From a fertile week for pop psychology comes news that social trust is declining at a time when personal connection is more important than worldly success.
As always, David Brooks draws on arcane research to prove that “countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime.”
But where are those countries? Worldwide acting-out of rage and hatred, from Washington to Moscow, suggests a new Age of Anxiety, starting with the terror of September 2001 and exacerbated by a global economic meltdown seven years later.
Damage to the human psyche goes well beyond politics as clinical anxiety becomes the most common mental illness in America, suffered by 40 million, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and affecting millions more with, as one report describes it, “a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing–but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there.”
As medicine struggles to understand and treat such distress in individuals, signs that it is undermining the whole society are everywhere:
*A pathological response to the passage of health care with verbal violence and a spate of acting out against bipartisan Congressional targets from Anthony Weiner to Eric Cantor (anti-Semitism, anyone?).
*Morphing of terrorism from political grievance to personal madness–from Jihad Jane to the current flavor of the week, the addled Michigan militia.
*Growth of the Tea Party movement, based less on issues than enormous free-floating dissatisfaction that, in its inchoate stage, is threatening Democrats electorally but has the potential to disrupt both parties with Sarah Palinish purging.