Anomie and Deaths of Despair

For the past five years, I’ve been transfixed by a set of global social movements. “Fascinated” is probably too generous a word. It’s closer to the feeling of passing a highway accident — a morbid compulsion, an inability to look away.

They appear in different corners of politics, technology, and culture, but they share a strange gravitational pull:

• MAGA, and the resurgence of nationalist populism
• NRx, and the flirtation with authoritarian technocracy
• Techno-libertarians, and the growing obsession with “exit” culture — building parallel systems outside the state
• The Manosphere, visible through figures like Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk
• The Great Denial — a chaotic fusion of anti-vaccine activism, climate-change denial, and biblical literalism, united by a sweeping rejection of modern scientific authority

At first glance, these movements seem unrelated. They emerge from different ideologies, speak different political languages, and often dislike each other intensely.

But the longer I watch them, the more they seem like variations on the same theme.

And one detail keeps standing out.

Most of the participants are men.

The Myth of the 'American Dream'

(or the 'European Dream', or the 'Korean Dream', or the 'Modern Dream', or whatever)

Coined by James Truslow Adams, in his 1931 book, The Epic of America, the 'American Dream' represented an ideal — almost a kind of social contract that many Americans came to believe in.

"...that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement."

Translated into everyday life, the dream looked something like this:

1. A respectable job that paid enough to save a little
2. A decent home and a reliable car
3. Sending your kids to college so they would have more options than you did
4. Retiring at 65 without fear of financial insecurity
   ...and if you worked hard enough...
5. Perhaps a small vacation place by the lake, and a boat to fish from on the weekends.

The table below shows how the economics behind that dream have changed between 1966 and 2026.

Some things that are abundantly clear:

1. The Homeownership Chasm
   In 1966, a typical house cost about 2.9 times the median household income.
   In 2026, it is closer to 5-6 times income.
   
   
2. The "Table Stakes" Trap (College & Childcare)
   The costs of entering the middle class (College) and staying in it (Childcare) have risen dramatically relative to income.
   - In 1966, higher education functioned as a ladder.
   - In 2026, it increasingly resembles a toll bridge, often financed with debt that can follow people for decades.
   - With the AI revolution looming, even a college degree no longer promises an escape.
   
   
3. The "Hidden" Erosion (Healthcare & Debt)
   Health insurance premiums have risen far faster than wages, becoming one of the largest hidden costs embedded in employment.
   
   At the same time, household debt has roughly doubled relative to income, rising from about 45% of income in the 1960s to roughly 100% today.

The sense of economic security that characterized much of the post-war middle class has gradually been replaced by something far more fragile.

And as for the vacation home by the lake...

or the little fishing boat?

For many people today, those belong less to everyday reality and more to the mythology of the 'American Dream'.

So what happens when the rules of the game change this dramatically?

When the goals society promotes remain the same, but the pathways to achieving them quietly erode?

Over a century ago, a French sociologist named Émile Durkheim described what happens next.

The Concept of Anomie

Durkheim coined the term anomie (from the Greek anomia, meaning “without law”) to describe a state of social disorientation that emerges when the norms that regulate society begin to break down.

In healthy societies, shared expectations create a kind of moral ceiling. They tell people what is reasonable to hope for, what counts as success, and what effort will likely produce.

But during periods of rapid economic or social change, that regulatory framework can collapse.

The goals remain.

The dream remains.

But the mechanisms that once connected effort to reward begin to fail.

Durkheim argued that when this happens, individuals experience a deep sense of dislocation. They no longer know where they stand, what rules apply, or what the limits of ambition should be.

The result is not simply disappointment.

It is anger.

Because when people realize that playing by the rules no longer produces the promised outcome, the legitimacy of the rules themselves begins to dissolve.

Durkheim described this moment with remarkable clarity in his 1897 study Suicide:

“When society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising this influence; hence the sudden rise in suicides. In these moments the scale is upset; but a new scale cannot be immediately improvised. Time is required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things.”

As he watched the upheavals of industrialization sweep across 19th-century Europe, Durkheim diagnosed the collapse of the rules.

