I am not a sociologist, but I don’t think it is greatly overstating the case to say that Durkheim is to sociology roughly what Freud is to psychiatry. He did not have Freud’s passion for control. He was not sneaky like Freud. But he did seminal work at the very beginning of the field.
And it is interesting that suicide was the first topic he chose. It would seem, intrinsically, to be a social “crime”.
And I recall, to the point, that one of his first findings was that publishing acts of suicide causes copycat suicides. Thus, for over 100 years you will rarely read in the papers of suicides. Yet forty five THOUSAND people kill themselves every year. That is a staggering number. And for every one who succeeds, 25 TRY. That is over one million suicide attempts each year.
And this presents the interesting point, at the moment: we have a major problem, but it is a problem that gets worse the more we talk about it, at least within certain forums.
For my part, I tend to view it simply. We have one large segment of our society that killed God to their satisfaction long ago, and which seeks to destroy every relic of common culture outside of its political tentacles. Life for nearly all of us is difficult at times, and nearly insufferable for long stretches of time. Culture evolved to protects us from our confusion. Less culture, more confusion, more people jumping off buildings.
And as I indicated in the last post, a belief, or rejection, of God makes a big difference. The data is clear, for example from POW’s, that the survival rate in all circumstances for the religious is significantly higher than for those who are atheists.
In my thought, and in my action, I am always looking for what I tend to call flanking paths, which is to say non-obvious ways to influence what we can see. When dealing with complex systems, most of the time there is no other way. You cannot impose a simple order on a complex order without destroying it. And simple orders are actually vastly less ordered, formally, than complex ones.
But to the topic here, I continue to insist that we need to bring the spiritual into the scientific domain. The work of Cleve Backster may be a way. The work of Gary Schwartz, or Dean Radin may be a way. There are many people doing fascinating, scientifically rigorous and disciplined work in these domains. They need to be funded, supported, encouraged, lauded.
To my mind, this is obvious and simple. But people love their confusion.