culpability of those who have created the current political climate.
171
Feel lonely or want to help those who are lonely? Try doing some community service. You will be surprised how many new friends you will have, and you might be a friend to someone who really needs one.
1
I like “rippers” and “weavers.” Very sticky. Family and community is where you find it. I happen to believe that means face-to-face and not digitally. Could be work, could be yoga class, or the dog park, or your actual family. Screen time allows the compassion, empathy and diplomacy muscles to atrophy. We thrive on outrage and “otherwise.” That can’t be healthy. It’s only when I’m talking with Mark at the dog park (his pug’s name is Tator Tot) that I know he’s a vet, a retired teacher, cares for his ex wives who has cancer with an amazing wit) am I likely to REALLY listen and try to understand a different political view. Online, I would have dismissed him easily as a crack pot. I don’t. I can’t. because I know him and he’s part of my dog park tribe. Less screen time, more face time is where we’ll replace fear with love.
17
@Diana Wilson
You could not be more right. Screen time and social media are destroying man's inherent empathy and depriving kids of the chance to develop necessary social skills. Until we decide to unplug America's youth, the problem will only grow worse.
As Patrick Deneen wrote, Liberalism failed because it succeeded. Born from a false anthropology that man was solitary and selfish in the fictional state of nature, liberalism has successfully molded people into the nature it claims to be born from. Hence our lives have become solitary, nasty, brutish and - at least for those without means - short. The truth is that we are not naturally selfish, self sufficient beings. We spend more of our lives in a state of dependency than self sufficiency.
4
@Sean Wait.........I thought we Liberals were supposed to be 'Commies', and conservatives 'rugged individualists'. Now the meme has changed?
Now the lonely and disaffected have the media, 24 hrs a day, to tell them who to hate and show them that they are not alone in their hate, and tell them that guns and violence are the way forward.
Stop avoiding the obvious, Mr Brooks. The haters have always been there, but they have never been better encouraged.
27
The new cold war is between those who believe society is guided by the pursuit of fulfillment through laissez faire capitalism against a system of governance that does not let the pursuit of material wealth determine the course of its people. Rather we could have a government that tamps down the dog-eat-dog brutality of a life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" and encourages and allows its citizens an ability to create a life of meaning, substance and higher purpose than the almighty dollar.
6
How much meaning is there supposed to be for someone digging ditches, clearing sewers, collecting carts at Walmart or stripping in a men’s revue show? Like all in life, happiness and purpose must be earned.
1
This is a fine column. And most certainly Brooks is up to it. While not a fluke, it is refreshing to see.
Thanks.
5
It might be useful to look at the difference between Europe, with a dropping suicide rate, and the US, with a rising one. Brooks does this and with his usual finger wagging, misses the point entirely. Europe also has an epidemic of loneliness and mental illness. What it does not have is guns.
I don’t bring this up to turn it into yet another round of guns good/bad. I bring this up to show, frankly, how lazy the thinking in this column is. Brooks writes the same column over and over again, and doesn’t bother to look at the facts critically.
Gun violence is a public health issue. This doesn’t conflict with the 2nd Amendment. I am strongly pro-choice, but that doesn’t mean I want to see more and more abortions performed each year. Supporting free speech doesn’t mean you faithfully share every bizarre conspiracy theory you see on Facebook.
We can’t solve problems if we don’t frame them correctly. Let’s address loneliness, sure, but let’s not pretend this is the proximate factor behind gun massacres.
53
@Mercury S
Thank you, that’s the point. Guns are just not easy to get here in Europe!
“Most of us bought into a radical individualism …”
The addition of the unnecessary adverb “radical” is Mr. Brooks tell — a hint that unwittingly exposes his worldview and which undergirds his premise — individual aspirations, absent a legitimate dogma, are suspect and likely to undermine all that is good and true in society.
It’s a viewpoint that has been introduced repeatedly by the right to demonize citizens who have the temerity to step out of line and question a questionable status quo.
What’s ironic is that David’s conclusion that “ there are many more weavers, people who yearn to live in loving relationships and trusting communities” describes perfectly the worldview of the left — not the authoritarian worldview of the right.
Please, Mr. Brooks, you can’t steal second base while keeping one foot on first — be brave… make the leap!
3
Brooks predicted Trump may be impeached or resign in one year. The ones who can impeach are clinging to their seats for safety denied ordinary Americans.
5
Consumer capitalism commodifies human value in terms of consumption. Corporate capitalism commodifies labor, destroying workers’ organizations. Conservatives want to force all education and charity to flow through religious organizations, even granting religious rights to corporations to trump workers’ rights.
We need a visionary movement to make America greater than ever, forward looking, not the backward looking MAGA.
8
"Every year nearly 45,000 Americans respond to isolation and despair by ending their lives. Every year an additional 60,000 die of drug addiction. Nearly twice as many people die each year of these two maladies as were killed in the entire Vietnam War." This is shocking, David. Thank you for bringing our attention to this horrific fact. You are right that loneliness, deracination, and isolation are finally at the heart of much of the violence in this country.
7
False equivalence. People choose to kill themselves and to try drugs, they didn’t choose to go to Vietnam. They were simply fulfilling the obligation to serve that every 18 year old man has.
Very perceptive. Thank you, Mr. Brooks.
1
Maybe there is something to this since there is no rhyme or reason to the suicide rate, government systems and economic systems. But, there are plenty of low income and developing countries below the US on suicide rate charts. The fact that Fox and Rush stream evil into homes everyday cannot help. They warp minds.
3
I have lost family members to chemical imbalances in the brain that defied treatment and resulted in suicide. None died by gunshot. Maybe someday David Brooks will gird up his loins and correlate the alarming suicide rates in the United States to the proliferation of firearms. It's a lot easier to have a change of heart and phone a friend or dial 911 after swallowing pills or slitting a wrist than it is after pulling the trigger of a gun you put to your head in a moment of despair. GUNS. It's the guns.
