Social disorder

“ By this mental bondage morbid sympathy is clearly and definitely distinguished from all subordinate degrees of this instinct, however closely allied the imitation of a disorder may seem to be to that of a mere folly, of an absurd fashion, of an awkward habit in speech and manner, or even of a confusion of ideas. Even these latter imitations, however, directed as they are to foolish and pernicious objects, place the self-independence of the greater portion of mankind in a very doubtful light, and account for their union into a social whole. ”

“ Later, the anti-social man was regarded as a pathological product—the victim of disease; and it is one of the fashions of to-day to regard him as 'a social product'—the victim of adverse social environment. ”

“ Social disorders and the Inner Mission.—All that concerns humanity has interest for this movement. The evils of domestic life are graphically drawn; the irregular sexual connections, foolish early marriages, illegitimate and deserted children, infanticide, pauperism and crime. The Inner Mission has already established schools for little children. ”

“ The problem of abnormality—crime, vagabondage, prostitution, alcoholism, etc. How far is abnormality the unavoidable manifestation of inborn tendencies of the individual, and how far is it a matter of deficient social organization,—the failure of institutional influences? There is a quantitative difference of efficiency between individuals, but if there is hardly a human attitude which if properly controlled and directed could not be used in a socially useful and productive way, must there remain a permanent qualitative difference between socially normal and anti-social actions? ”

“ The herding of the poor into crowded tenements, the inability to find work, the lack of wholesome interests and excitements to provide a normal outlet for energy of body and mind, the daily sight of the luxury of the rich and the bitterness of its contrast with their own need, awaken dangerous passions and reckless defiance of law. The lack of education, contact with absorption of law-defying philosophies of life, tend to make crime appear natural and justified. All of these unhealthy conditions are being attacked under the spur of our new social conscience ”

“ It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are as yet cursed.
Hence, to those who are struggling with disease and pain, with ignorance and defect, with vice, and with crime, but for the most part too separately, it is time to say that all these four evils are capable of being viewed together, and largely even treated together. ”

“ Every form of social ill roots itself in these mind disorders. Since this great burden seems to be increasing as a result of the conditions of present-day living, it is not strange that those most familiar with the situation are seriously alarmed. ”

“ Here were all the elements that go to make up a first-class "social problem." A vivid imagination, inflamed by a deep sympathy with immediate inconvenience and suffering, drew a harrowing picture of the distress to individuals and to society. ”

“ So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or [29] moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? ”

“ In recent times 310 members of this family have been studied, and it is found that vagrancy, feeble-mindedness, mental troubles, criminality, pauperism, immorality are, as it may be termed, their patrimony. [37]
These classes, with their tendency to weak-mindedness, their inborn laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organized activity, contain the people who complain that they are starving for want of work, though they will never perform any work that is given them. [43] Feeble-mindedness is an absolute dead-weight on the race. It is an evil that is unmitigated. ”

“ There is, thus, from the earliest times, a certain form of elimination of the anti-social character which results in the gradual formation of an emotional and mental disposition that habitually and instinctively falls into line with the requirements of the social whole. ”

“ Granting the social phenomenon of crime, we ought to ask ourselves: where does the fault lie? If we are to acquit the individual criminal of responsibility, it falls back necessarily upon the social community through which the causes of degeneration and disease have filtered. Accordingly, it is we, every one of us, who are at fault: or rather, we are beginning to awaken to a consciousness that it is a sin to foster or to tolerate such social conditions as make possible the suffering, the vices, the errors that lead to physiological pauperism, to pathology, to the degeneration of posterity. ”

“ At the other end of the scale, we have the parasitic class of the beggars or thieves. They, too, are not personally responsible for the conditions into which they are born. But they are not only to be pitied individually, but to be regarded, in the mass, as involving social disease and danger. ”

“ The disease inherent in her being, that deadly outcome of social tyranny which perverts the generous elements of youth into mere seeds of destruction, developed day by day, blighting her heart, corrupting her moral sense, even setting marks of evil upon the beauty of her countenance. ”

“ Similarly, since the “laboring classes” feel most the growing healthful pain of their position, they as naturally revolt under the same conviction. Sociologically, these conditions, which some find so painful and alarming, mean but one thing,—the increase of social consciousness. ”

“ Such personal causes as mental defect are extremely important, indeed, many students maintain that bad economic and social conditions are negligible causes of crime, unless found in connection with low mentality and a depraved moral sense. ”

“ Also, whereas, to a certain extent, we know whence bodily disorders arise, moral disorders come of faulty education, the thousand and one follies with which the human brain is afflicted, in short, any irregular condition of the social body. ”

“ In the downward course of mental disease-processes the degeneration is from the complex to the simple, from the stable to the unstable, from the highly organized to the lowly organized. In the different forms of mental diseases first the moral life, then the social instincts become affected, the patient becomes selfish, introspective, morally selfish, then loses all regard for others, becomes careless, wasteful and negligent of his vocations, life-work, and duties ”