A generation later, another sociologist would explain what people tend to do when those rules collapse.

Strain Theory

Heavily influenced by Durkheim’s work, Robert K. Merton took the concept of anomie and adapted it to the realities of modern American society in 1938.

Durkheim had diagnosed the problem: a breakdown in the social norms that regulate expectations.

Merton focused on what happens after that breakdown.

He observed that societies often continue promoting the same cultural goals — wealth, success, status, upward mobility — even when the legitimate pathways to achieve those goals become increasingly restricted.

When that gap between goals and means grows too wide, individuals experience what Merton called strain.

In other words:

The dream remains.

But the ladder disappears.

And when that happens, people don’t simply give up.

They adapt.

Merton proposed that individuals tend to respond to this strain in five predictable ways:

1. Conformity: Accepting both goals and means (non-deviant).
2. Innovation: Accepting the goals but rejecting legitimate means (e.g., stealing to get rich).
3. Ritualism: Rejecting the goal of success but rigidly adhering to the means (e.g., a "dead-end" job).
4. Retreatism: Rejecting both goals and means (e.g., drug addiction, dropping out of society).
5. Rebellion: Rejecting both goals and means, and replacing them with new ones (e.g., radicals, revolutionaries).

Merton’s insight was that when societies promote the same dreams but quietly dismantle the ladders needed to reach them, people do not simply abandon those dreams.

They invent new ways of pursuing them.

Seen through Merton’s lens, the strange cluster of movements we began with starts to look less like coincidence and more like sociology in action. 

Each represents a different response to the same underlying strain.

In other words, the movements that look so different on the surface may actually be different survival strategies within the same broken system.

1. MAGA — Rebellion (restore the old system)

Goal: the American Dream, national prosperity

Means rejected: existing political institutions

Reaction: replace current leadership and rules to restore a perceived earlier order.

MAGA can be understood as a form of restorative rebellion — rejecting current institutions in order to restore a perceived earlier order: It rejects the current means — globalization, neoliberal governance, technocratic management — in order to restore what it sees as the goals of the earlier American order.

2. NRx — Rebellion (replace the system entirely)

Goal: order, competence, hierarchy

Means rejected: democracy itself

Reaction: replace both goals and institutions.

This is textbook Mertonian rebellion.

NRx is a "Radical Rebellion": It rejects the goal of "Democracy" itself, viewing it as the "broken engine" that caused the 2026 wreckage. In place of democratic governance, they imagine systems run more like corporations — with a sovereign executive rather than electoral politics.

3. Techno-libertarians — Innovation

Goal: wealth, autonomy, technological progress

Means rejected: government regulation, state authority

Reaction: create new pathways:

- crypto

- network states

- startup culture

- exit from traditional governance

This fits innovation almost perfectly.

In Merton’s original 1938 framework, “innovation” often referred to crime — individuals using illegitimate means to achieve culturally approved goals like wealth or success.

But in 2026, the innovators are not bank robbers.

They are architects of parallel institutions.

Their logic is straightforward: if the traditional pathways to the American Dream appear increasingly constrained — if the median home costs five to seven times median income, if regulatory systems move slowly, if institutions feel captured or dysfunctional — then the rational response is not rebellion.

It is circumvention.

Rather than overthrow the system, they attempt to route around it.

• Cryptocurrencies attempt to bypass traditional banking and monetary systems.
• “Network states,” a concept popularized by Balaji Srinivasan, imagine digitally organized communities that eventually gain physical sovereignty.
• Entrepreneurs speak openly about “exit” — leaving traditional governance structures rather than reforming them.
• Some dream of settlements on Mars through companies like SpaceX (Musk), while others experiment with ocean-based micro-states through projects such as the Seasteading Institute (Thiel).

They are not trying to break the law.

They are trying to build systems in which the existing law simply no longer matters.

4. The Manosphere — Retreatism → Reaction

Initial reaction:

- withdraw from institutions

- reject traditional relationship norms

Later reaction:

- channel resentment into ideological movements

This begins as retreatism and often evolves toward rebellion.