10
you're falling into the 'it's both sides' trap. we have so few resources for people with addiction and mental health issues because the right (fox news et al) has spread lies about 'those people' in order to scare people, knowing that fear helps them win elections they'd lose if the debate was about things like wealth distribution and health care (how many more addicts would be getting life-saving help if their states opted for medicaid expansion?). we now know what happens when the right takes power: massive tax cuts for the super-rich, unceasing attempts to shred the safety net (and unceasing lies about the fact that they're doing it). and if that isn't enough, the right's perfectly ok with denying the reality of climate change, meaning that young people will likely inherit a world characterized by cataclysmic events. don't forget massive debt too, in no small part generated to make the already super-rich even richer. no wonder young people are killing themselves!
15
Don’t forget the cost of college and real estate. There is nothing for them to look forward to.
8
There were plenty of "weavers" in the Tree of Life synagogue. They already were "in loving relationships and trusting communities."
They didn't need "training" or "strategies" or a "call to arms".
They needed a government that would protect them. Not a government led by a conspiracy theory spewing white nationalist. Not a government that has sold it's to soul to the NRA.
There is only one economically advanced country that suffers from repeated mass killings. Does "protracted loneliness, loss of meaningful work, feeling pressured and stressed in the absence of community", hardly an American monopoly, explain the striking difference in mass murder rates? Or is it the unique prevalence of weapons designed specifically to kill large numbers of people, quickly?
14
This article is an outrage.
We live in a time where we finally have a huge excess of time to build community. We have the ability to have time for community yet we have an economic system called neoliberalism which is neither new nor liberal. We have a philosophy that worships material wealth and sees poverty as a crime yet we produce far more than we consume .
Fifteen years ago I talked about a five day week three week days and a two day weekend but because an insane philosophy called American conservatism Americans work more hours and have less time for community and affirming others value.
Every time experiments in guaranteed income are initiated conservatives sabotage the experiment because they know health education and productivity increase.
We have everything but time to think, time to share, and time to do what primates evolved to do. We are insane we develop a technology to allow us the time to use our oral skills and share the fruits of progress.
We don't need to grow the economy we need to develop sustainability, we don't need more stuff we need less. We need music, dance, art and purpose and purpose comes from a society that affirms our humanity as the most important thing we have to contribute. We need to say that what we want is not your stuff but you.
I live in Quebec and we greet each other with a hug to affirm your very presence is a reward.
7
Sure, there is good and not so good in all of us, but that's not the same thing as inciting violence. Another "both sides" failure.
7
David Brooks sees the synagogue slaughter for what it was: the eruption of a festering boil of a life gone wrong. We humans are not made to be alone. Here in America, loneliness is aggravated by poverty, joblessness, and capitalism, in which one's value as a human being is equated with one's net worth. Mass shootings could be reduced by better gun control, but the real sickness is in how we fail to take care of our most isolated citizens. A crackpot doesn't kill only himself and his victims, he takes away a part of our whole society. In the immortal words of John Donne: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."
6
Isolation is dangerous and an isolated christian american white person creating murder and havoc is charged with an hate crime. If it were a single muslim american person then they would be a terrorist. Not charging this person as a terrorist lets off all of the people that gave him support for his ideology. Also in the news is the way China has taken extremists and put them in reeducation camps to give them the skills to live harmoniously in society and practice their religion without harming others. In the West it is considered terrible that these extremists are reeducated by the state. It seems that the western idea is to leave them isolated to form extreme ideas or to be harnessed by the Madrassas funded by Wahhabist Saudis in the name of "Freedom of Religion". Surely this terrorist attacking our fellow citizens because of their religion would have benefited from reeducation by a state run institution. Maybe this isolated individual would have learned a skill and found work and friends. Instead we isolate people by our own apathy in the name of freedom of thought. Surely this terrorist would have been better off if he were recognized as a possible loner and interred for a period until it was established that he no longer had extremist tendencies. In the west we isolate and in China they communicate. It is about time we cleaned up our own backyard before making trouble for others countries who are trying prevent extremism and terrorism by teaching skills and tolerance.
1
This is almost as bad as messing with our health care.
2
Brooks often puts out dud columns, but it is worth reading through them because every so often he strikes on something so fundamental and true that it takes your breath away. Thank you David - I think that a great many people feel the loneliness and alienation permeating our society at the core of their beings, and having the phenomenon explained so clearly and succinctly helps bring perspective, clarity, and hope. Your work is extremely valuable!
4
The background of isolation, loneliness and alienation that Mr. Brooks writes about is well documented. Unfortunately his optimistic message at the end is more hope than reality. There is nothing happening in the bulk of our country that is bringing people towards a more supportive way of living. There is a loss of extended family structure. Those who are ambitious and well educated often have to leave their home towns to succeed in their careers. Then their are the people who form a growing group nearly hopelessly abandoned by society. They grow up without a trusting family unit, leave third rate schools uneducated and end up on drugs or in prison. The moral and political decay and divisions within the United States is accelerating and unless there is some outside force that changes the direction where we are headed the final result will be the end of society that we have known and enjoyed.
2
Getting rid of the guns would help too. The 2nd amendment is a quaint vestige, and it's time to get rid of it or go back to interpreting it the way it was meant: giving the states, not the citizens, the right to maintain militias.
8
Again, a Brooks column that is largely true but beside the point. Social isolation is a major problem in the United States. But there are more direct causes for most of what ails us at the moment. The intentional spreading of hatred by politicians, starting with the president. Poor health care delivery. Non-existent mental health treatment. And atrocious social services all around. All in the service of giving more money to the richest Americans. Let’s talk about the forest, David. Enough with the trees , already.
107
I was really with you until the last paragraph. It is just a polite contrivance to blame lack of knowledge. The old greek way to explain away akrasia does not contribute to the conversation. Instead its a dodge; a way to explain the problem of evil where we are All blameless and redeemable. It's nothing but an emotional crutch that gets in the way of actually solving the problem. As is the portrait of the lonely-disconnected-man-shooter that Brooks draws. So long as you rely on this myth that they just simply don't know the pleasure of social connection outside these extremists, you won't really be understand how people come to be that way.
