When Despair Drives Violence: Looking for Root Causes
A friend recently made important points about violence in America. He’s right that we’re seeing widespread nihilism – people losing faith that life has meaning or that their actions have positive consequences. He pointed to moral relativism and a breakdown in shared values. These observations ring true. The question is: what created these conditions?
I keep coming back to economics. Cultural and moral frameworks matter, but economic security is what allows people to invest in those frameworks in the first place.
**The Foundation Under Everything Else** When people work full-time jobs that still leave them one emergency away from homelessness, something breaks down inside. When young adults can’t afford apartments despite college degrees and decent jobs, the promise that hard work leads to stability feels like a lie. When families lose homes they’ve paid on for years because of medical bills, faith in the system erodes. People are watching the rules they were taught – work hard, play by the rules, build a stable life – fail them completely. The nihilism my friend describes makes sense in this context. When legitimate paths to security are blocked off, people stop believing in the system. When institutions feel hollow because they’ve stopped serving regular people, trust dies. When working harder means being exploited more efficiently, consequences stop mattering. **How We Got Here** The post-WWII middle class was built through deliberate choices: strong labor protections, public investment, fair taxation. Wages grew with productivity. Families could buy homes, send kids to college, and look toward the future with confidence. Over the past 40 years, that foundation was systematically dismantled. Wages stagnated while productivity soared. Unions were weakened. Public services were cut. Today, many full-time workers can’t afford basic stability – housing, transportation, healthcare, childcare. Companies pay wages so low their workers qualify for food stamps, outsourcing labor costs to taxpayers while posting record profits. This is wealth extraction – pulling resources from the base of society and funneling them upward. **Why This Feeds Violence** When enough people lose access to legitimate paths forward, the whole society becomes brittle. Fear replaces faith. Anger replaces hope. People start looking for someone to blame. This creates the conditions for violence we’re seeing: – Economic desperation fuels nihilism and despair – When institutions stop serving people, respect for those institutions dies – Financial stress makes everything feel like a crisis – When the system feels rigged, extreme actions start seeming rational The CEO assassination is a clear example. Luigi Mangione was responding to a healthcare system that destroys families financially while generating massive profits. Murder is wrong, but we can understand why someone might see violence as the only way to be heard. **What Real Security Looks Like** Concentrating wealth at the top creates fragility – a country stretched thin, with too few people holding up too much. Real security comes from a strong middle class. People who can afford stability believe in the system. They participate in democracy, respond to emergencies, teach children, and keep communities functioning. They have something to lose, so they work to preserve it. The strongest middle class in American history came from deliberate investment: education, housing, labor protections, healthcare, infrastructure, and fair taxation that prioritized broad prosperity. We can choose that path again. We know what works. **Rebuilding From the Ground Up** A secure, stable society requires wages that keep pace with productivity. Worker protections that prevent exploitation. Affordable housing and modern infrastructure. Healthcare built for health. Public education that opens doors. Fair taxation and closed loopholes. Responsive government that adapts to changing needs. These are pragmatic ideas, grounded in economics and history. They restore strength to the part of America that makes everything else work. **The Choice We Face** The nihilism and moral breakdown my friend describes are real. They’re symptoms of what happens when a society abandons the people who hold it up. We can keep blaming cultural institutions while the economic foundation crumbles beneath us. Or we can rebuild that foundation and watch people rediscover faith in the system – because the system actually serves them again. A country that abandons its middle implodes. A country that invests in its people becomes unbreakable. The violence we’re seeing comes from choice. And we can choose differently. **Related Reading:** **[The Collapse of the Middle Class Is a National Security Issue](https://dittany.com/the-collapse-of-the-middle-class)** – The foundational analysis of how wealth extraction creates the conditions for social breakdown and violence **[America’s Middle Class Will Save It](https://dittany.com/americas-middle-class-will-save-it)** – How middle class stability creates democratic resilience and reduces the appeal of extremist movements **[When Stock Markets Rise While Americans Struggle: Understanding the Disconnect](https://dittany.com/stock-markets-rise-while-americans-struggle)** – The specific mechanisms that create economic despair while convincing people to support the system extracting wealth from them **[There Is No Far Left Movement in America: We Are Centrists](https://dittany.com/there-is-no-far-left-movement-america-we-are-centrists/)** – Polling data showing that policies often labeled “radical” have decades of bipartisan majority support among Americans