Geoffrey Morton-Haworth_'s  Instablog

While many people acknowledged the moral hazards of bank bailouts, fewer recognized the still greater social hazard: the apathy that spreads wherever fraud, corruption and incompetence are allowed to continue unabated.

This is anomie, a collective social disorder typified by a sense of hopelessness and its each-for-themselves consequences.  Events unfolding in the UK over the past weeks exemplify this phenomenon:

1. the government’s "it's-all-too-hard" response to the call from Mervyn King (governor of the Bank of England) to address the issue of the Too Big to Fail Banks;
2. the indignant reaction of rescued banks who feel they have every right to pay themselves huge bonuses;
3. the story of mother-of-two Victoria Davis, 39, who knelt in front of a 50mph train after her bank, Lloyds TSB Group (LYG), withdrew a £30,000 overdraft facility from the chauffeur car business she ran with her husband, Mark; and,
4. the subsequent announcement of a further £8 billion bailout to Northern Rock (NHRKF), with little expectation of repayment.

Anomie is not some remote and abstract concept from the flakey world of social sciences. It is an all-too-real aspect of everyday life in Eastern Europe that now affects all of us in the West. Anomie is manifest, for example, in the wave of deaths at France Telecom.

Such extraordinary social malaise makes the prediction that the UK may never fully recover from the current recession more than credible.

As Charles Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.  It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

Education is perhaps the one legitimate antidote to anomie, offering the hope that the more skills we each have the more options that we will have… yet it takes decades or even generations to take effect.

As our social fabric decays, so forums like this, blogs like BaselineScenario, pressure groups like Showdown in Chicago, A New Way Forward or Be That Change, and new approaches to discourse management will become increasingly important, for those who are lucky enough to fall on the right side of the digital divide.