3
Cause and effect are difficult to demonstrate with any degree of confidence. Maybe we can agree that mental illness can feature a combination of factors, including chemical and socio-economic influences. But when we look at factors as simple as no longer providing care for the mentally ill, the decline in living wages, the pushing of drugs like Oxycontin by pharmaceutical companies, and the rising costs of housing and health care, it's hard not to conclude that a major influence has been the application of trickle-down economics by bought politicians.
12
And yet a whole lot of Americans suffer psychic wounds precisely because they lack economic opportunity—and an important reason for that blockage is the class war waged on behalf of those who insist that low low taxes for them is more important than anything, be it public schools, a decent social safety net, or long-neglected infrastructure maintenance. So please do not minimize the economic role in increasing or mitigating social/psychological ills, Mr. Brooks.
47
If you want to blame violence on mental health issues and lack of community, you should be against junk health plans that don’t cover mental health care, and should not penalize localities for taxing their residents to pay for parks, public libraries, community centers and excellent schools where people connect, communicate, and learn from each other. Temporary health plans that don’t have mental health parity are now to be renewable for three years, raising the cost of mental health care for everyone else, and possibly bankrupting people with junk insurance if someone in their family has a psychiatric emergency. The limit to the SALT deduction raises Federal taxes by millions for my town, which has been a real community since the 18th Century.
Note that the Minutemen helped launch our nation with muskets, not AR-15s with bump stocks or handguns with silencers.
Man up, David. Take a side in the battle for the soul of our country.
194
The mass shooter who is a middle-aged white man, a loner, and a gun fanatic, is not a new phenomenon. Statistically, this is the profile of most mass shooters, and has been so for many decades. And this mass-shooter phenomenon probably has nothing to do with radical individualism; if you examine most of the known mass shooters in the last half century or so, you’ll probably find very few who engage in philosophical reflection and who debate, with themselves or others, the merits of an individualistic life style versus a more communitarian social contract. Mostly, they’re just angry; someone else is responsible for all their misfortunes; and that someone (or someones) must die.
I whole-heartedly agree that we need more opportunities to get together as members of a community; but I don’t think that has much to do with solitary shooters.
18
David, in a word, yes. I think you have described very astutely the central problem of our society. Isolation. Indeed, it is a SPIRITUAL isolation. The human spirit needs to be connected to other people in a day-to-day rhthym that makes life livable. All the old tools we had for this have fallen by the wayside into the past and we have not yet conjured new tools to replace the old ones. Some would point to social media as a new tool but let’s be blunt - that was a mirage. Social media isolates us even further.
6
The line you describe doesn’t necessarily run through the middle.
In the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn writes that the line separating good and evil runs through every human heart, and that this line gets pushed toward one side or the other depending on a person’s history and circumstances.
In current events, I see people with much more evil than good in their hearts, gathering more power and more attention, badly affecting the lives of the rest of us. Better hearts have a big job ahead, starting by going out to vote.
12
@Lowell Hill
Back during the Second Punic War while attending university, those of us studying to be secondary school teachers were required to take courses in behavioral psychology. I’m pretty sure that in one of these courses I was taught:
“There are five basic human emotions — anger, fear, hurt, love and joy. All other emotional states are simply the degree of these basic emotions or combinations of them.”
I’m not trying to contradict your well-written comment, Lowell, but it occurs to me that “evil” is not on the list.
Killing a dog for the fun of it may be termed an “evil” act, but the emotion(s) motivating the perpetrator of such a crime is anger, or fear, or a combination of the two. Or hurt. A terrible hurting inside. Who knows?
Actions are good or evil. People are driven to do good and evil things by the emotions listed above.
No one has evil in their heart.
People who cannot bear the fear and hurt and anger in their minds sometimes commit horrible crimes, but these crimes come not from evil inside them.
1
Keen insights here, especially from Hari. I’m convinced that the only real solution to mass murders is for communities to redevelop where neighbors got to know each other a little. When it gets around that someone is socially isolated and living in such a way as to raise concern that this person should not have access to a gun, neighbors should notify local police, who should respond. There are just too many guns out there to ever effectively control. Something like 1200 people have died in mass shootings since the 1966 U of Texas Clock Tower. But nearly 30,000 die gun deaths every year from suicide, crime, and accidents. Why is it only in the context of mass shootings that people shout for the government to do something? Why doesn’t the media report anything (on a national level ) about the other 30,000 victims who are not killed by guns but aren’t victims in mass shootings?
3
I haven’t read that any of his acquaintances knew he owned guns, or had extreme views about those of the Jewish faith. He kept himself to himself, with no wife, partner, or friends. His life as a truck driver may have accentuated his isolation. His only meaning in life was achieved by seeing himself as a warrior for what he saw as his racially-defined culture, through an online group of individuals who didn’t know each other. Very sad.
People are like sheep dogs, in that if you do not give the sheep dog a job he will find one—and you may not like what the dog settles on.
This man has had no life. As bad as I feel for those murdered, they had lives, and families, and friends to remember them. This man will only be known for murdering defenseless worshippers in their tabernacle.
But Brooks is correct in pointing out what we all already know—that there is much alienation, loneliness, isolation, and a feeling of meaningless in our society.
Most kill themselves by suicide or substance addiction rather than kill, and we don’t talk about them. But a few go the other direction, like this man. Are we not all responsible to try to befriend the friendless, in the same way we try to feed and clothe those in need. But you can’t befriend someone with a monetary contribution.
I am not disputing what David Brooks is saying re a growing amount of individuals with feelings of dejection, rejection, and worthlessness. Is it nature or nurture, the age-old question? I would venture to say it is both, an inherent propensity for mental disorders and diseases coupled with an environment which exacerbates the unstable psyche.
Can society do something about it? Yes, but it can not do it alone. This world has become increasingly complex and less ethical and moral. For my friends across the aisle, we need money and resources and government leadership to get this huge undertaking of treating the mentally ill off the ground and running.
