ly abandon dreams of success but also the rules of social/bureaucratic engagement, deliberately receding into a nonproductive way of life, sometimes by way of alcohol or drugs. The rebel is one who actively rather than passively discards both the values of the culture and the rules of engagement, instead setting up an alternative, revolutionary value system and potentially engaging in social protest and action.
Merton develops the idea that social structure may have standards of achievement that for all except the wealthy and powerful may be impossible to accomplish. That hard reality, in conjunction with social norms consistent with, say, Judaeo-Christian views of morality and honesty, sets up a situation of alienation, i.e., anomie or strain, that may actually foster social dysfunction or social deviance as the individual's mode of action. This is connected to Merton's characterization of manifest and latent functions of social institutions and social behavior:
This is the rationale for the distinction between manifest functions and latent functions; the fir
...