When the Mind Runs Hot
There was a time when distrust had a direction.
You distrusted a party. A newspaper. A politician. A bank. The anger had an address. Even the scandals of the 1970s had a center. A name. A crime. Hearings. Consequences. The system absorbed the shock and continued.
What we are living through now feels different.
It is not distrust of something.
It is distrust of everything.
Call it 360 degrees of anomie.
Durkheim described anomie as normlessness, the thinning of shared structure. In his era, erosion was vertical. Religion weakened. Tradition weakened. Industrialization destabilized communities. The old roof collapsed before a new one was built.
Today the erosion is spherical.
Upward, elites lose credibility. Sideways, media fragments. Downward, tradition thins. Inward, the individual faces infinite information and shrinking shared guardrails.
During COVID, the tone was certainty. Measures were necessary. Vaccines were safe and effective. Experts were aligned. The message was moral as well as medical. Doubt was framed as irresponsibility.
Later, nuance appeared. Side effects were acknowledged. Policy trade-offs debated. Some measures reconsidered.
The shift from “this is clear” to “this is complicated” did not feel like scientific maturation. It felt like moral whiplash.
Institutions were not only offering data. They were distributing virtue. When the frame softened, many did not feel corrected. They felt maneuvered.
Then came Ukraine.
At first, clarity. Russia brittle. Ukraine resilient. Sanctions decisive. History leaning in a visible direction.
Years passed. The war hardened into attrition. Outcomes blurred. Narratives adjusted.
Again: certainty, shock, suspicion.
And then Epstein.
For decades, many assumed elites were flawed but functional. Self-interested, perhaps corrupt, but operating within limits.
The revelations destabilized that assumption. A powerful man exploited minors, moved in elite circles, died under opaque circumstances. Documents surfaced in fragments. Closure never came.
In the vacuum, imagination expanded.
Flaws became rot.
Corruption became ritual.
Failure became design.
Each episode alone could have been metabolized. Together, they raised the temperature.
Because what 360 degrees of anomie produces is cognitive fever.
Not open tyranny.
Not revolution.
Cognitive fever.
The trains still run. Courts function. Elections occur. Switzerland remains orderly.
But the interpretive system overheats.
When shared trust thins, skepticism does not stay disciplined. It inflames. Small inconsistencies feel systemic. Narrative alignment feels like merger. Revision feels like concealment.
In liberal theory, institutions were meant to counterbalance one another. Government checked by media. Media by competitors. Citizens by access to plural voices.
Today, many no longer perceive friction. In crises, government and dominant media often move in parallel. Messaging aligns. Moral framing aligns. Retrospective self-critique is muted.
Whether this is coordination, conformity, or shared incentives matters less than the perception. Differentiation feels cosmetic.
When that perception takes hold, triangulation collapses. Citizens stop asking which institution corrects which. They assume consolidation.
And once consolidation is assumed, interpretation radicalizes quickly.
If trust falls below a certain threshold, the jump from “they were wrong” to “they were coordinated” shortens. From “they failed” to “they conspired.” From “the system is flawed” to “the system is a cabal.”
This is not pure hysteria. It is heated pattern detection under conditions of low trust.
The immune system of doubt stays switched on.
People cope in predictable ways.
Some cling harder to institutional loyalty. The system must be defended, because fragmentation feels worse than error.
Some detach. Nothing is trustworthy, so nothing can destabilize them.
Others escalate. Total explanations replace partial ones. Conspiracy offers coherence where ambiguity feels intolerable.
All three reactions attempt to reduce temperature.
But cognitive fever has consequences.
High-trust societies rely on risk-taking in trust. Cooperation beyond tribe. Assumption of procedural fairness.
When trust narrows, cooperation narrows. Shared narrative shrinks. Authority becomes provisional. Consensus becomes suspect. Urgency triggers skepticism instead of solidarity.
The danger is not medieval collapse.
It is gravitational pull.
In a climate of fever, clarity becomes seductive. Strong figures, simple stories, total explanations. Not because people crave domination, but because they crave orientation.
360 degrees of anomie is not the end of society.
It is the phase where old anchors dissolve and new ones have not yet stabilized.
The system functions, but the temperature is high.
The real test is whether skepticism can cool back into calibration before fever becomes the norm.
Societies do not collapse from doubt alone.
They fracture when doubt overheats and becomes the only language left.