But there is one more issue which must be met, perhaps a band-aid yet nevertheless crucial. Whether it is his Republican ideology or he just plain forgot, Mr. Brooks should have focused on the absolute need for, as Mr. Kristof wrote about today "gun safety." That means standing up to the NRA, this administration and its Congress. That means saying that we no longer have a choice in the matter, that we must stop making our own "weapons of mass destruction" so available as to get in the hands of the mentally ill.
16
I agree with every thing you say, Mr. Brooks. But go further.
How do the weavers wage this war? When huge forces are poised to be unleashed, thanks to selfish politicians and media echo chambers. When so many of us are in pain and not prepared for a principled fight. I wonder if anyone has the answer.
I disagree with Brooks that social isolation and concomitant depression are not about politics and ideology. Social alienation is very much a product of the American capitalist and cultural ethos, which has resulted in the "spreading derangement of the American mind." Both political parties have in their own way promoted the rugged individualist as the archetypal American, albeit Democrats have at least acknowledged the unfortunate consequences of this mindset while Republicans have turned the blind eye. Brooks call for re-creating community/family still falls into the trap of the rugged individualists who reach out to those lonely boys. That is not going to work unless government works to restructure the systemic forces that force people apart, which will require -- among other changes -- universal health care, a living wage and healthy environment for all.
Despite his compassion, Brooks is still that die-hard conservative who believes that government does not have/should not have a meaningful role to play in helping people, other than the rich, achieve a meaningful life, which of course includes a loving family and community. Brooks disposition it seems to me is one of the lonely man.
6
David frets that people making individual choices will be the downfall of society. Because there is nothing like oppressive peer pressure against non-conformists to give meaning to one's life. He points to mass murders as evidence of his theory.
Here's a simpler answer to why mass shooters are loners: they're jerks. They've slapped away every hand that has reached out to them and then wonder why no one talks to them. They are socially isolated not because of some cultural ethos of rugged individualism but because of their anti-social behavior. No amount of stoop sitting or bowling league participation will change that.
On the other hand, if we didn't have a president who trucks in violent rhetoric and who regularly demeans others for fun and profit, perhaps fewer of these loners would stock pile easily available weapons and go on a shooting spree to turn rhetoric into deplorable action.
19
David
Keep repeating repeating repeating your message. We all know where blame lies. I’m sure David agrees, but more importantly he is trying to move beyond blame to think about how we can make things better.
1
The lonely man in society was probably best described by the French author, Albert Camus, in his 'Outsider'. We are now living the Technological Revolution where our lives are being monitored to a great extent by computers.
While the content of this essay addresses loneliness, you omit to include a growing affinity for violence and depressing topics.
On Fridays, a friend in South America sends this other subscriber to the New York Times, a list of movies up-date. If you have a moment in your window, Mr. Brooks, take a look at the viewing fare last Friday, October 26, while keeping in mind that we are celebrating Halloween.
A friend in the field of Public Health earlier wanted to forward a 'depressing' web on medical care for the elderly. I said no. Lively, brilliant, the above once wrote, 'you can never be lonely when you have dogs'. Whatever happened to The Blue Bird of Happiness?
To sum it up we were having an exchange on pragmatic matters without morbidity, and she has nearly taken a terrorist bullet, bounced back from malaria, etc.
When was the last time you heard of a woman, with a machine-gun opening fire on a crowd? I have not had the heart to read about this guy who sounds as if he were wearing an invisible Nazi-uniform, but you reminded me to send a tree to a friend of mine. She will understand.
5
One quibble: “Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community.”
No! The American form of capitalism forces most of us into a workaholic ethos...
21
"It's the economy, stupid." David, as you dabble in psychology, mix in some Maslow. People don't start worrying about a sense of belonging unless physiological and safety needs are met. Despite select macro-indicators that economic life is peachy, the accelerating march of income inequality and the likelihood of less access to healthcare wracks the majority with anxiety about their basic needs. Trump's boogeyman rhetoric keeps the focus at those levels too. The tribes are huddling not to find community (that's so 2008!), but to confront the real or imagined 'other.'
8
Starting to get closer David: "On the one side are those forces that sow division, discord and isolation." And of those forces, social-networking services and their attendant gadgetry: small-screened smartphones and headphones and ear-piece mics play a huge role. Why? Because the whole marketing plan behind SNSs (and smartphones by the way) is to superficially declare the service is going to "connect" everyone, park one square into a "radical individualism" of supposedly unlimited-connection that not only feeds loneliness but also actually promotes more loneliness, as the individual's "power" to manipulate the technology increases. It's all about creating one's own "protracted loneliness," for loneliness sells to the lonely more loneliness...the vicious cycle of a gift that keeps on giving, or in this case, keeps on taking, and taking and taking. One's physical, in-place contact with others, one's interpersonal social skills, one's personal information and location, one's attention span, and one's ability to 'stand under' the other in order to understand have ALL been leveraged by the shiny-thing technology that counts on protracted loneliness as a marketing strategy. Indeed: “Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially,...." and then one either buys more tech or hooks-up again virtually and viciously again, and again, and again..... We feed the beast, and it gets colder and colder and colder.
3
We could afford to ignore the sole loners. A country of 330 million people or the world with more than 7 billion residents shouldn’t be afraid of the fringe elements.
We should be terrified of our “best and the brightest”. When they kill, they kill by the dozens of million.
Have you forgotten the WWI? Launched over the assassination by a teenage shooter of a prince, it killed more than twenty millions people and maimed the same number.
The best and brightest among us were just too stupid to find the working compromise.
More than a century later they have failed to recognize own stupidity. Even today our history books claim that the Great War was unavoidable as if we were struck by the meteorite from the sky of a similar size to the one that eradicated the dinosaurs millions of years ago,
The same kind of stupidity and carnage happened with the WWII. During the Cold War we came to the verge of extinction and self-destruction.
Even today we are waging the longest conflict in our national history.
