Anomie of the State
Anomie, according to Durkheim, comes from the breakdown of social norms. This is to say that when societies go through transitional periods, the categories which a language and society must create to differentiate between concepts and ideas are necessarily fluid. This fluidity lends itself to uncertainty until language re-creates culture towards more effective production in the new environment. Of necessity, that process of re-creation involves re-stratification of those populations who can ideally capitalize on the new environment, which entails re-identification and reconnection with societies valued by any given member.
The Society of Selves
As Robert Putnam aptly described in this book Bowling Alone, American society is moving towards this type of isolation. Modernity is at the end of its cycle, and people don't know where to do next. Advertising and multinational media conglomerates regularly feed people fiction and call it news. Organized religious practices regularly influence people to follow the same socially constructive and destructive practices today as they did dozens, hundreds, and thousands of years ago. Political theorists put forth revolutionary ideas, and hipshot academics even regularly discover fundamentals of life incongruent with unexamined realities of those within their communities. When these sorts of social disruptions occur, anomie is a necessary reaction to the change.
During industrialization, anomie took on a deeper meaning, however - that of peer isolation. Through the advent of globalized communication and transportation, people can now live the vast majority of their adult lives with almost no human contact whatsoever. More frequently, though, the societies in which a person participates is now almost purely at their own volition. Main streets are empty of pedestrians and clogged with cars, and pews bend low every weekend with people surrounding themselves with only those who agree with them. This complacency generates both anomie and anger.
When a view is unexamined, it's a prejudice - regardless of its social constructivity, linguistic communication, or cognitive representation. If a person doesn't know why they believe something, yet still publicly professes its truth, an inherent instability develops: fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is the profession of any unexamined observation as "true," regardless of whether that observation came from a holy book, parent, or politician.
When fundamentalisms of any type collide, however, anomie and anger emerge. Again, these are mutually defined and mutually destructive.
Industrialized Isolation
Labor doesn't take on a life of its own - labor takes the life of the laborers. When labor becomes the driving force of an economic system, at cost to society, Anomie and anger are the natural equilibrium. When this happens, the only social systems allowed to develop are those within a corporation, inbred and dysfunctional. Modernity is, then, characterized by the practice of money worship.
Specifically in the area of socioeconomic theory, most Americans with whom I discuss economics don't know why they endorse a given political system. They know that they've been taught that capitalism is better than socialism, and all they had to do to pass their high school economics exam was be able to remember how to spell the words properly. Some know the basic principles of supply, demand, scarcity, price, cost, and profit, but those are the rare ones. As discussed in my post-industrial economics article, this format of industrialized education and fiat university degrees has produced an entire generation with an inability to think critically. It's little wonder that industrialized education has produced isolation: in the absence of challenge or meaningful, purposeful interaction, the only natural equilibria are stagnation, isolation, and cultural death.
Thankfully, there is at least one subset of American society who still concentrate on critical thought - the hacker culture. Initially, "hacker" meant "someone who is skilled at understanding computer systems." In the absence of meaningful interaction with the culture itself, the media substituted the culture's definition with that of "computer criminal." Recently, however, the hacker culture has branched out from the study of computer science to include most known disciplines. There are now network hackers, music hackers, food hackers, language hackers, math hackers, and a growing group of "lifehackers." Hacking is now a concentration on the primitives, interactions, and gestalts of any system, in any discipline.
The Entitlement Society
In Aldous Huxley's book, Brave New World, he described a society based on engineered deficiencies in members of the population. Named alphas, betas, gammas, deltas, and epsilons, each biologically engineered class had its own jobs, communities, and belief systems with little mobility between the layers. One of the common beliefs, though, is that everyone believes they're fundamentally "better" than the class members below them. This ideology, a type of false consciousness, preserved social order by prohibiting class mobility. This idea is prevalent in American society as well, though not necessarily through bioengineering.
For the past many decades in education, a prevalent theory has been universal self-worth and self-esteem. Fifty years ago, these terms weren't even in the vernacular. Now, any American English speaker will not only know what they mean, but know that they've been told they should have them. This inherently devalues action: children (who are now becoming adults) are and were taught that they're special and worthy of respect axiomatic with their very existence. Those of us who didn't toe that line insisted that our personal value of self should come from something we've done, not something we've been. For that, we were chastised, and pushed further into the ideology that everyone's a winner, and anybody can do anything. Anyone raised in a Christian church will recognize this as an echo of "of course you should be proud of yourself - you're a child of the most high God!"
The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on the other hand, declares "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." This makes no mention of being equal in abilities, skills, class, or ideology. To say that all human beings are born equal in dignity and rights does not say that all human beings can be anything or do anything they want to do. Life is painful and difficult, and teaching our children that they are to expect rewards for their very essence is to both devalue humanity and to set them up for gross disappointment later in life. These children have grown up to create an entire society around entitlement - the baseless belief that the world owes them something. Why should they believe differently? This is what we've all been taught from day one.
This form of ideology has a cyclical relationship. This false consciousness closes the door to radical social change, but opens the door for inter-class mobility. When people can move between classes, though, class consciousness develops. Siddhārtha Gautama arguably wouldn't have achieved the great enlightenment (the formation of Buddhism) without the great departure (crossing from the royal class into the lower class). This vision of class is the beginning of radical social change.
In American society, however, this cycle is stuck because of consumer credit and commercialization. These too, though, are finite demands, governed by a person's ability to repay a debt within the span of their natural lives.
The Economics of the Shadows of War
In supply-side economics, transfer functions are typically gaussian, such as the extraction and refinery of oil. In demand-side economics, however, this trend tends towards the sigmoidal, such as with consumer credit, or any derivative market such as that for housing. The beginnings of sigmoidal curves appear exponential, until the marginal utility that exists (or can be created) levels out as a function of the Pareto principle. Eventually, these sigmoidal curves level off at a maximum saturation point, and either reaches an equilibrium, as with sustainable demand, or crashes, as with unsustainable demand.
This false consciousness will be amended in American culture when those whose labor is being exploited by industrial (oligarchical, non-democratized) capitalism realize that debt cycles are unsustainable. This realization will come when the markets which run off of consumer credit either crash or deteriorate enough that the majority of the middle class is without some fundamental need: food, water, shelter, or socialization. The latter of these needs is already not being adequately addressed. Of the other three, wait until the housing market crashes. Wars can only fuel the economy for so long - eventually, they devalue fiat currencies by devaluing the social capital invested from foreign markets into domestic ones.
Again, this is a function of America's life in the shadow of World War II. We have a powerful military, and we choose to use it to indirectly further internal social control. This pattern, based on scarce, geopolitically dodgy resources, is the very definition of unsustainable investment. When it proves as much, so too will the false consciousness of the American lower and middle classes.