“ These illustrate the dangers of affectional wound,—the sensitivity of personality to emotional shock. A conflict may make or break an individual.
Just what is it which differentiates between two lives of similar asocial behavior or suffering affectional wounds, one becoming disorganized, the other attaining higher levels of mental and social integration? Certain psychoanalytic biographies show struggles of eminent men and women who passed through periods of mental strain or moral failure, yet rose superior to and even strengthened by their wrestling with life. ”

“ This fact affects human behavior and happiness profoundly, and the restoration of stimulation to labor is among the most important problems confronting society. The present industrial organization tends also to develop a type of human being as abnormal in its way as the opposite type of individual who gets the full amount of occupational stimulation by taking a line of interest destructive of social order,—the criminal or vagabond. ”

“ The very weakening of the controlling social consciousness causes the social mind to become predisposed to overaction of the social subconsciousness with its abnormal suggestibility and consequent social, psychic diseases and mental epidemics of all sorts and description. ”

“ The presence in all civilised communities of police and fire departments, boards of health, and the like, testifies impressively to the influence of social fear working normally as a conserving agent. But there may be, and frequently is, social as well as individual abnormality of fear; as in panics, massacres, lynchings. In order to deal with this effectually, in order to keep social fear within the bounds of reason, it will always be necessary to recognise that, after all, society is made up of a mass of individuals, and can only think and feel and act as individuals think and feel and act. ”

“ It is a sign that in the existing situation some one or more of the four wishes—security, new experience, recognition, and response—has not been and is not adequately realized. The fact that the symptom is social, that it is contagious, is an indication that the situations that provoke it are social, that is to say, general in the community or the group where the unrest manifests itself. ”

“ By that inevitable law of action and reaction which prevails alike in moral and social as in physical phenomena, the community which has so large a portion of its members in a condition of ignorance and brutality, must, throughout its whole body, partake of the degradation which exists within it, and must be affected, by the very contact, in all its feelings, sentiments, and purposes, through the gross and ignorant passions which such an association cannot fail to arouse. ”

“ And it is a self-evident fact that nothing will27 render human existence so miserable and short as social destitution, bringing, as a matter of consequence, mental pressure or anxiety of mind. Even comparative want is prejudicial to physical health. ”

“ Examinations now keep daltonic gentlemen out of locomotives, and ladies who have lost their “keys” are apt to find their friends’ pianos closed. What we cannot guard against is a variety of the genus homo which suffers from “social color-blindness.” These well-meaning mortals form one of the hardest trials that society is heir to; for the disease is incurable, and as it is almost impossible to escape from them, they continue to spread dismay and confusion along their path to the bitter end. ”

“ We would, therefore, as far as the hardships of the human lot are concerned, go on struggling to the best of our ability against them but for the social doctors, and we would endure what we could not cure. But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past. These products of social quackery are now buttressed by habit, fashion, prejudice, platitudinarian thinking, and new quackery in political economy and social science. ”

“ In short, the child, like the woman, helps to bear the often grievous burden of disorganization; bears it, among the well-to-do classes, in an ill-regulated life, in lack of reverence and love, in nervousness and petulance; as well as in premature and stunting labor among the poor. ”

“ The sufferer's "catastrophic" point of view, which tends to isolate the present trouble from all its causes, to represent it as temporary and accidental, is related to his tendency to state that he has no friends, relations, or social connections through whom help could come to him. ”

“ When we remember the conditions under which the vast mass of servants have grown up, the exposures and privations of their homes, their undeveloped mental state in relation to social duties, the exhausting work upon which the majority of them enter in hotels, lodging-houses, struggling households, or the special danger of rich, careless establishments, and realize both the condition under which their service drags on and the natural instincts of the human being, then it is easy to understand why to a frightfully increasing extent they yield to the solicitations to which they are exposed. ”

“ The most frequent real causes, as found by social investigation, are lack of self-control, lack of mutual ideals in regard to sex relations, ignorance of sex hygiene, use of alcohol, irresponsibility, economic extravagance, disagreement regarding the family income, hasty marriage after brief acquaintance. Among the other causes productive of discord are selfishness, insincerity, false pride, nagging, poor housekeeping, the husband’s lack of economic ability; marked differences in age, education, social status, religion ”

“ And this makes it very evident that the science which is principally, if not exclusively, engaged in studying these phenomena of social disease, should feel the necessity of finding a more exact diagnosis of these moral diseases of society, in order to arrive at some effective and more humane remedy, which should more victoriously combat this somber trinity of insanity, suicide and crime. ”

“ When the people become tired of their universal servitude to worldly anxiety,—when they have fully meditated and discussed the fact that ninety-nine hundredths of social offences arise directly out of property; that the largest proportion of human faults bear a relation to selfish possession; that the most formidable classes of diseases are caused by over or under toil, and by anxiety of mind; they will be ready for the inquiry whether this tremendous incubus be indeed irremovable ”

“ For we must not lose sight of two things: first, that the bad germs that show themselves in our present society are the anti-social instincts, opposed to the sociability and sympathy upon which life is based, while the good germs are the social instincts ”