Are we going to blame it on the lonely looser too?
7
Hatred is learned. No one is born hating or is born a bigot. One learns.
And hate is always, and only, legitimized from the top down: parents, teachers, religious and/or political leaders.
6
This is more than The Cold War. This is American Civil War 2020
9
Brooks love to be the dreamer. He rarely calls out the GOP for their leading role in these awful behaviors promoting hate and division. Remember that the GOP would not allow a vote on Garland and then they presented a nominee without vetting him. A nominee who was credibly charged with sexually inappropriate behavior and lying repeatedly to congress. A man who is a complete partisan. They also have a Senate leader whose only goal was to block anything a president wanted to do regardless of whether it was an idea of his own party. And finally, you have Trump himself, the leader of the GOP party. He conspired with foreign entities to win the election. He created the birther nonsense. He spoke about grabbing women by the pussy. He beat his ex wife. He slept with numerous women, including a porn star, with a new born at home. He defended white supremacists even after they ran over a woman with a car. He continually attacks the free press. He calls his opponents childish names. And now, his supporters that he incited have killed or attempted to kill numerous Americans. And yet, he just continues to attack migrants that are not even in the country. And worse yet, he and the GOP whine that he is the victim. If this was the law, you would say the Dems have committed a few misdemeanors and the GOP have committed a countless number of felonies.
19
@CA Dreamer
That woman who was "run over" was killed. And yet, Trump said there were "good people on both sides." No! Nazis are not "good people." We fought a bloody World War with thousands upon thousands of casualties to defeat Nazis and a similar philosophy in Japan.
I feel we need to expect less from our government and stop setting up our false hopes for disappointments. Our government is failing us because the politicians who are reasonable mature centrists cannot get any votes. We expect too much razzle-dazzle and have no time for calm compromising voices. We get what we give which is false expectations.
Personally I feel happiest when I give out of my loneliness to wherever I already get love from others. Lonely people need to be of service to others. Nothing makes me happier than on Sunday morning when I go to my Quaker meetings early enough to plug in the coffee machine, set out mugs, get hugs. I enjoy other kindred spirits who show up early every week, we connect, we get deep, I am never without a friend to talk to. We do not allow cell phones. We limit time so everybody can share. We stay afterward and visit.
Often on a Saturday evenings I avoid being alone, now as a single retired guy of 73 I go out to my groups and stay out of the self pity.
Some things the government just cannot fix. A lonely guy needs to get out among others who do service and he needs to serve to learn that he too is one with a loving spirit.
6
@Bill Evans
I am a moderate democrat who believes that immigration must be decided by the majority. I am also upset with the leadership of the Democratic Party, including Nancy Pelosi, because she has forced her beliefs upon us. What if she had believed that everyone who holds down a job should be protected from health care bankruptcy. She might have actually done our middle class some good. Instead, she took the Karl Marx path. We will "pay any price, bear any burden...."
1
Vintage Brooks. Very timely, very sociological. His diagnoses, however, are usually far better than the solutions he sees and proposes. One issue Brooks really doesn't address about the loneliness epidemic is the increasing reliance upon electronic media for "community." This is especially true among young Americans, and Brooks notes the rise in suicide rates for that group.
2
It's an opinion, this opinion piece. I respect that (do you hear that anymore?)
I lead an isolated life and fight depression. Please don't paint all loners as fascists.... I am an independent and I abhor both extremes.
This Jewish story, as bad as it is, explains a lot to me about Germany in 1933. This all gets worse and worse. I've asked the Times to pull all my comments because I fear one day they will be used against me. I fear fascism.
We are at the brink of a unprecedented loss of life even being as wealthy as we are (just as in Europe in 1914).
But how do we fix this via the weavers? The weavers are now standing apart watching the rippers "go to town." As you said, "it's easier to rip than weave." Are we on a precipice?
Is it time to stock up on food and water?
1
Lone gunmen who carry out mass shootings are hardly representative of our society as a whole. As depressingly frequent as these events may seem murders on the whole are down dramatically from the peak years of the early 1970s through mid-1990s. We're still by civilized norms a violent society. And we do a miserable job of identifying and deterring the misfit-crackpot-loser types like Bowers and the pipe-bomb guy from Florida whose name I have already mercifully forgotten. But, generally speaking, and by most objective measures, more people are now better off materially than at any point in human history. Are we somehow less well off spiritually because the definitions and expectations of community have evolved? I tend to doubt it.
2
There is always a guy, a lonely guy, a deeply insecure loser who is attracted to extremist ideologies. A pathetic, weak man who is desperate to do something and will say anything to cover for the insignificance of his self and the non-existence of his soul. And today, that lonely, weak loser is the President of the United States of America.
95
And don't forget: Trump
3
Were the Nazis just lonely men or were they emboldened by their treacherous leader’s vile rhetoric and acts? Is a Trump rally full of lonely men or is it a mob emboldened by their leader’s vile rhetoric and acts? It seems to me that these criminal acts are not excusable because the people who committed these crimes would have known better if they weren’t provided cover or emboldened by those in charge.
35
South of the border the desire is there to live the American DREAM. But in America itself 100 thousand Americans die each year from drug overdose or suicide - they were living the American NIGHTMARE. Seems America is fake, not for real. Something isn't clicking from Sea to Shining Sea. But what?
1
What Brooks still, STILL, fails to confront is that there actually is a difference in the points-of-view at issue. There actually are ideas that are superior to other ideas.
republicans;I can scream and moan about so-called “...mobs...” of really scary women confronting Senators in the halls f Congress. Meanwhile, Republican elected officials actively disenfranchise folks who might vote DEmocratic and right wing white males open fire in churches and gas stations and synagogues, always against defenseless people.
There are actually differences in approach there and one set of ideas. Is actually better than the other. trump told jokes about his hair having been wrecked by the rain and when during he long, sad presser Under AF1. That is the presser he gave about the massacre.
There actually is right and wrong to be discerned there and I can discern. Even if I never watch FOX.
