Consider a few questions. In terms of the effect on the human psyche, how different is the playground taught of “cooties” to cancel culture? How different from Big Tech’s efforts to spear and deplatform the “unwoke”? How different from being supervised by a petty tyrant in a toxic workplace? Or from a cult leader like jim Jones, who is isolate his recruits in the jungle? In the end, aside from degree, how different are any of these from world-class dictators like Mao Zedong or Josef Stalin, who could arbitrarily label anyone as a public enemy and have him exterminated both socially and literally with the silent consent of a population terrified of the same fate?
The underlying dynamic is the same: a machinery of loneliness that threatens to turn people into social pariahs in order to extort compliance. History is filled with sordid documentation of the damage done by totalitarian regimes that rely on machinery fueled by the conformity impulse and terror of isolation. We can only imagine how much worse it gets with such tactics wielded on a global scale through exponentially growing digital technologies.
The weaponization of loneliness drives just about everything in human affairs. The threat of social isolation tends to determine what we say or don’t say. Then it begins to regulate what we think and how we behave. It very often determines those we shun and those we don’t. Sadly, we seem locked into that souless machinery, like Walker Percy’s lonesome ghost.
If we are to exit this path to slavery, we need to challenge both those who would lead us down this road and, even more importantly, bystanders inclined to mindlessly follow. We need a conscious investigation to help crack the code of the weaponization of loneliness and its modern mechanisms such as identity politics, political correctness, and mob formation. We must aggressively defend the private sphere of life because that is the only safe haven for developing the power of human connection. Only then can we start defending ourselves against attempts to isolate us, especially from those we love in those who love us.
Stella Morabito, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation To Silence, Divide, and Conquer (Bombadier, 2022), xxi–xii
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