The Double Weaponization of Loneliness

The Doubled Weaponization of Loneliness
Roger Berkowitz

The existential crisis facing humanity is likely neither the devastation of the earth from global warming nor the destruction of humanity by a rogue AI. Indeed, artificial intelligence, in its promise of exponential technological advance, may change the calculus of the most apocalyptic climate change models. But what AI does threaten to do is to make ever increasing numbers of human beings economically superfluous. As AI does many of the jobs that humans do better, more cheaply, and more efficiently, masses of people will struggle to find jobs. With the loss of jobs come the more consequential loss of meaning and the experience of existential loneliness.

If one believes with Marx that the liberation from work will free people to hunt, fish, and take up hobbies, then the newfound free time will contribute to human flourishing–so long as governments decide to use the bounty from AI efficiency improvements to institute something like a Universal Basic Income. The problem with economic superfluity, however, is that we live in an age where public life is spiritually dead. With the retreat of religion, tradition, and public spiritual life, there is little to give masses of people a meaning and purpose in life outside of their career and labor. The esteem that comes from holding a job and making a living is for most of us the fundamental pillar of our identity. It is why when we meet someone we ask: What do you do? Our identities are wrapped up in our careers. The threat to render masses of people economically superfluous raises the question of what will happen to masses of people who suddenly are denied the sense of purpose they find in their job. 

This rootlessness and homelessness of mass society is not new; it emerged, Hannah Arendt argues, in the early 20th century with the loss of those public ideals of spiritual and civic religions that had previously leant meaning to the pain and suffering of human life. As people are abandoned to their own selves, they search for meaning in their jobs. And at times of depression or economic precarity, masses of people turn to ideological movements like Nazism and Bolshevism; these movements are collectively held fictions that give coherence and meaning to an unstable and seemingly irrational world. 

In a recent essay in the Atlantic Magazine, Hillary Clinton argues that the root of today’s  right-wing conspiracy theories and right-wing demagogues is a modern version of metaphysical loneliness. Without naming Arendt, Clinton cites a report of US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent 81 page report that documents the statistics behind the epidemic of loneliness in our society. She then connects the dots and argues that loneliness is not only bad for lonely individuals, but for democracy as well. Clinton writes:

Murthy carefully connects the dots between increasing social isolation and declining civic engagement. “When we are less invested in one another, we are more susceptible to polarization and less able to pull together to face the challenges that we cannot solve alone,” he wrote in The New York Times.
It’s not just the surgeon general who recognizes that social isolation saps the lifeblood of democracy. So do the ultra-right-wing billionaires, propagandists, and provocateurs who see authoritarianism as a source of power and profit.
There have always been angry young men alienated from mainstream society and susceptible to the appeal of demagogues and hate-mongers. But modern technology has taken the danger to another level. This was Steve Bannon’s key insight.
Long before Bannon ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he was involved in the world of online gaming. He discovered an army of what he later described as “rootless white males,” disconnected from the real world but highly engaged online and often quick to resort to sexist and racist attacks. When Bannon took over the hard-right website Breitbart News, he was determined to turn these socially isolated gamers into the shock troops of the alt-right, pumping them full of conspiracy theories and hate speech. Bannon pursued the same project as a senior executive at Cambridge Analytica, the notorious data-mining and online-influence company largely owned by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. According to a former Cambridge Analytica engineer turned whistleblower, Bannon targeted “incels,” or involuntarily celibate men, because they were easy to manipulate and prone to believing conspiracy theories. “You can activate that army,” Bannon told the Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
 

Unsaid in Clinton’s essay is that her title, “The Weaponization of Loneliness,” is taken from a recent book of the same title by Stella Morabito. Morabito, too, worries that mass loneliness is threatening a new totalitarianism; and she also cites Murthy’s Surgeon General Report. For Morabito, however, our epidemic of loneliness underlies a different version of totalitarianism, one rooted in identity politics, political correctness, and mob agitation. Morabito writes:

Murthy’s advisory should alarm all Americans. It declares our loneliness epidemic to be a public health crisis that requires urgent government intervention. But it can just easily serve as a blueprint for an even more massive government invasion of the private sphere of life, as I explained in a three–part series here at The Federalist.
The initiative must be resisted at all costs. To understand why, we first ought to consider Hannah Arendt’s epic book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” She noted that people cannot be fully terrorized into compliance unless they are first isolated from one another. “Therefore,” Arendt wrote, “one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.”
Bringing about that isolation involves what I call a “machinery of loneliness.” It’s not a new process. It goes back through modern history, at least since the French Revolution. We must become aware of the process if we hope to rein it in and revive civil society with institutions worthy of trust.
There are three main components of the machinery of loneliness: identity politics, political correctness, and mob agitation. Identity politics strips us of our individuality, and divides us into camps sorted by various identities of “oppressor” or “victim.” Political correctness controls our speech by inducing us to self-censor under threat of ostracism. Mobs take different forms, but they serve to enforce all of the above while cultivating conformity, compliance, and social distrust.

Clinton’s essay is plainly intended to promote Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent 81-page advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Social Isolation.” She presents her 1996 treatise on soft collectivism, “It Takes a Village,” as a forerunner to the advisory.
Murthy’s advisory should alarm all Americans. It declares our loneliness epidemic to be a public health crisis that requires urgent government intervention. But it can just easily serve as a blueprint for an even more massive government invasion of the private sphere of life, as I explained in a three–part series here at The Federalist.
The initiative must be resisted at all costs. To understand why, we first ought to consider Hannah Arendt’s epic book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” She noted that people cannot be fully terrorized into compliance unless they are first isolated from one another. “Therefore,” Arendt wrote, “one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.”
Bringing about that isolation involves what I call a “machinery of loneliness.” It’s not a new process. It goes back through modern history, at least since the French Revolution. We must become aware of the process if we hope to rein it in and revive civil society with institutions worthy of trust.
There are three main components of the machinery of loneliness: identity politics, political correctness, and mob agitation. Identity politics strips us of our individuality, and divides us into camps sorted by various identities of “oppressor” or “victim.” Political correctness controls our speech by inducing us to self-censor under threat of ostracism. Mobs take different forms, but they serve to enforce all of the above while cultivating conformity, compliance, and social distrust.