What Is Cognitive Reappraisal

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The brain increases vigilance in response to a perceived sense of threat.

Our trust in other people and our confidence in our institutions are at an all-time low.

Anomie is rising as societal polarization erodes shared values and social constraints.

On this evening’s televised news, all three networks emphasized (“Breaking News!”) an unprovoked knife attack in Times Square, killing one person and grievously wounding another. If you read in the newspapers about this incident or others like it, the story likely ended with some variant of the Guardians’s reference to “turbulent times” or similar descriptions decrying why things currently seem so badly out of kilter.

We don’t need to coin a new word or phrase to describe the conditions that make possible such grisly events. (Two days later, police shot and killed a man wielding a knife on a cable of the Brooklyn Bridge.) Anomie, popularized in 1893 by sociologist Émile Durkheim, refers to a “generalized state of normlessness” where there is a breakdown of social and moral rules. In such a setting, violence increases secondary to the loss of the social constraints that ordinarily keep aggressive and other negative impulses in check, the so-called “cultural corset,” as it was referred to during the Victorian era.

How Stable Social Structures Regulate Human Behavior

Anomie is actually a straightforward concept: Stable social structures ordinarily regulating human behavior become less powerful as determinants of how people actually behave.

For instance, during times of social breakdown (extreme polarization, political corruption, general malaise, anxiety, and distress), violence tends to increase among a small percentage of individuals who, until recently, had functioned non-violently. According to Durkheim, this small percentage was only tenuously restrained by........

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