Jane Addams: Public Sociology

In every society and country around the world, there are roles, values, morals, and a group of standards in which people live and view the world, also known as democratic social ethics. Jane Addams came up with four key elements that described what exactly democratic social ethics consisted of: no one group of people are more important than another, all people are active agents, people seek opportunity for kindliness, and personal safety of all members of a social democracy is tied to the personal safety of each.

Realistically, how often does a society actually follow these elements? In almost every society, there is at least one of these elements being violated, if not more. One specific example that sticks out in my mind is the video on kidnapping brides in Kyrgyzstan. After kind of breaking away from the Soviet Union after a long period of time, the people of Kyrgyzstan went back to their old ways and started kidnapping brides. This man in the video literally went to her house where he communicated with her brother (usually the parents) and took a woman, who was already seeing someone else, hostage until the groom's family was finally able to convince the bride to wed. And if the woman was to say no to him, then she would be banned from her family and the entire society. This here alone is breaking at least two of Addam's elements. In Kyrgyzstan, men and women are not at all even close to being equal. Men have so much more say and importance in the society, and women don't even stand a chance. Unless they are okay with being disowned, the women have to say yes against their own will. It also doesn't follow the "all people are active agents" element. Women do not have the ability to act in this society and say what is wrong and what is right, that's not up to them.

America, the land of the free and home of the brave, doesn't even come close to following all of these elements today. The government and some other people may say that men and women are treated equally in today's world, but there are still a lot of men who hold the same job title and position as women making a lot more money than them. Women are also still being sexually harassed in the workforce
too. No one says it or admits it, but men are still dominant in today's society. Not to say that we are horrible people, but there are not enough people in this country that actually still seek opportunity for kindliness. Everyone is focused on only themselves and doing what they need to do to get by. People don't think about ways they could be kind to others on a daily basis. The government is a big example right now.

Durkheim on Suicide

As a psychology major, suicide has a lot to do with the field that I'm going into and what I want to study further, so of course I'm going to pick suicide to blog about. I agree with Durkheim when he states that the purpose of even studying suicide in the first place is to make it a sociological phenomenon and not just a personal choice. There are so many outside factors and pressures that drive a person to commit suicide. The pressure to fit in, the pressure to get good grades as a student, the pressure to make some kind of meaning out of your life, people constantly badgering you about everything and anything. The outside world puts a lot of stress on someone which can cause them to become mentally unstable and even consider suicide. There are four different kinds of suicide we could talk about: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic. Egoistic is basically where you consider yourself an outsider and you don't fit in. And if you don't fit in anywhere, you're probably going to get bullied and harassed, causing one to feel so ashamed of themselves that they believe their life isn't worth living anymore. Altruistic is where you feel so strongly towards a certain society or group, that you would be willing to die for them. This is true of soldiers who go to war and they know they're going to die, but they keep on going anyways. This type of suicide could be considered more heroic or novel though because they aren't dying for themselves, they're dying for their country. Anomic is where there is very low regulation causing people to go from being stable to unstable. An example of that could be during the recession in the US. Before the recession, people had good jobs and they were for the most part financially stable, and then they wake up the next morning and bam, there job is gone. They lost all of their pay and salary and now have no way to pay the bills or go to the doctor if they're sick. Such an enormous change of pace in life doesn't settle in well for a lot of people causing them to end their lives. The last one is fatalistic suicide, where there is too much regulation, take for instance a prison. It is human nature to want to be free, and people aren't able to live well when someone has so much control over their life. When they can't do what they want, when they want, they question the point of living. People don't just wake up and decide they want to commit suicide and end their life for no reason at all. There is a lot of outside factors and stress that just builds up until a person can no longer tear it down and gives up. Because of things that have happened in their life that seem like they cannot be fixed, they commit suicide. The video I have posted posted  is about a teenager who was suicidal because she lost her mom to suicide at age 9.  Suicide is not just a personal choice, it is a sociological phenomenon that not everyone recovers from.