I get it. Brooks is having massive cognitive dissonance because conservatism-the cause to which he has devoted his life- has gone totally nuts. Recognizing that, however, is he First Step to Recovery-for Brooks and, maybe, for the nation.
You know, it actually is possible that the nation will not be able to withstad the strain of constant, and now literally deadly, attacks from the Right on the rest of us and on the Institutions of American life.
40
Trump, the Republican Party, and Fox News incited and channeled their base’s white racial anxiety to believe Jews are funding the brown caravan that will destroy America, which the killer referenced. Brooks points toward the killer’s isolation. Why don’t loner American mass murderers slaughter Wall Street brokers or white people at rural county fairs? Why do they always seem to target a black church, Sikhs, women, gays, schoolchildren? Is Brooks’ analysis a more individuated and profound explanation or just a bankrupt attempt at political diversion and cover up of the racist, sexist tide that threatens to destroy America?
35
This article is completely wrong. It's an effort to hide or
remove guilt from conservatives and Republicans who
are destroying our country.
123
Nice writing, Mr. Brooks. But, you failed to mention the greatest problem we face: GUNS. The unholy marriage between the NRA and their well paid lackeys, the GOP, brought us here. A lonely guy is sad. A lonely guy with Guns is terrifying. They are just one Job loss or female rejection away from carnage. And unlike Women, they don’t quietly swallow pills and die . No, they must go out in a blaze of Murder. A rage filled, FOX stoked John Wayne, on Meth. Sure, people are murdered by other means. But for MASS Murder, Guns are the preferred choice. The deplorable choice. VOTE in November. BE the change.
28
Many hateful people are not lonely. In fact, the most dangerous hateful people are the charismatic and social ones, because they have friends and supporters. If the Pittsburgh shooter had been more social, he might have been able to recruit accomplices. Or, he might have been able to organize politically, run for office, and enact his hateful ideas towards Jews and refugees into law, resulting in many more deaths and suffering than a shooting spree.
Our problem is with racist individuals, not social disconnection. If you give racists social connections, you just enable them to network and amplify their power.
10
Tonight we read about the killer in Pittsburgh being arraigned, and the death penalty's on the table after he killed 11 people while others hid and cowered in dark rooms and hallways.
5200 US troops are being sent to the border to confront a ragtag group (caravan) of people fleeing the most impoverished and violent nations in our hemisphere.
Last week the FBI captured a man who had been sending bombs to prominent Democrats, and who, reportedly, had a list of many more he wanted to harm.
Congress sits on its hands, twiddles its thumbs, looks the other way, and accepts a paycheck each month for not doing their job of putting a check or balance on a president who is whipping crowds into a frenzy, condoning violence, attacking the press, denigrating American citizens, and all while simultaneously hand-holding with dictators in oppressive societies.
People are shouting threats at people speaking Spanish, or shooting African Americans in a store.
Where is our leadership?
Some days it's just too hard to read the news. It looks like evil is winning and that nothing you do will matter.
Yes, I've already voted. And I've encouraged many others to do the same.
I've written to senators, signed petitions, and have gone to church. I make donations, teach, and am being interviewed for volunteer work.
I just want this daily / weekly madness to stop so that I can eat, read, sleep, work and enjoy life again rather than living with this continual angst.
74
"There’s always one guy, who fell through the cracks of society, who lived a life of solitary disappointment and who one day decided to try to make a blood-drenched leap from insignificance to infamy."
I read that and immediately thought of Lee Oswald. We've bred a new generation of these Oswald-types, armed to the teeth with military weaponry and their anger toward society fueled by easily accessible social media sites.
This is not good at all.
3
There were approximately 1.2 billion human beings on Planet Earth in 1851 when The New York Times was born.
As of today (Monday, October 29, 2018), there are approximately 7.6 billion Earthlings and The New York Times is now 167 years old.
While I can appreciate what Mr. Brooks is trying to do with this Op-Ed piece, I am confused as to why he does not mention the phenomenology of Donald Trump’s 45th Presidency here not even once.
Is it because Think Tank-ism discourages recognizing obvious patterns in regards to simple cause and effect principles?
Or is it because Brooks disagrees with the “fortune favors the bold” meme?
As K.C. of Aberdeen, WA once sang, “When I was an alien, cultures weren't opinions”.
Oh, how I long for the 2020s to be the decade when The Muppets’ Rainbow Connections become daily realities.
Thank you, David.
2
Me. brooks, When have you reached out to the lonely boy? I’m guessing never.
Talk is easy.
3
@mike
That kind of cynicism and divisiveness is why we're in this mess. Sheesh!
Another set of horrors. Brooks is on the case.
He was right again!
Validated in horror! Those damned liberals!
Despicable.
After every horror Brooks can be counted on to tout his vindication.
2
I think things will become not only demonstratively worse for not only the lonely and dispossessed, but also for most Americans, when the new wave of banking deregulation coupled with greed of those running the financial institutions, and thus running the government itself, bring about the next big recession/depression. I believe the lower 90% won’t be able to bailout the upper 10% as was done after the 2008 “free market economy” collapse.
8
Whew! Great Piece.
Many people are victims of their extended exposure to the media. Eventually, unable to clearly see the three dimensional reality around them. Isolation certainly exacerbates this.
The lack of resources for mental health services including community outreach is a sad fact, as is the culture and availability of guns.
Speaking of resources, as of 11 September 2018 320 F 35 fighter jets have been built at a cost of +/- $100 million each. There are plans to eventually build 2400 of them.
No wonder we do not have the resources to work on solving some of these problems effectively.
21
Aside from the bodies and the lonely, solitary, disenfranchised and insignificant man, there's also one other thing at these massacres: guns. Without guns, people might throw a punch instead of raining down death.
Without guns, the nightly news would be ten minutes long.
There will always be disturbed people out there, people who have mental illness, begrudge a neighbor, despise a politician or just want to go out in a blaze of glory.
