All my life I've been surrounded by cats. When I feed my cats, they eat as much as they like, and then they stop. They have had enough. Human beings are different. Give them five dollars, and they regret that they didn't ask for ten. They earn an extremely high salary, and they fight to have that super bonus at the end of the year. According to Durkheim, human beings differ from every other animal in that they cannot be satisfied, they just never have enough. Now, this could be a guarantee for unhappiness. It could even explain why cats are such happy animals and humans are destined to remain eternally unsatisfied. But according to Durkheim, there is a solution for this problem. The limits of what we may desire are not given by our biological makeup, as is the case with other animals, but they are given to us early on in life by society. It is society that takes care of this kind of regulation. Society imprints in our minds that we should harmonize our desires with our means. It tells what we can hope to achieve and what we should abandon because it is not realistically obtainable. When everything works well, we internalize those limits. We don't even realize that they are not simple inevitabilities but that they are actually social facts, external and coercive codes that we once have internalized and that lead us to desire only what we may one day possess. Now, in modern societies this mechanism doesn't work the way it should. We are often confronted with uncertainty about, or even with an absence of, rules and regulation, and this is what Durkheim calls a situation of anomie. This explains the rise of suicide rates when economic expectations are in a crisis. A stable middle-class position protects just as well against suicide as a stable position amongst the poor, but when the economy becomes very volatile and people may lose all their money overnight, or when very poor people may all of a sudden become very rich, then the whole population is touched by this general atmosphere of anomia, anomie. There is a weakening of that overarching, unifying conscience collective, the cultural codes now are in disarray, and under those circumstances people do not internalize any kind of limit anymore and they become dissatisfied beyond repair. And then again, we can observe a rise in suicide rates that is most noticeable amongst groups who suffer most acutely from the economic uncertainties. For example, the people who work in the financial professions, but also other groups who experience the most extreme changes in their economic situation over a relatively short period of time. This is the type of suicide that Durkheim calls anomic suicide. And it is just like egoistic suicide, typical of modern Western societies, with their unstable economies and the frightening uncertainty for many people about their economic future. Here again, Durkheim devotes a few lines, and in this case it's not more than a footnote, to the exact opposite of what he has analyzed, anomic suicide. When regulation is extremely high, he says, suicide rates will also rise, and this is the type of suicide that he calls fatalistic suicide. Here he gives the example of a slave in an exotic society, or in classic antiquity, who kills himself after the death of his master. Now Durkheim chooses a rather far-fetched example, and again this type serves, first of all, a theoretical purpose. He wants to demonstrate that he is searching for the optimal degree of regulation and not for the most intense regulation that you can imagine. So, Durkheim is especially interested in egoistic suicide and anomic suicide, but it's not so easy to keep the two apart. They are both typical of modern Western societies with a low degree of cohesion and a low degree of regulation. But, it is hard to imagine a society with a high degree of cohesion attended by a low degree of regulation. So, the two do not vary completely independently. Still there is some kind of difference. Egoism, altruism, has to do with social structure, the strength of the ties that bind people, the robustness of the network, whereas anomic fatalistic has to do with culture, with the effective internalization of social prescriptions. But then again, the difference between structure and culture is, in sociology, not always as clear cut as it seems.
