Sunday Word: Anomie

[sallymn]

anomie [an-uh-mee]

noun:
social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values

Examples:

Emile Durkheim, whom I’ve studied since I was an undergraduate trying to understand the social changes of the 1960s, would call this new normal anomie - a destabilized and destabilizing state when rules and rule givers lose legitimacy. (Sherry Turkle, Empathy Rules, Harvard Business Review, February 2022)

You may have heard the term lately because it’s all over the place. Typically, it’s associated with worker anomie, or ennui, or burnout. (Michael Hiltzik, 'Quiet quitting' is just a new name for an old reality, Los Angeles Times, August 2022)

The filmmakers, largely forgoing a soundtrack, skillfully manipulate stillness, silence and anomie to unsettling effect - at times evoking the ambient dread and decay of, say, Roman Polanski's 'Repulsion.' (Andy Webster, Review: In 'Hard Labor', a Brazilian Couple's Unsettling Struggle, The New York Times, October 2015)

Durkheim talked of two phenomena: of alienation, where one distances oneself from society, and anomie, which is a state of normlessness. Rules exist but don’t matter because somehow values become impotent. (Shiv Visvanathan, Death by passivity: India's response to pollution reflects the anomie of our time, The Atlantic, November 2019)

Even the most brilliant diagnostic assessment of the postcolonial Nigerian predicaments must factor the high level of cultural and value anomie that we need to transcend to restore Nigeria to greatness. (Tunji Olaopa, Olugbenga Ogunmoyela: An Omolúwàbí in the Midst of Cultural Anomie, This Day, September 2022)

Origin:

'absence of accepted social values,' 1915, in reference to Durkheim, who gave the word its modern meaning in social theory in French; a reborrowing with French spelling of anomy (Online Etymology Dictionary)