Guns empower the powerless. They're the answer to every grudge and every perceived unfairness. They make the weak powerful. They turn the merely disturbed into the homicidally insane.
We will never find every isolated, disturbed or hopeless person out there. Talking about addressing social issues or mental health is just blather from the right. We'll never find or treat everyone who snaps, or might snap. But we can make it harder for them to get guns.
Sadly, conservatives will never restrict the proliferation of guns. They'll talk about vague social solutions, or championing family values or other pointless fixes that won't fix anything.
We don't need the entire population of America to be an armed militia. We need to make our gun fetish not something we ensconce in the Constitution, but something we take steps to eliminate.
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@gemli
yes. Thank you gemli.
1
As a former public corruption prosecutor at Main Justice and having traversed through many corridors of the elite in the US (due to the nature of my business and background as a prep school and Harvard College graduate), it strikes me that Brooks downplays the very strong vein of corruption and lack of morality running through the upper strata of US society, which is full of manufactured personalities (from the celebrity world to those of finance and politics) and the dark triad of personality disorders (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy). The truth is that if one is "out and about" in society, one both professionally and personally encounters many predatory characters - and institutions. Thus, to me, Brooks' diagnosis is far off: what we are seeing is not loneliness due to an inability to connect, but a wide swath of individuals who have been preyed upon and disenfranchised by late capitalism that has been bent to protect and enrich the elite - with Trump being the most obvious example, but only the tip of the proverbial iceberg . . ..
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@William M. Palmer, Esq.
Yes!
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@William M. Palmer, Esq.
I agree.
And, as I'm sure you know, if you want to see real corruption and disenfranchisement, look inside the prisons. This would include the people building, funding, the agencies of criminal justice, prison staff, and the people caged within.
Brooks doesn't just downplay the sour side of his high societies, but he utterly ignores such things as the pipeline that runs from poverty to the prisons. In so doing, he makes anything he says sour to me.
In this week, or any, you'd think he'd want to take some responsibility for a swath of misdiagnoses.
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One minor manifestation of this power imbalance, felt in some way by all, is the superabundance of superheros in film and TV. Unless you are able to hurl someone across the room using "mental energy", or perform some other prodigious feat, you're a worthless, defeated individual. There's a hardly a show on a network like the CW that doesn't feature mutants, witches or other supernatural creatures that cater to the vicarious needs of today's youth, the same ones about to buried under a mountain of student debt and bleak employment prospects. The contrast couldn't be more stark.
52
Another Brooks op-ed piece about stereotypes. There are plenty of lonely people in this country who do not go out and kill anyone. They don't smoke, do drugs, make hateful comments about anyone on social media. There are plenty of "normal" people who are drawn to extremist ideologies. What happens is that the further in they get the more they may turn on their friends. Once they've turned on them enough their friends stop being their friends.
America has a peculiar fascination with violence and guns. The NRA, which was once a fairly sane organization concerned with gun safety, changed into a zealous insane group that foams at the mouth any time reasonable gun control laws are brought up.
As for loneliness, some of that is a product of not having enough time away from work to do more than the bare minimum. It's also due to how expensive it's become to go to the movies, a ball game, a concert, or just have a cup of coffee and some danish with a friend. People don't hang out in their yards or walk across the street to say hello. We go onto Facebook instead and lose the chance of getting to know our neighbors.
And the best way we drive each other away is to insult each other over politics, religion or whatever else we can. We've lost the interest in or ability to live as neighbors. We don't dare trust anyone, especially not our government who can't get its ducks lined up to do its job by us.
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@hen3ry Good start with your criticism about Brooks' stereotypes. But then you kind of veer off into your own stereotypes of modern life.
@hen3ry Sorry Larry, but I see it all the time. It's gotten to the point where doing anything but working is too expensive in America. In my corner of the world people are too busy working to bother to get to know the person across the street. It's easier to retreat to social media and text or converse via the phone or the computer.
By not exposing ourselves to different points of view we lose something. However, given the absolute hate that animates a few people (more than a few), it can be hard to select friends from the opposing side. And unfortunately, in my experience again, the ones who start the insults and threats are hard core Trump supporters.
2
"The rising levels of depression and mental health issues are yet another manifestation."
"Maybe it’s time we began to see this as a war."
"It’s easier to destroy trust than to build it..."
Americans love wars. Every problem worth its salt eventually becomes the object of a "war". It is a badge of recognition. War on Poverty. War on Drugs. War on Terrorism. And now? War on Alienation?
But if the problems are indeed isolation, alienation and disconnectedness, doesn't bundling them into a war make them worse? How does declaring another war build trust?
Brooks's concerns are valid, and a major mental health component clearly exists. But the war metaphor takes us down the wrong path.
3
"I keep coming back to this topic because the chief struggle of the day is sociological and psychological, not ideological or economic.
Disagree. The root problem of the opioid crises is the loss of jobs because of outsourcing or the constant search for the cheapest labor (legal or illegal)
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We can’t truly be weavers if we perceive our differences with other humans as a “war.” Deep as the divide may be, we still must find ways to bring people across. It happens. Take one contentious issue, health care. GOP leaders savaged what they dubbed as “Obamacare.” But as the reality of not having coverage for pre-existing conditions grew more widely recognized, former opponents of the ACA became supporters. Universal health care, a fundamental right in a humane society, had never been more widely accepted than it is now. It is in the process, not always smooth by any means, of being woven into American life.
19
Every country in the world has the isolated, loner individual who is at the fringe of idealism one way or the other; however, not everyone can walk into a store and carry out AR15 rifles and ammunition.
It's the access to weapons that makes America exceptional in a violent way, and more guns are not the answer to the ocean of guns already in circulation.
Guns are a divisive topic in America, which is why I personally think there is some digging to do to see if Russian money is being funneled through the NRA to support extremists (and continue the divide here at home--meeting their goals of undermining the forces that check their own power...)
If we were in a more socially equal society, I'd feel safer.
