The Great Isolation

Why Social Bonds Collapsing Might be the World’s Biggest Invisible Problem

One of my favourite songs is Joy Divison’s “Isolation”. It’s a cry of despair for the guilt, shame, and anger wrought by loneliness. “Mother, I tried to, believe me…I’m doing the best that I can…I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through…I’m ashamed of the person I am.” Haunting — but only because it is so beautifully, terribly, psychologically accurate. We will come back to it.

I read a fascinating and urgent recent piece of research: loneliness is rising dramatically among young people. It mirrors a greater trend: social bonds are breaking down systematically, globally, and significantly. Trust in institutions is collapsing. Trust between people is falling. Loneliness is rising. Suicide rates in the most forgotten places are spiking. This is a kind of invisible, fiery, self-made catastrophe of human possibility —as though a meteor of despair has struck the planet — so much so that I will wager that you do not see it as anything resembling one.

Why? Because if social bonds are broken, then democracies, economies, and societies are more likely to become authoritarian, tribal, feudal places. The world plunges headlong into tribalism, division, hate, spite, anger, rage, and fear — for the only projects that a society which doesn’t trust itself can engage in, ultimately, are segregation, servitude, and building a caste system. How then can such societies, one in which people enjoy few bonds, do not trust each other, hope to solve its real problems — whether climate change, inequality, stagnation, or declining democrac?

So to my mind, the collapse in social bonds is a great and urgent social emergency — perhaps the greatest problem in the world, because fixing all our other problems first depends on it. If we give up on one another — how are we to create a better future, which demands investing in one another — whether in the form of healthcare, education, finance, transport, clean energy, and so on?

“Mother, I tried to, believe me.” Do you see the link yet? The idea of giving up on others, and giving in to one’s isolation? What are its effects, on us as as people, and as societies? Let us explore it a bit. What might be driving this collapse in social bonds?

The first force is obvious. Technology isolates us, as I have written about extensively, through social comparison. The more that we perform sociality as a kind of pantomime routine, where we pretend to perfect, flawless, desirable, enviable, the less genuinely social we are at all. For sociality is not just rising to the top of hierarchies, as American biologists, like their Soviet counterparts, believe. Human sociality is simply being held and loved and know. But technology makes all that less possible, because it induces us to scorn, taunt, mock, and deride. But in the end, we are the losers — our social bonds break, and our capacity to love and be loved, hold and be held, withers and shrinks. You can use Tinder to find a million dates every night forever — but that is exactly what isolation is, isn’t it? That is the absence of social bonds — not the presence of them. “I’m ashamed of the person I am”.

The second force, to my mind, is neoliberalism, American capitalism, choose your buzzword. The reason is very simple. The assumption this ideology makes is that everything — every single social issue — can be solved by markets. But markets do not require, want, or need social bonds. They only require prices. And thus, replacing communities with markets, bonds break. But it is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the problems are not solved — they only grow.

Think of privatized prisons, or punitive policing — social problems that demand communal solutions, replaced with markets instead. Were the problems solved? Of course not — American incarcerates more people than any other country in the rich world, at the steepest cost. “I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through”. How can trust grow in a society ever grow, if the cut-throat, predatory behaviour that monopolistic markets induce permeates every single aspect of life — by design?

Now. What are the effect of these of twin forces? There is nowhere left to plant the seeds of trust left. No real public spaces. No town squares. No mental healthcare. Dwindling family life and leisure time. Little working media. Workplaces rife with abuse and trauma.

There is no way to forge, build and strengthen bonds left in our societies. Even if, as Ian Curtis once sang, “Mother, I tried to, believe me” — we will necessarily fail even if we wish to build them — we will enjoy fewer relationships than our parents and grandparents. I do. Don’t you? Think about it carefully.

Loneliness is our plight and our destiny in a world where technology and capitalism have made social bonds unaffordable luxuries and liabilities — not assets, the essence of “social capital”, basic human rights which underpin democracy, ground society, and anchor sanity.

Ah, but what is the effect of being doomed to loneliness? Of societies which are no longer linked by social bonds? Well, the effect of loneliness on the human mind is guilt, rage, anger, shame, and despair. “I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through…I’m ashamed of the person I am” Now. All that fury must go somewhere. If it is turned inward, then perhaps it becomes depression. But more likely, if it is experienced en masse, it will be turned outwards. People being social animals, will seek to form new bonds. But bonds are costly to form. So they will look first to people just like themselves — those that look, act, and think the same — because when trust is costly, difference is unaffordable.

And so lonely societies are more likely to experience vicious tribalist, nationalist, extremist movements. “America for the Americans!”, and so on. That is a way to form the only real social bonds that can be had — weak ones, built on hate and spite and anger, not strong ones, built on closeness, intimacy, and relationship — when trust itself is the costliest of goods. Others will be scapegoated — minorities, the weak, the vulnerable. They will be the most affected of all — for they will be the loneliest of the lonely.

In other words, loneliness will drive people — especially young people — into the arms of the fringe right, the fascists, the authoritarians. They will seek safety in the arms of strongmen and father figures. And thus a society teetering on the edge of authoritarianism may find itself, sooner than it knows, a place of tyranny. Thus, loneliness both reflects and exacerbates our plight: a world balanced on the razor’s edge of democracy and breakdown. The more loneliness there is in a society, the harder it will be for it to stay a democracy, a peaceful place, or a prosperous place.

Now. What is the answer to all this? Well, there are many answers. Less technology usage by the young — enforced by their parents. More public spaces, in which bonds can be formed again — whether physical ones, or public media. And so on. But more than the means, it is the ends which matter.

It took me a very long time to understand why I loved Joy Division’s music so much. And in the end, I think, it is because the despair, guilt, and shame in it could have easily made little fascists of them. But it did not. They chose the heights of the human experience instead — singing songs about love and sorrow, not hate and fury. There is a great and sad and beautiful lesson in that, isn’t there?

That great, tragic irony — people whom isolation could, even should, have made hate, but were wise enough not to let it — is reflected even in their name. And the same challenge is ours. Loneliness is the darkets poison for the human soul: it can easily turn us into little Nazis, extremists, tribalist, without us noticing. And that is exactly why we must always teach one another why it should not.

Umair

January 2018