I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that’s the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up–either religious or social laws–become meaningless. Things just get really dark. You lose those constraints, and then anything goes. The forces that set that in motion, I don’t know exactly what they’d be. I think just a lot of frustration, lack of finding’ somethin’ that you can hold on to, lack of contact with people, you know? That’s one of the most dangerous things, I think–isolation…. Nebraska was about that American isolation: what happens to people when they’re alienated from their friends and their community and their government and their job. Because those are the things that keep you sane, that give meaning to life in some fashion. And if they slip away, and you start to exist in some void where the basic constraints of society are a joke, then life becomes kind of a joke. And anything can happen.
Bruce Springsteen speaking with Kurt Loder, 1984, quoted in Warren Zanes, Deliver Me From Nowhere, 245