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@ajarnDB I totally agree on guns, but actually, having traveled and spent time in many countries, in my opinion, there is no other country with such a high percentage of "isolated loner individuals" as the US. Almost everywhere else has a higher % of functioning extended families and/or a more easily shared group identity.
13
@T SmullI I agree. The family connections and support is much stronger/tighter outside the USA. It's really a shame that in the US grandparents (over 80 often) are living alone and young people don't feel the filial piety or bonds that are more common outside the US to share the home and be part of a multi-generational family. (BTW, I have live more than half of my adult life outside the US, and I think we are really substituting hate and bigotry when we don't have the basic family love and support that most people find normal.) As for extending connections, we here in the USA are overly impressionable by advertising and seem really gullible. Perhaps more people in the USA should get a passport and use it to see how the majority of humanity finds relationships and humility/connectedness normal.
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@T Smull
The thing is, that isn't going to change, just because David Brooks has identified it.
Its time for David Brooks to identify something else.
Thank you so much, David Brooks, for this positive outlook in the midst of the trying time we live in. Let us all indeed learn to be weavers. I am fortunate to be part of a local faith community in this town of 22,000. We hope we can affect relationships in our town. If everyone did this in their own cities, towns, and neighborhoods, we could alter the negative course we seem to be on.
6
"Most of us bought into a radical individualism that, as Tocqueville predicted, cuts each secluded self off from other secluded selves. Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community. Most of us live in insular media and social bubbles that provide us with Pravda-like affirmations of our own moral superiority. Most of us hew to a code of privacy that leads us to not know our neighbors."
Pretty good description of how our market economy (DBA capitalism) orders our lives to be: acquisitive, competitive consumption directed.
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This article seems accurate.
But Brooks is writing this column because he wants to ignore the real story.
That is, that Trump bares some responsibility for the massacre because of his rhetoric. Write about that now and write about anomie at a later time.
And yes, Trump supporters, at least at the websites I look at have decided that Trumps words have no consequences, even as Trump is on the campaign trail trying to persuade people to vote for those he supports.
Yup, Trumps words only matter when we say it does. And nothing can persuade them otherwise.
Rather than say Trumps words only matter when I say they do, Brooks avoids the whole issue of Trumps responsibility by ignoring the issue.
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@sheldon: As you say, the article seems accurate, Why then attempt to stretch it to make of it a vehicle to oppose Trump?
I don't agree with most of Trump's policies. Neverthelless, considering his relationship with a son-in-law and daughter who are Jewish, I hardly could consider Trump to be a source of anti-semitism. That charge hardly could be applied to David Brooks, either, whom I believe is Jewish.
2
Let's start with compassion. Let's shame those who actually believe they never had a leg up by being born into the right family, or by being born wealthy. Let's stress that true immorality lies in looking out only for one's self. Let's condem those who snarl their way through their dog eat dog world.
There are many of us who are empathetic and compassionate - but we aren't the ones who Gerry rigged their way into power.
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@Al, I believe you that, ironically, "greed" may be the only way to motivate those that are destroying our society with ... greed.
When kindness becomes cooler than money, they'll become greedy for at least appearing to be kind.
When healthy, harmonious living becomes more fashionable than fashion or body image, they'll become thirsty for healthy living.
When respect for the Earth becomes more respected than an appearance of dominating Mother Nature, they'll line up to be counted as defenders of our planet.
I don't think we'll every win a war against human greed (even if - maybe - we can control that instinct in ourselves). But, we might re-direct this inherent drive into more productive paths.
6
David Brooks feels compelled to remind his readers that things were far better during the 19th century when middle class people had porches that they sat on and communed with their neighbors, and pews where they prayed and recited Bible verses, and leather bound chairs where they read the classics.
Welcome to the 21st century David, with a doubling of global population during your lifetime, and the shrinking of the spaces among us to the point that we put up barriers and add locks and security devices to make ourselves feel secure from "the others."
And then admit David, that a raging president has captured the hearts and souls of those who feel cheated and isolated by the revenge effect of technology, the maddening growth of population and competition, and the populist anger being amplified by the President's tweets and speech.
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@James Landi: the 19th century, as well as most of the 20th centery, were great for everyone, provided they were not African-American, Native American, female, homosexual, belonging to another religion or race, or somehow did not fit into the mold that society foresaw for them... then it definitely was not so great.
10
David said "The weavers just need what any side in a war needs: training so we know how to wage it, strategies so we know how to win it and a call to arms so we know why we’re in it." Yes. I agree. Many of us would like training so we could be part of the solution to this problem. Does anyone have ideas on how to acquire effective training to alleviate this problem?
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@Thelma McCoy
Yes. Mindfulness. Simply observing what you and others think, feel, sense and do without judgment and pusuit.
We do have an epidemic of loneliness in this country, and a lot of it is fueled by our addition to technology. As Tristan Harris, formerly Google's Design Ethicist and Product Philosopher, attests, our computers and smartphones, as well as the apps they run, are designed to be as addictive as possible. From a capitalist standpoint, making a product addictive is perfect for maximizing profit. Unfortunately, it's also really good at giving us a detached, depressed society.
Just wait until virtual reality arrives in a big way. You think we're lonely and isolated now...
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@jrinsc,
Why do you think most Silicon Valley execs don’t let their small kids have smart phones and tablets? They know exactly what it does to people and don’t want their kids to become that.
2
Thank you for binging these issues into clear focus.
Readers may find the work of Case and Deaton, of Princeton, on declining life expectancy in the disadvantaged in the U.S., and the "disorders of despair", an informative elaboration of these themes.
12
Yes, we all have light and dark in our hearts. If as you say we need to know how to fight as weavers, I am sorely wanting some suggestions. I am old enough not to be naive, but am still heart deep injured that what has seemed so obvious in my life, the need to build and include, has been so discredited. I have at last resorted to telling those around me in equal despair that it must be what we want as a country. I sure hope I am wrong. I just do not have a better response.
14
I think it is hard to weave at a macro level, but there seems to be some small ways of doing so, this comment option for example.
Thanks.