Loneliness is not an Epidemic to be Treated—Narcissism rather is a Social Scourge, Causing People to Imagine They Need “Connection” in the Form of Infinite Caresses and Reassurance from One’s Tribe
And the Democratic party, for all their concern about alienation, only Proves Everything our Unchecked Narcissism Already Brazenly Demonstrates
I. Introduction Hillary Clinton as the Vanguard of a Progressive Movement to Stage a War on Loneliness so to Speak, like the War on Poverty
Hillary Clinton’s prescription for alleviating, or perhaps curing, our supposed loneliness epidemic in The Atlantic is laughable.
I haven’t given up, though. I still believe in the wisdom and power of the American village. I’m inspired by the moms and dads showing up at school-board meetings and getting involved in local politics for the first time because they refuse to let extremists ban books from the neighborhood library. I love reading about teenagers turning to old-school flip phones so they’re no longer at the mercy of giant tech firms and hidden algorithms. I’m encouraged by the growing number of companies giving employees time off to vote and recognizing that they have responsibilities not just to shareholders but also to workers, customers, communities, and the planet. And I take heart from the workers bravely organizingcorporate warehouses and coffee shops, or walking a picket line, breathing new life into the labor movement and insisting that even in our fractured age, we are still stronger together.
Her article titled “The Weaponization of Loneliness” recalls Jim Jordan’s congressional committee on the “weaponization of government.” And similar to the way the inquisitional overtone of Jim Jordan’s committee betrays its own tendency towards weaponization of subpoena power, Clinton’s essay gives grounds to suspect our crisis of social alienation is little else besides another manufactured crisis, a smokescreen, for progressives to craft policies that nobody asked for, the impetus of which is to get them reelected and justify more social spending or what they more fashionably call now, “investment.”
But I think in her case, because she’s an egomaniac, still incapable of admitting that she lost to Trump because she can’t confront the fact the country hated her just a little more than him— after Russiagate, loneliness is just another way for Clinton to excuse and deny to herself the reason she lost, transferring her loss onto her made-up pathology of the benighted basket of deplorables. Referencing Clinton’s ‘90s “It Takes a Village” book, Ashley Frawley writes in Unherd, “Hillary Clinton Still Doesn’t Get it,”
Once again showing a stubborn penchant for reducing social problems to biology, Clinton believes that an “epidemic” of “loneliness and isolation” not only explains the rise of the “alt-Right”, but is also infecting American society to its core, threatening citizens’ “personal health and also the health of our democracy”. Turning her “basket of deplorables” into a “basket of the debilitated”, she confirms that America’s political elite is inclined to view the politically dispossessed in two ways: risky or at-risk; swarming or sick; dangerous or disordered.
What this forgets, though, is that treating voters as vulnerable, malign loners rather than disenfranchised political agents is part of the problem. Just as in the Nineties, Clinton seems incapable of reckoning with people as conscious actors. For her, problems are not solved by negotiating with the affected, but by prescribing expensive social programmes that seek to alter their behaviour. Yet being treated as passive recipients of “behaviour change programmes” will backfire unless the political class that Clinton represents addresses the political vacuum once filled by representation and contestation.
I say Clinton’s conception of the right wing mind is made up, because as Rich Loury writes in National Review, “Hillary Clinton’s Weaponized Loneliness,” it’s the left who are at least as lonely as the right. And airlifting taxpayer dollars on the hollowed-out heartland is a risible solution to the crisis of alienation that left progressives probably suffer the most acutely.
Moreover I think there’s justification to surmise that left wingers like Hillary Clinton or confused centrist ex conservatives like David Brooks are projecting their own neuroses onto the MAGA movement that in addition to systemic racism or patriarchy, or climate change alternately provide a self-loathing individual the grandiose sense of purpose one craves and the validation that comes with the self-assigned humility of pretending to care about something like the irreversible heating of the planet or undeniable systemic racism. Moral superiority is conferred in direct proportion to the issues whose significance one rates greater than oneself. Though incidentally there is nothing more contemptibly selfish in my opinion.
Loury responds that right wingers are less lonely,
As it happens, Republicans are the party of married people. As Conn Carroll pointed out at the Washington Examiner, in the 2022 House races, Republicans won married men by 20 points and unmarried men by seven, and won married women by 14 points. The GOP, on the other hand, got wiped out with unmarried women by nearly 40 points.
This marriage gap has a connection to loneliness. According to a Gallup survey in 2020, 41 percent of single people reported being lonely the day before, whereas only 16 percent of people who were married or in a domestic partnership said the same thing. (This was in the midst of the pandemic, by the way — overall loneliness has declined since.) By region, New England has the highest rate of loneliness, and big cities are significantly more lonely than rural areas.
