Word of the Day: Anomie

[MikeF]

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break. I am back on-line and came across this while working with TRAC Monterey, an Operations Research TRADDOC group focused on modeling and forecasting programs for IW.

I thought it maybe helpful for the group.

Anomie is social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values ; also : personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty that comes from a lack of purpose or ideals (Merriam Webster dictionary).

Anomie research delves further into the work already published in Dr. Kilcullen's conflict eco-system and Dr. McCormick's Mystic Diamond to further explain, forecast, and solve the complex problems into today's world.

Dr. Niklaus Eggenberger-Argote of the Swiss Academy for Development, a research partner of Dr. Karen Guttieri in the Cebrowski Institute, explains his anomie research at Fields of Activity

Globalization has political, economic and cultural dimensions with strong social impacts that present challenges to national and international security. Fast-paced social change leads to an erosion of traditional values, reference points and guiding norms; it challenges identities, world views and behavioral patterns and hampers meaningful interpretation to social reality that result in a loss of orientation (anomie).

Anomie stimulates innovation and creativity, but it also leads to apathy, risk behavior, aggression, violent upheaval or a shift towards radical (but direction-giving) ideologies.

Anomie research:

-is a culturally cross-validated tool that measures psycho-social consequences of rapid social change in different social and cultural settings

-focuses on invisible, but measurable attitudes that precede patterns of behavior

-uncovers hidden structures, processes and risks of instability and violence within a society before they turn into visible patterns of negative behavior (“early detection”)

-allows for a better understanding of the micro-level of society and non-rational decision-making (human behavior, beliefs, social norms, cultural and historical structures, interaction between societies and individuals)

-provides a database for socio-cultural modeling aimed to anticipate and mitigate societal disorders on time

At the individual level, modernization generates feelings of alienation and anomie as traditional bonds and social relations are broken and leads to crisis of identity (...) Samuel P. Huntington

v/r

Mike