5. The Great Denial — Ritualism

Goal abandoned: modern scientific consensus

Means retained: cultural identity, religious tradition

Reaction: cling to older belief systems even as reality changes.

This is close to Merton’s ritualism — preserving the ritual after the system stops making sense.

Ritualism occurs when people lose hope in the "Goal" (scientific progress, a better future) but cling obsessively to the "Ritual" (religious literalism, traditional identity).

The Logic: In this worldview, the institutions claiming scientific authority have produced a world of mounting debt, unaffordable healthcare, and technological disruption. If this is the result of “The Science,” then “The Science” must be a false god.

The Response: They retreat into the "Rituals" of the past—Biblical literalism or "natural living"—as a protective shell against a reality they can no longer influence.

MAGA provides the votes.
NRx provides the vision.
Techno-libertarians provide the money.
The Manosphere provides the anger.
The Great Denial provides the enemy.

Durkheim explained the collapse of the rules.

Merton explained how people respond when the ladder disappears.

But neither fully explained why modern institutions themselves feel so alien, so untrustworthy, so illegitimate.

For that, we have to turn to Max Weber.

The Iron Cage

Writing in the early 20th century, Weber argued that modern society was undergoing a profound transformation he called rationalization. As societies became larger and more complex, they increasingly relied on systems designed for efficiency, predictability, and control. Governments became bureaucracies. Corporations became managerial hierarchies. Decisions were governed by procedures, metrics, and rules rather than tradition or personal authority.

These systems were extraordinarily effective at organizing modern life. They built railroads, global corporations, and nation-states capable of managing millions of people.

But they came with a cost.

Weber warned that modern individuals would increasingly find themselves trapped inside what he famously called an “iron cage” — a world of impersonal institutions, endless regulations, and bureaucratic procedures that feel indifferent to human needs.

In such a world, individuals no longer experience institutions as sources of meaning or legitimacy.

They experience them as systems to navigate, manipulate, escape, or resist.

In Weber’s language, rationalized institutions become efficient but spiritually empty — systems that function perfectly while meaning quietly drains out of them.

Seen through Weber’s lens, the five movements we began with begin to make even more sense.

• MAGA attempts to smash bureaucratic elites and restore a more personal form of political authority.
• NRx rejects democratic bureaucracy altogether in favor of a hyper-efficient corporate-style hierarchy.
• Techno-libertarians try to bypass bureaucratic systems entirely by building new institutions outside the state.
• The Manosphere withdraws from social institutions it believes no longer serve its interests.
• The Great Denial rejects modern expertise and retreats into older sources of meaning and authority.

Each represents a different reaction to the same underlying condition.

Not just anomie, as Durkheim described.

Not just strain, as Merton explained.

But also the suffocating rationalized order Weber warned would define modern life.

And that brings us back to the original observation.

All five movements are overwhelmingly male.

Which raises the final question.

Why are men reacting so strongly to this moment of anomie, strain, and institutional alienation?

The Death of 'Men'

To understand why these reactions are so overwhelmingly male, we have to look at how the postwar social contract itself was deeply gendered.

1. The Collapse of the Provider Archetype

In the mid-20th century version of the American Dream, economic success was not just about material comfort. It was also a definition of masculine identity.

The respectable job, the house, the car, and even the fishing boat were not merely consumer goods. They were symbols of competence and adulthood — visible proof that a man had fulfilled the role society assigned him.

In Merton’s terms, a man could simply be a conformist.

He accepted the cultural goals and the legitimate means.

A single income from a stable job could support a household, build modest wealth, and confer social status.

But as the earlier table shows, many of the economic assumptions underlying that model have shifted dramatically.

Housing costs have risen far faster than wages. Education and childcare have become structural expenses rather than optional ones. Economic security increasingly requires dual incomes and complex career navigation.

The result is that the traditional provider role has become far harder to sustain.

When the provider role weakens, men do not simply lose income.

They lose one of the primary frameworks through which their social value was historically measured.

In Weber’s terms, the modern economic system does not simply regulate behavior.

