When People Break

Thank you. An LJ user I follow bradhicks once used the term "furnace of Moloch" to describe how America treats its human capital.

In our past disagreement over health care, for example, I do not dispute that it would be a human good if we could magically give every person excellent health care. My disagreement has to do with practical means of accomplishing this in a society laced with assumptions, historical facts, bureaucratic inertia, capital and human investment, and last but not least, mythology and moral panics.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."

David Gerrold modifies this slightly: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet domestication." (emphasis added)

I feel that the truth is somewhere in between.

We live in one of the most enlightened, kind and benevolent civilizations that has ever existed on this planet. This gives people like you and me the leisure to glimpse not only how far we've come, but how very much farther we have to go.

Another way to look at it: as humankind we are all under inexorable sentence of death, living between the pronouncement of the verdict and its actual carrying out. Sometimes events in life put this into sharper relief: being diagnosed with cancer, losing a loved one, being a witness to an atrocity of history such as the Holocaust or Rwanda, events on the battlefield of the soldier or the "streets" of the police officer.

I would add to your lists of escape the following phenomena:

-- alcohol use as a legal drug, which a few make large profits from despite enormous social costs (half of persons arrested and half of persons treated in the emergency room are under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time)

-- the shifting role of marijuana and its creeping legalization for the useless (i.e. "medical marijuana") but not for the workers

-- illegal drug use among all segments of society, but especially heroin as a prolonged means of relatively painless suicide, cocaine and other stimulants as "superchargers" for the elite classes to try to keep up with their workloads, and both crack and meth as the self-medication of the poorest and least capable of other means of escape

-- the mass increase in the use of antidepressant and other psychiatric medications, prescribed legitimately for what can only be called an epidemic of depression, stress disorders, anxiety and other conditions

-- the dramatic rise in addiction to both the Internet and to online gaming / virtual reality such as Worlds of Warcraft and Second Life

Suicide can be thought of as the canary for how much stress a population can take, so your analysis is apt on this point.

In an environment filled with death, Frankl had the opportunity to observe both passive suicide (failing to do the utmost to survive, such as choosing to share food with another prisoner) and active suicide (self harm, resistance and/or escape attempts). The latter was exceedingly rare, surprisingly so given the conditions, although historical cases do exist.

Murder-suicide is a familiar phenomenon although again very rare. Individual cases tend to get much more attention, such as Jason Rodriguez in Florida and the shooter at Fort Hood.

Violence as a reaction to stress has three places to express itself: public crime on the streets, workplace violence, and domestic violence in the home. Guess which one is least reported, easiest to get away with, and has the most long term damaging effects for the victim, society and even the offender?

http://www.ncadv.org/files/DomesticViolenceFactSheet(National).pdf

>> And who's going to want to buy or rent a place where a murder or suicide happened?

You, if you ever stay at a motel or hotel. This is a sufficiently common occurrence in the hotel industry that they have established procedures and clean-up crews on call.