Does Loneliness Give Rise to Totalitarianism?

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination…is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”

Loneliness is a growing problem in industrialized, developed nations. We know this in our marrow; indeed, the problem has been growing for the last 10 to 50 years, depending on what time frame one uses. Books like The Lonely Crowd talk about the isolation many experienced in the mass culture of the 1950s and 60s. To us, that seems like another world, and for many people today it is, as many of those in the younger generations can’t even imagine what living then was like.

This growth in loneliness and feelings of isolation, serious enough in Britain at least for the government to feel justified in its appointment of a minister for loneliness, is most prevalent among young people. This is perhaps a clue as to why they are the ones who most enthusiastically embrace the identity politics that are consuming more and more of society’s discourse.

The rise in loneliness is due to a range of things: changing living habits, the trend towards smaller families, partly driven by choice and partly by house-price and living cost necessity and the changing patterns of work, especially in the growth of ultra-flexible—and unstable—zero hours work contracts. It is also due to the cost of our increasingly close relationship to technology, especially in the age christened by the first the smart-phone, which Thomas Friedman has written about.

These devices have seen a massive surge in usage over the last few years and have also gone hand in hand with an upsurge in social media usage. Both of these phenomena have grown together, one feeding the other. One might quibble with the idea that these are a direct cause of loneliness, and that this all stinks of Luddite passions. There is some truth in this, as those who declaim about the ills wrought on society through the power of the phone and Internet often stray into apocalyptic language, imbued exclusively with dark tones and little light.