This means that Hillary forged a coalition of the lonely (or at least the more lonely) in 2016, and the worst thing that could happen to her party is more people getting married and living in small places with a stronger sense of community.
Of course, Hillary doesn’t offer either of those as potential solutions to the crisis of loneliness. No, but Joe Biden’s infrastructure program might help — as if people are disconnected because they can’t take high-speed rail to go see friends. She’s heartened, too, by parents protesting “book bans” and workers engaged in union organizing. Left-wing activism, apparently, is what can knit us all back together.
Yeah Hillary. Perpetually fighting inequality and authority for the sake of Justice is a surefire—and insofar as one is politically engaged taking part on the right of history, maybe even the best—route to healthy relationships.
II. My Callously Pessimistic Theory of Loneliness as the Detestable Offshoot of the Modern Cult of the Self
In fact, if anyone is lonely, I would argue, it’s not because they’re deprived of social connection. Actually modern life suffers from a surplus—a debilitating excess— of connection, which paradoxically inducing a sense of deprivation, leaves people always wanting more, feeling left out, and feeling inadequate, inferior and excluded. It’s not that anyone is really isolated—not in this age where connection is more abundant and cheaper than ever before— rather self-obsessed people choose to opt out of every opportunity to have a genuine relationship with anybody and then reap the soul-dead consequences.
Why are marriage and fertility rates down? Why are people having less and less sex, even? Why do we spend all our time on our phones and between swiping left on every person and worrying about irreversible climate change, or gun ownership, so that we’re even permitted to delude ourselves “connection” simply—what? —ran away from us as a society? No. It’s because we chose to live vicariously through the experiences of the influencers, celebrities and entrepreneurs, whose transcendent beauty or money or notoriety we covet, and/or the transcendent political cause that gives our needy sense of inferiority a lazy opportunity for redemption and atonement; why, so we can have the narcotic pleasure to feel “anointed” in Thomas Sowell’s phrasing. It’s my conviction this is how degraded we have become not as a consequence of economic insecurity or the inception of social media. Jesus. In Margaret Thatcher’s words, No. No. No. As a culture we simply over a century, sacrificed our self-respect for the empty relief of egalitarian acceptance, self-esteem, personal empowerment, and destigmatization. What you can call this “loneliness” people suffer from nowadays, from pride parades, speaker shutdowns, and Twitter mobs on the woke left, to Incels, Qanon spiritualists, and MAGA fanatics on the far right—is only the desperate immiseration of a society that threw away a culture of norms and expectations, arrogantly to be above their confines.
We’re not lonely. We’re just obsessed with ourselves as sui genesis limitless projects, yet we simultaneously can’t face the exhaustive consequences of denying all limitations as a corollary of our indefinite commitment to “personal growth” in AOC’s terms or… our revolutionary conceit that we can change the world and force reality to conform absolutely to our most fickle fancies, i.e. with gun control, gender affirming care, net zero, antiracism. So we only imagine that we’re lonely.
Does this make sense yet?
It’s scary how our romantic fetishization of the limitless self lines right up with, and certainly gives way to, frantic desires for final end-all solutions to unreal insoluble abstract problems, like climate, the gender binary, racial inequality that merely threaten one’s increasingly co-dependent ego. That is, because one’s ego became so fragile, totalizing solutions became proportionately more appealing. If we can be described as lonely, that’s because our outsize egos made us permanently dissatisfied with anything in existence that falls short of rote culturally prescribed, not to mention mediocre, ideals of physical or moral perfection.
Before his essay devolves at the end into a range of dystopian prescriptions like Huxleyan government-subsidized socialization, David Brooks in The Atlantic, “How America Got Mean,” is correct in his diagnosis of our problem, and what led to it. In the beginning he says,
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein.
Brooks says that the decline of moral character in American society began in the post-war period with humanistic psychology. He says,
The trouble with the 20th century, the members of this group argued, was that the existence of rigid power hierarchies led to oppression in many spheres of life. We need to liberate individuals from these authority structures, many contended. People are naturally good and can be trusted to do their own self-actualization.
Indeed it is trends in European psychology that precipitated the narcissism at least of today’s left, in which one is a perpetual victim of unfair power structures, which only a heightened consciousness of micro aggressions and bureaucratic bubblewrap like trigger warnings, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, and safe spaces somehow prophylactically counteracts—the bane of my college existence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges all during the Trump presidency. An article in The Economist cites a new study finding that American Wokeness began abroad,
The term refers to a loose constellation of ideas that have changed how educated, left-leaning folk view the world. It says all disparities between racial groups are proof of structural racism; that norms of free speech, individualism and universalism are camouflage for discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of privilege are dismantled. The conventional wisdom says that woke ideas began in the social-science departments of American universities, migrated to the country’s newspapers and spread elsewhere.
