Who or what fills in for the parents once a teenager begins to understand the concept of morality and how he or she must act? Is it peers, teachers, ministers, entertainment celebrities, video games or self-assessment? How about all of them?
Let’s start with peers since studies[1] have shown that peer pressure is probably the single biggest influencer on choice for most humans. We hear anecdotal stories all the time where an individual is characterized as a “good boy/girl” by family as they are being taken off to jail for some felony. The need to “fit-in” is one of the great human survival tools, and is probably a key element of why we have been so successful as a species, but it is also one of the great dangers for mankind. Peer pressure and the need to fit-in goes a long way to understanding how populations tend to accept leadership that ultimately proves itself to be destructive and self-serving. How else do we explain things like the rise of Communist dictators who kill tens of millions of their own people, or a National-Socialist regime that sets out to eliminate the Jewish population, as it moved to dominate Europe?
Today, we see in America two social phenomena that on the surface seem contradictory, but I believe are both symptoms of the same issue. In the first case, we see the tremendous growth of gangs, beginning in the inner cities, flourishing in the prison system, and now moving to the suburban and rural parts of the nation. The gang recruitment is on-going and unfortunately reaching for younger and younger recruits to indoctrinate into their society. There are black gangs, Hispanic gangs, oriental gangs and white gangs. They all seek and offer the same thing, peer acceptance. They, just like their underdeveloped country counter-parts, grow to dominate a particular region, and become self-sustaining through illegal activities, just like the infamous Costa-Nostra “families” J. Edger spend so much time investigating in the late 1940’s through the 1960’s.
The second case is “the loner” or social outcast who so often erupts, seemingly from nowhere, to wreak violence and havoc on some unsuspecting individual or group. We see this in the increasingly frequent mass murders that make our evening news. What leads these individuals to isolation, is it rejection from family, friends, or peers, or is there some other force at work? Again, I suspect, although I’ve done little in-depth research that isolation grows from negative experiences with the social structure including peers. Or from possible addictions to any of a number of devices or drugs.
It is easy to say this is a manifestation of mental illness, but if we think about the increasing frequency of these events the question must be asked, is it mental illness that is growing uncontrollably, or a shifting standard of personal morality? Have we as a society made murder an acceptable personal choice?
-- To be continued --
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