Throughout the 16th century, loneliness was often evoked in sermons to frighten churchgoers from sin – people were asked to imagine themselves in lonely places such as hell or the grave. But well into the 17th century, the word was still rarely used. In 1674, the English naturalist John Ray included ‘loneliness’ in a list of infrequently used words, and defined it as a term to describe places and people ‘far from neighbours’. A century later, the word hadn’t changed much. In Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), he described the adjective ‘lonely’ solely in terms of the state of being alone (the ‘lonely fox’), or a deserted place (‘lonely rocks’). In Hamlet, William Shakespeare’s tragic hero experiences loneliness and isolation that is mostly self-imposed. In the 19th century, amid modernity, loneliness lost its connection with religion and began to be associated with secular feelings of alienation.1
Thinkers as early as Aristotle observed that man is, by nature, a social creature. For this reason, there has been a surge of media attention on the “loneliness plague” which the Information Age has wrought. The collapse of community perhaps explains the meteoric rise of “social” media. A recent study revealed that people who spent more time on social media were more likely to experience feelings of loneliness, especially if their motive for being on social media was to maintain contact with friends and family. The problem, of course, is that social media seems to be doing more to divide people than unite them – or in Arendt’s words, isolate humans “against each other.” Volunteering is a way out of the loneliness epidemic. Volunteering often provides a new perspective on the world. It can introduce us to new ideas, communities, and ways to be grateful for what we already have.
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world 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. Totalitarians in power found a way to crystallise the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being. Through the use of isolation and terror, totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness, and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda. According to Hannah Arendt, important factors that made totalitarianism possible included collapsed political structures and masses of uprooted people who had lost their orientation and sense of reality in a world marked by socio-economic transformation, revolution and war. While the leaders of the movements belonged to the “mob”, their many supporters were recruited from these rootless and lonely “masses” through propaganda.
The basic experience underlying totalitarianism, the experience that continues today to make it likely that totalitarianism remains a constant concern, is loneliness, an alienation from political, social, and cultural life. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Arendt believed that totalitarian rulers crave complete control and use propaganda and rewriting of history to instill fear and loyalty in citizens. When you live in post truth society, you can’t do anything because if there is no truth there can be no coordination and therefore no action. Project 2025 is a plan to shatter democracy’s guardrails, giving presidents almost unlimited power to implement policies that will hurt everyday Americans and strip them of fundamental rights.
Today’s GOP is the totalitarian force it claims to oppose. The right’s intrusion into private life is exactly the characteristic of modern authoritarianism decried by 20th-century conservatives. The militant blurring of the private and public spheres is a signal characteristic of totalitarianism, as mid-century political thinkers understood it. Whatever else the Trumpian right may be, it is not at all squeamish about the politicization of private life. There’s a heightened sense on the American right that culture is the fulcrum of society and politics – “hence you have to intensify the culture wars.” Trump’s own ongoing assault on the electoral structure of democracy is itself a brand of culture warfare, with sinister election workers and voting-machine makers undermining the rightful pride of place accorded to white nationalist rule in the American system.2
Hannah Arendt argues that power is communication not coercion and control: power radically differs from control, domination or violence in that it cannot be exercised over someone; it can only be exercised with others through communication and cooperation. “You can’t launch a coordination from the top if you’ve got all these distracting little people exercising their thinking and voting, running around talking about pluralism.” Big money has always spoken loudly in American politics. The power elite control what you think through proxies who control information and communication, and through their lobbyists who influence what most of your politicians believe. In November 2024, America rebelled against political elites by again electing a self-proclaimed champion of the people, Donald Trump. Eight weeks into a second mandate, it is now out in the open this government is more deeply in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaires than ever before.
Beyond appealing to the past, power also relies for its continued legitimacy on the rationally binding commitments that arise out of a process of free and undistorted communication. Because of this, power is highly independent of material factors: it is sustained not by economic, bureaucratic or military means, but by the power of common convictions that result from a process of fair and unconstrained deliberation. Power is also not something that can be relied upon at all times or accumulated and stored for future use. Rather, it exists only as a potential which is actualized when actors gather together for political action and public deliberation. It is thus closely connected to the space of appearance, that public space which arises out of the actions and speeches of individuals. Indeed, for Arendt, “power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence.”3
The most prevalent cause for loneliness was feeling disconnected. Cognitive discrepancy theory suggests that loneliness is a subjective, unpleasant, and distressing phenomenon stemming from a discrepancy between individuals’ desired and achieved levels of social relations. Many young adults spoke about being lonely because they felt unable to express themselves, their feelings or talk about their issues. They also talked about being lonely due to feeling they did not matter to others and were not understood. Challenges pertaining to social media and materialism in contemporary culture contribute to loneliness as does pressure associated with work, fitting in and social comparison. Social media play a major role in exacerbating these experiences. The basic experience underlying totalitarianism, the experience that continues today to make it likely that totalitarianism remains a constant concern, is loneliness, an alienation from political, social, and cultural life. Arendt focuses on loneliness in her analysis of the origins of totalitarianism.
Arendt writes of entire populations who “had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” She describes the masses’ escape from reality as ‘a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist.’ She points out that in societies riddled with elite hypocrisy, ‘it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.’ Toward the end of her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt maintained that what makes a society vulnerable to takeover by authoritarians and totalitarians is loneliness. She defined loneliness as “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man (sic).”4
We do need the narratives, but the real danger is we need them even if they are not real. Applebaum gives the example of people who fall for QAnon conspiracies and their prophet Q because of their desperate need to be part of an ongoing story. They can now belong to a community in which their views are accepted and reinforced, but, even more importantly, they “have access to special and secret information that most Americans don’t have. So you’re a community that has special knowledge. You’ve been gifted with this special access to a different reality.” Authoritarians would have you think that they can do certain things better than their counterparts who have to deal with checks, balances, and public opinion. Authoritarian leaders share conspiracy theories to attack opponents, galvanize followers, shift blame, and undermine democratic institutions. Authoritarianism, in politics and government, is the blind submission to authority and the repression of individual freedom of thought and action.
As the crisis of neoliberal global capitalism unfolds, and as we move to the brink of another economic crisis, global capitalism is once again resorting to authoritarianism and fascism to maintain its power. Basically, exposure to neoliberal ideology increases loneliness and decreases well-being by reducing people’s sense of connection to others and by increasing perceptions of being in competition with others. Loneliness is feeding authoritarianism. To defend democracy and decency, we must build belonging. Authoritarianism is defeated by offering people a social contract that works again, so they don’t have to flee into the arms of strongmen for a sense of safety and security when societies are collapsing around them. Liberals throughout history have made this mistake again and again. In Nazi Germany, liberals didn’t offer people anything much – it was the Nazis, in fact, who promised them the world. The same was true in Soviet Russia. And it is true again in America today.
1 https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-rooted-in-loneliness
2 https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/republican-totalitarianism/
3 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/#ActiPowe
4 https://www.womensordination.org/blog/2022/06/07/loneliness-and-authoritarianism/