It also quietly renders older identities obsolete.

2. The Fragility of Male Social Integration

Durkheim argued that social stability depends on integration — the networks and institutions that connect individuals to society.

Historically, many men were integrated through external institutions:

• workplaces
• unions
• civic associations
• religious institutions
• military service

As many of these structures weakened or transformed over the past half-century, the institutional anchors of male identity weakened as well.

At the same time, educational and professional systems increasingly rewarded skills that many women rapidly adopted and mastered.

Women, in many cases, adapted by building broader social and professional networks — combining education, work, and community roles.

Many men experienced the erosion of the provider role as a collapse of the entire system of orientation that once structured their lives.

In Merton’s framework, this helps explain why some male responses tilt toward:

• retreatism (withdrawal from institutions)
• rebellion (attempts to overthrow or radically change them)

rather than simple ritualistic compliance.

3. The Search for Charismatic Authority

Max Weber argued that when bureaucratic systems become too rigid and impersonal, people often seek relief in what he called charismatic authority — leadership grounded not in rules, but in personal power, vision, or disruption.

In periods of institutional strain, charismatic figures promise something bureaucracy cannot offer:

agency

.

Different movements channel this impulse in different ways:

• Populist politicians such as Donald Trump (USA), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Marine Le Pen (France), Javier Milei (Argentina), Nayib Bukele (El Salvador), Narendra Modi (India), and Geert Wilders (Netherlands) promise a leader who will smash the bureaucratic elite and restore direct authority over distant institutions.
• Techno-libertarians such as Peter Thiel (Palantir / Founders Fund), Balaji Srinivasan (Coinbase / Network State), Elon Musk (SpaceX / Tesla), and Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz) elevate the startup founder as a sovereign innovator capable of bypassing traditional institutions altogether.
• Manosphere figures such as Jordan Peterson (psychology / self-help), Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA), Andrew Tate (online influencer), Myron Gaines (Fresh & Fit podcast), and Joe Rogan (podcast / UFC) present themselves as guides through a social landscape that many followers feel has become hostile or incomprehensible.

In each case, the appeal lies not simply in ideology, but in the promise that someone can still seize control of the system.

The Wreckage of Identity

Seen together, these dynamics help explain why the movements described earlier draw such heavily male participation.

Many men are caught in a kind of structural pincer:

Economic strain:

The traditional markers of male adulthood — home ownership, financial stability, family provision — have become far harder to achieve.

Institutional alienation:

The bureaucratic structures that govern modern life increasingly feel impersonal, unresponsive, or exclusionary.

Identity collapse:

For much of the twentieth century, male identity in industrial societies was tightly coupled to the role of provider. Work, family provision, and civic participation formed the institutional ladder through which men integrated themselves into society.

When that ladder weakens, the effect is not purely economic.

It is existential.

Durkheim warned that during moments of rapid transition, societies must eventually “reclassify men and things.”

The uneasy feeling many people experience while watching these movements may reflect precisely that process.

A long-standing social contract — economic, institutional, and cultural — is being renegotiated in real time.

The participants in these movements are not simply reacting to politics or policy.

They are searching for a new way to define meaning, status, and belonging in a world where the old markers of identity no longer function the way they once did.

Contemporary philosopher Byungchul Han perhaps explains it best in 'Burnout Society'.

The achievement-subject subjects itself to a compulsion to perform. In this way it becomes both master and slave.

So where is all this headed?

To answer that question we have to leave sociology for a moment and turn to the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, whose thinking quietly echoes the dialectical philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

The Macro-Dialectic (Paradigm) Shift

Kuhn argued that systems of thought do not evolve smoothly. Instead, they move through periods of stability, followed by crisis, and eventually by revolutionary transformation.

For long stretches of time, societies operate within a shared framework — what Kuhn called a paradigm. Within that paradigm, people debate details, solve problems, and refine institutions, but they rarely question the underlying assumptions that hold the system together.

Over time, however, anomalies begin to accumulate. Problems appear that the existing paradigm cannot adequately explain or resolve. At first these anomalies are dismissed as temporary failures or technical glitches.

