New In Print: Stella Morabito, The Weaponization of Loneliness

How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer

Just out today from Stella Morabito, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer from Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press.

The publisher writes,

Do you keep your opinions to yourself because you’re afraid people will reject you? Do you sign on to a cause just because everyone around you acts like it’s the right thing to do?

Welcome to The Weaponization of Loneliness. Tyrants of all stripes want to tell you what to believe and how to live your life. They get away with it by using the most potent weapon at their disposal: your fear of ostracism.

This book explains how dictators—from the French Revolution to today’s globalists—aim to atomize us in order to control us. We fall for it because our need to connect with others and our fear of social rejection are so hardwired that they trigger our conformity impulse.

We need to understand how the merchants of loneliness—power elites in Big Tech, Big Media, Big Government, academia, Hollywood, and the corporate world—exploit our terror of social isolation. Their divide-and-conquer tactics include identity politics, political correctness, and mob agitation. Their media monopoly spawns the propaganda essential to demonization campaigns and the subversion of our institutions. It all adds up to a machinery of loneliness.

This book also offers a message of hope. We can resist this psychological warfare if we have strong bonds in our families, faith communities, and friendships. We must also talk openly and often about the deadly costs of abject conformity and compliance.

Stella Morabito has been a guest on the Heidelcast (see below) and quotations from her work have appeared frequently on the HB. She has published numerous articles on the social fallout of propaganda, mob psychology, and the cult mindset at The Federalist, where she has been a senior contributor since 2014. She has written on those themes for various other publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Public Discourse, Townhall, and the Human Life Review. Stella served for a decade as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency where she focused on methods of communist media, propaganda, and disinformation. She has a master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history from the University of Southern California and currently lives in the Shenandoah Valley.

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5 comments

  1. Yep, this is a book I’ll definitely have to read. Without having read yet, though, my own personal advice on this matter is to stop watching television, any television, but especially news programs, local as well as national. I have done this beginning in early 2020 during the first stages of the so-called pandemic and the subsequent lock-down. And I feel much richer for it.

    • Well said, George.

      I live among the Amish.

      They didn’t participate in the Pandemic because they had no TV telling them to be afraid.

  2. I haven’t read the book, but is she predictably hypocritical in only applying this to the left or refreshingly honest in applying it to both left and right? Conformity and fear of ostracism and isolation are also features of Moscow, Idaho and the MAGA Trump cult.

    • Ash,

      Take a look at some of the things that Stella has written and listen to the interviews I did with her.

      It seems only fair to judge her on what she has actually written and on what she has set out to do.

    • That’s because the left is more susceptible to the collective thought, standing out on ones own success’s and failures scares them. Thus COMMUNAL thought and the grey area where everyone gets a trophy, hard work =’s success

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