This was always a partial story. The godfathers of woke ideas, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, philosophers who argued all social relations were really about power, were based largely in France. Mr Rozado’s new paper takes things further. He analyses 98m news articles, tracking words such as “transphobic”, “racist” and “sexist”. The phenomenon, it seems, did not begin in America (see chart). Countries such as Australia, Canada and Sweden in fact led the charge.
Is it any wonder over the years, that people became so miserable the moment they became enraptured with the convenient illusion that they were a perfect victim implicated in a grandiose historical struggle, among the ruins of an invisibly oppressive world?
Nobody is deprived of connection, my neoliberals. People are only so self-involved, because no modest connection with anything is good enough for them. Hence the mad contrivance of postmodern woke progressive ideals like “bodily autonomy.” I have a friend who, when he was in law school, told me that when a professor asked the class to name what they thought was the most important right in a democracy— while he like any rational person raised his hand and declared Free Speech, the majority of the class said bodily autonomy.
And yet it’s progressives like Hillary Clinton who wonder why people were so lonely as to vote for Trump on the right. Please. Like the educated metropolitan woke progressive girls with eating disorders getting preventive botox aren’t lonely. Or the misanthropic environmental movement, so lonely and hateful of human connection they’re more concerned about the quality of the air in the next hundred years than the price of heating your home or the gas you put in your car. Or, to borrow Megyn Kelly’s wonderfully scornful phrase, do you think the “trans lobby,” adding more and more letters to the LGBTQ+IA2 isn’t a lonely sociological pattern? Or the people who are so infantilized as to identify as demisexual or pansexual, etc. Since I recall once seeing pictures of asexual people marching together— now it strikes me, can you imagine a group of people more lonely (or insanely narcissistic) than a bunch of people with no sexual impulses marching to get accepted by showing their pride not to have any sexual desires? Give me a fucking break.
But the height of the left’s hypocritical fixation on loneliness doesn’t come with Hillary Clinton’s absurd idea that the right “weaponized” it. This shit gets better. I have yet to read something more absurd than proposed by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy. In Reason editor in chief, Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s newsletter the other week, I learned Chris Murphy wants to establish a federal agency to handle the epidemic of loneliness. She informs us,
On Tuesday, Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy announced the introduction of his "National Strategy for Social Connection," a bill that would create "a federal office to combat the growing epidemic of American loneliness, develops anti-loneliness strategies, and fosters best practices to promote social connection," as Murphy put it.
Which she compares to federal nutrition guidelines,
Murphy's bill would create an "Office of Social Connection Policy to advise the president on loneliness and isolation," order federal agencies to implement a "national strategy on social connection," and start a public awareness campaign to educate people about fostering connections.
"Similar to existing national guidelines on nutrition, sleep, and physical activity, the Office would issue research-based best practices on how to better engage and connect with our local communicates," Murphy's summary of the bill states.
U.S. nutrition guidelines, of course, have a long history of being ridiculously unscientific and plagued by cronyism. And whatever one thinks about nutrition and physical activity guidelines today, there's no denying that Americans are massively overweight and way too sedentary. So, I'd hardly call these things models of efficacy.
In fact, national guidelines on how to be less lonely are bound to work about as well as nutrition and physical fitness guidelines have: not at all.
It sounds to me like Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” repackaged to suit civilization’s discontents. At the end of her newsletter, Nolan Brown, a libertarian, concludes,
What's next, a national trivia-night network? Social wellness screenings on public buses? Federal subsidies for bowling leagues?
I know…
IV. The Illiberal Danger of Politicizing People’s Asinine Misery, the Product of a Morally Bankrupt Culture We Made That Way
And I would add, the last thing we need now is for the federal government to administer directly to our outsize egos, making us lonely in the first place. Anyway doesn’t anyone know that the left-behind heartland voted for Trump, primarily, because their self-importance was fed by generations of government entitlements, in particular Social Security Disability Insurance and the Earned Income Tax Credit? Trump only gave these people, habituated to abuse social programs, disincentivizing work, a scapegoat— blaming illegal immigrants, trade with China, Big Pharma, and Muslims while notably promising to protect Medicare and Social Security. To say nothing of our social programs. When Trump promised to repeal and replace Obamacare just to show how Anti-Obama he was, he did not replace or repeal Obamacare.
The Democratic party would have you believe the far right’s loneliness is caused by economic inequality or racism from insecurity over demographic change when it was really the wage subsidies and entitlements offered as rights by their own Democratic party ever since the New Deal, through the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, that created an individual that without the dignity of employment, or one’s own income, succumbed to government dependency, which naturally over many generations made him deeply, dangerously indignant. I would argue that with the rise of Trump perhaps ironically, we are beginning to pay the price of the New Deal (let alone the national debt from unfunded entitlements going broke), not “trickle down economics” or multinationals supposedly “shipping jobs overseas.”