Eventually they become impossible to ignore.

Confidence in the system begins to fracture.

What follows is not a gradual adjustment but a period of intellectual and institutional chaos, as competing visions attempt to replace the failing paradigm.

Seen through Kuhn’s lens, the movements we have been examining begin to look less like isolated political phenomena and more like competing attempts to define the next paradigm.

Some want to restore the old one.

Some want to replace it entirely.

Some want to escape it.

What they share is the same underlying assumption:

the current system no longer works.

And when a society reaches that point — when confidence in its institutions, its rules, and even its underlying worldview begins to fracture — the question that inevitably follows is this:

Is liberalism itself beginning to collapse as a governing paradigm?

Ironically, this is where the fissures between the five movements begin to appear.

Liberalism vs. Neoliberalism vs. Post-liberalism or something else altogether?

For most of the past two centuries, the dominant political paradigm of the Western world has been liberalism — a system built on individual rights, constitutional government, market economies, and democratic representation.

Its philosophical foundations emerged during the Enlightenment, articulated by thinkers such as John Locke, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Their ideas grew out of the broader intellectual currents of humanism and rationalism, which placed human reason, individual dignity, and universal rights at the center of political thought.

These principles found concrete expression in the late eighteenth century — most visibly in the United States Constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen during the French Revolution.

Over the next two centuries, liberal ideas spread globally and became the foundation of many of the rules-based institutions that structure the international order today.

But liberalism did not remain static.

It evolved.

In the mid-twentieth century, liberalism fused with the welfare state, producing a model that attempted to balance market economies with social protections. Influenced by the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes and implemented through programs like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, this model created what many later remembered as the post-war middle-class social contract.

By the late 20th century, a different variant emerged: neoliberalism, which emphasized deregulation, globalization, privatization, and the increasing dominance of financial markets.

Capital, once tied closely to national economies, became increasingly mobile. Factories moved across borders in search of cheaper labor. Supply chains stretched across continents. At the same time, the digital revolution transformed information into the most valuable commodity of the modern economy.

The result was extraordinary economic dynamism — but also profound dislocation.

Entire industrial regions hollowed out. Financial markets expanded dramatically. Wealth accumulated at the top of the economic hierarchy at levels that would have startled even the great industrial magnates of the early twentieth century.

The liberal system had not collapsed.

But the economic and social assumptions that once sustained the post-war social contract were quietly coming undone.

For several decades, neoliberalism appeared to be the final stage of liberal democracy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some observers even declared the “end of history.”

But the tensions described throughout this essay — economic strain, institutional alienation, and cultural fragmentation — suggest that this paradigm may now be entering the kind of crisis that Thomas Kuhn described.

If that is true, several competing possibilities are already beginning to take shape.

1. Restoration: Return to Earlier Liberalism

Some movements seek to restore an earlier version of the liberal order — one that combines national sovereignty, industrial policy, and stronger social cohesion.

In this vision, the problem is not liberalism itself, but the specific form it took under globalization and neoliberal economics.

MAGA-style nationalism largely fits this impulse.

2. Replacement: Post-Liberal Systems

Others argue that liberalism itself has failed.

Post-liberal thinkers claim that individualism, marketization, and bureaucratic governance have eroded community, identity, and social stability.

Their proposed alternatives range from nationalist authoritarianism to technocratic corporate governance.

Movements like NRx fall into this category.

3. Exit: Parallel Systems

A third response rejects the question entirely.

Instead of reforming or replacing the system, techno-libertarians attempt to exit it — building new institutions outside the traditional state.

Cryptocurrency networks, network states, and experimental governance models all reflect this impulse.

Rather than fighting over the existing paradigm, they attempt to make it irrelevant.

4. Collapse and Mutation

The final possibility is that none of these movements succeed fully.

Instead, the liberal order mutates gradually into something new — a hybrid system that incorporates elements of all three responses.

Historically, this has often been how paradigm shifts actually occur.

The system does not disappear overnight.

It evolves into something that no one originally predicted.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Kuhn observed that when paradigms collapse, the transition period rarely feels orderly.

