In layman’s terms, anomie is a state of no moral or social principles in an individual or in a society. In a broader sense, it is, as defined in sociology, a societal condition defined by total breakdown of moral values, ethical standards that usually keep the society and its denizens on the right track. Introduced by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his book The Division of Labour in Society in 1893, the term gained currency after it was used again by him in the seminal book Suicide in 1897.

Well, just like me many of us must have observed with trepidation that the society and its dwellers are in a state of anomie. There are actually two by-products of anomie, which are indicative of social degeneration – an insatiable will and an absence of legitimate aspirations.

While delineating ‘insatiable will’ Durkheim used the term ‘the malady of the infinite’ in his book because desire without limit can never be quenched, it only gets intense with every windfall you get in your way. This is what we are witnessing now among our fellow countrymen. That’s why people, driven solely by psychological egoism, are now so solipsistic and their hearts are sick with desires having only nefarious intentions and longings.

Hundreds of instances of mala fide abuse of power to misappropriate public money and fleece ordinary people can be adduced here to better articulate the point that people’s yen for materialistic gains is only getting stronger, so are the means of corruption to satiate that hunger.

This is a country where government officials have bought a pillow at Tk 6,000, a chair at Tk 45,000 and a set of curtains at Tk 28.25 lakh. Again, despite the fact that three-month-long shutdown was underway starting from 26 March last year (meaning no government official was attending the office), around 350 drivers of the government transport pool worked for extra four hours every day along with their usual eight hours’ duty. Such dedication(!) and arduous overtime helped them embezzle around 3 crore of public money.

Pulling wool over everyone’s eyes, countless malefactors, someone belonging to the lowest rung of social ladder (driver) and even someone from the highest echelon of the economic strata, are involved in this sort of deliberate deception. Can you just visibilize the kind of rotten mentality one needs to embezzle money with such wild abandon?

Most interestingly, there is no admonition for such activity since society as a whole is sucked into the vortex of moral depravity. From individuals to the society, the degeneration has spread its tentacles in every sphere of our social life. Such lack of a social ethic gives rise to an absence of legitimate aspirations. For example- a bevy of sanctimonious people now resort to under-the-table transactions and other proscribed ways to aggrandize wealth in our country.

Our moral turpitude, further fortified by the indulgence of the state, has turned our society into a wasteland where even the law has been given teeth just to make way for those unscrupulous people to legalize their illegal money or asset. The abhorrent practice of whitening black money is the glaring example of such moral fluidity and our proclivity as a society for illegitimate aspirations.

In the first nine months of the current fiscal year (2020-21), undisclosed assets worth a whopping amount of Tk 14,295 crore have been legalized, according to information provided by National Board of Revenue (NBR). Owing to such practice, more and more citizens are now harboring illegitimate yearnings in their minds and keeping themselves aloof from abnegation and abstinence.

(The writer is a columnist.)