Now with this loneliness panic and Biden airlifting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on the rustbelt, it looks more and more like progressives are making an unconscious display of remorse at the failure of their own programs to help those people, even as they double down on the exact same policies that started this decline. Take Biden’s subsidized childcare, Buy American content requirements, subsidized wages, and union protections attached to the Infrastructure Bill, the CHIPS act, and the god fucking awful Inflation Reduction Act.
It’s no coincidence that as center-right psychologists, Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt claim, we only became more fragile and starved for connection as we first became more self-absorbed and entitled than ever before in American life, beginning with the 70’s self-esteem movement if not as Brooks argued, the 50’s with humanistic psychology, abetted by the sweeping powers of our ever-expanding welfare state. An informed, albeit not a kind, account of the problem dictates that government largesse would only make this cultural malaise even worse, reinforcing our cognitive distortions, feeding our seeming incapacity for personal responsibility.
And although this might sound ludicrous at face value, the underpinnings of the role that mental health has come to play as a political football, a cudgel for the advancement of populist causes, has more sinister implications than you can probably imagine.
Center right intellectual Ronald Dworkin in his frightening 2021 essay in National Affairs, “The Politicization of Unhappiness” compares the idol of mental health—defined, upheld and enforced by the growing caring industry— to a revolutionary political party. He says,
With its four tiers, the caring industry's formal structure and hierarchical organization mimic those of a revolutionary political party. Clinical psychologists stand at the apex of the pyramid and hold supreme power — at least from an intellectual point of view — in that they constitute the agent of legitimation and define what therapy is. Below the apex, a far-flung base ramifies throughout society, with clinical social workers, counselors, marriage and family therapists, nurse psychotherapists, and life coaches counseling as many Americans as possible in as many places as possible.
This sweeping base, which is vital to the industry's caregiver role, is also highly reminiscent of a revolutionary political party's far-reaching lower echelons. When revolutions occur on a grand scale, a revolutionary party fills the vacuum created by the discrediting of traditional elites and the breakdown of civil society. Its members fan out and attach themselves to society's major institutions to exert control and restore order. This is precisely what's happening with the caring industry today. The industry already stands in alter-ego fashion alongside just about every organized unit of state and society in the United States: Wherever there is a corporation, a school, a prison, a church, or an Army base, there is also a unit of the caring industry. That activists should try to attach a unit to the police should not surprise.
Like any successful revolutionary political party, the caring industry pulls the personal dimension of life through a new kind of organization, offering people solutions to their problems and a new kind of authority figure to manage them: the caring professional. With the old authority figures belittled and real friends and family spread thin or even non-existent, the only people left who can fill the void — and who have the prestige to compel others to follow them down a new road — are caring professionals.
Dworkin here illustrates the very real illiberal threat that an unchecked commitment to heal our discontents poses to a free society. As society becomes allegedly more lonely, the more you will hear calls from the right or the left to turn mental health professionals into first responders and to lend power and authority to an industry that depends on the ideology of caring for its multibillion probably multitrillion dollar existence (I know at least the corporate Diversity industry is valued in the trillions). And as the populist right and left in America and across the West continue to attempt to manipulate public consciousness with their absurd respective agendas, the more we can expect, and more for liberty’s sake we have to resist, this unsettling alignment between big government and the mental health industry insofar as administrative efforts to palliate our discontents and make us happy or less lonely infringes profoundly on our individual agency with the most deleterious consequences for a ideally free and open neoliberal society.
People quote Orwell a lot these days, but I think the greater fear was raised by Aldous Huxley. That we will surrender our liberties willingly the more safely and gladly to inhabit an artificial state of consciousness.
V. Fuck Licensed Professionals: Just Fuck em, goddamn it
I will be writing more articles on this preposterous psychosocial even weirdly sexual malaise that beggars belief, the lack of any sense of shame with which people talk about their feelings and how openly they evince a desire to receive the helping hand of public authority. One really gets a sense of how pervasive an issue it is when even on the far right men have become abhorrently open regarding their emotions and insecurities. I think it represents a Road to Serfdom that if Hayek were still around, he would find no less dangerous than socialism.
Indeed the politicization of unhappiness—the attempt by institutional authority to determine happiness, to determine “connection,” to determine your relationships for you—is socialism.
Stay independent, individually strong, and self-respecting, neoliberals.
— Jay
It really is hilarious to hear that pretentious gasbag, Hillary R. Clinton, bloviating about American loneliness, its causes and the cure. Once again, It Takes a Village! Sure, but in HRC’s village, you’d find yourself starved of privacy, peace and quiet. There would be so many agents of the helping professions on hand, working hard to make you happy and well adjusted, whether you wanted to be happy and well adjusted or not…