It feels chaotic.

Ideas that once seemed fringe suddenly become mainstream. Political coalitions fracture. Institutions lose legitimacy faster than they can reform themselves.

The movements we began with — MAGA, NRx, techno-libertarianism, the manosphere, and the Great Denial — may be early signals of precisely that kind of transition.

Not the destination.

But the turbulence that appears when a civilization is searching for its next organizing principle.

My Own Personal Prediction

History suggests that periods of systemic crisis often produce loud ideological extremes.

The Great Depression of the 1930s produced two such poles: communism and fascism.

The economic and political upheavals of the postwar world produced competing visions of nationalism and socialism.

The stagflation and institutional crisis of the 1970s produced a different pair of extremes: state expansion or systemic collapse.

But in each case, the eventual outcome did not fully resemble either pole.

Instead, something new emerged.

The ideological battle between communism and fascism ultimately produced welfare capitalism in much of the Western world.

The tension between nationalism and socialism evolved into postwar social democracy.

And the economic crises of the 1970s eventually gave rise to the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s.

In each case, the final system was not the loudest ideology.

It was a hybrid system built by pragmatic coalitions.

Not revolution.

Not restoration.

But adaptation.

The radical middle.

And the radical middle is visible if you know where to look.

Pragmatic Chameleons

Lee Jae-myung (South Korea)

Nayib Bukele (El Salvador)

Giorgia Meloni (Italy)

Keir Starmer (United Kingdom)

Sanae Takaichi (Japan)

And perhaps the best exemplar of them all:

Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore).

Viewed through the traditional left–right lens of twentieth-century politics, these leaders appear scattered across the ideological spectrum. Some are described as conservative nationalists, others as social democrats, others as technocratic reformers.

But that lens increasingly fails to capture what they actually represent.

What distinguishes these leaders is not where they sit on the ideological spectrum.

It is their orientation toward practical outcomes.

Their rhetoric may lean left or right, but their governing style tends to follow a different logic entirely — one grounded less in doctrine than in results.

They borrow policies from wherever they appear to work.

Market reforms from the right.

Industrial policy from the left.

State intervention when necessary.

Deregulation when useful.

For example:

• Lee Jae-myung advocates aggressive state investment in AI and semiconductor industries, while simultaneously pushing universal basic income pilots and expanded welfare programs.
• Nayib Bukele combined hard-line anti-crime policies and mass incarceration with Bitcoin adoption and aggressive technology investment, while dramatically expanding public infrastructure.
• Giorgia Meloni, despite nationalist rhetoric, has largely maintained EU fiscal frameworks and supported industrial subsidies for green energy and manufacturing, blending conservative identity politics with pragmatic economic management.
• Keir Starmer promotes pro-business growth strategies and fiscal discipline, while also proposing state-led green industrial investment and expanded workers’ protections.
• Sanae Takaichi supports massive state spending on strategic industries and defense modernization, alongside market-oriented growth policies and tax incentives for innovation.
• And Lee Kuan Yew famously combined free-market capitalism and global trade with massive state housing programs, sovereign wealth funds, and strict social governance.

In other words, their ideology may lean.

But their policies do not.

They govern less like ideologues and more like engineers — assembling systems that function under real-world constraints rather than ideological purity.

What makes this pattern especially interesting is that many of these leaders draw energy from the very movements described earlier in this essay.

They channel populist anger about institutional failure.

They adopt technocratic language about efficiency and competence.

They promise disruption where bureaucracy has stalled.

In that sense, they absorb elements of populism, technocracy, and technological optimism all at once.

But they rarely embrace the most destabilizing elements of those movements.

Instead, they attempt to harness that energy and redirect it back into governing institutions.

Where the earlier movements seek to smash the system, escape the system, or deny it entirely, these leaders attempt something more pragmatic.

They try to make the system work again.

If this pattern holds, the next political era may not be defined by ideology at all, but by a generation of pragmatic system-builders — leaders less interested in defending old doctrines than in engineering institutions capable of functioning in a far more complex world.