Loneliness as a matter of policy is unwelcome in the healthy society. Loneliness is a “soft” policy where healthy societies tend to prefer “hard,” tangible policies. Unless loneliness hardens which in that case indicates that the healthy society has become ill.
There is no shortage of policy proposers ready to make that case. Loneliness, in fact, is a bipartisan concern, addressing different underlying problems. An anti-loneliness proposal that also wants to curb “radicalization” tends to come from the left. An anti-loneliness proposal that also wants to increase marriage and birthrates tends to come from the right. But these proposals are not without their bridges. Both focus predominantly on the loneliness of young men. Both approach loneliness as a form of delinquency, driven by an authoritarian impulse in which a lonely “culprit” is burdened to reform for the benefit of a sociable “victim.”
The pursuit of power is the last refuge of the unimaginative. And no policy imperative shows so negligible a presence of dynamic thinking than that which seeks to “end” or “cure” loneliness. The very notion that loneliness can be forced into extinction is as pernicious to believe as it is impossible to achieve.
Loneliness is better approached as a reform effort. Though the effort is less to make loneliness more bearable than it is to allow you to come to a better understanding of it, to rediscover its merits, and to cultivate it for proper use beyond a single social type. This is not accomplished simply by stopping one action and adopting another, as if to exchange a tattered sweater for one that is intact. To approach cultivated loneliness with the solemnity it requires, you must first disabuse yourself of conceptions and prejudices on which the flawed proposals depend. For if the proposals avert natural death on their own merits, that does not save them from justified execution.
Loneliness proposals left and right operate broadly on this premise: lonely men under 30 are deprived or deprive themselves of communal fellowship in favor of violent video games, bukkake videos, and/or any bespoke axiomatic system they happen to find in open-source landfills. To the extent that one symptom is more hazardous than others differs from activist to activist. What is linked, however, is the question as to how are they to be lulled out of this condition and into the better world that presumably awaits them upon this attitude adjustment. This is the core of the authoritarian cast, and it is founded on two corrupt concepts.
Both proposals operate on the conclusion that loneliness is a willful descent into subhumanity. Yet both are couched in a gentle tone, aimed at the willfully subhuman and for the benefit of charitably minded people, that you may call false compassion. The compassion may be genuine to the anti-loneliness activists, having accepted, at different speeds perhaps, the liberal notion that other people exist. There is virtue in empathy, the activists insist, even for the listlessly bored, porn-addicted, and free-roaming mind of the lonely male. But that virtue may be in exhaustible supply among the people whose support the activist needs most. They’re not bad people as such, just people who find it hard to make a charity case out of a satyr-like creature who is half-harasser and half-irredeemable social dependent. And if the hostility on the part of the lonely is mutual, the suspicion of the compassion is also more or less equal, and perhaps better assessed. After all, the lonely would not be wholly ignorant of the distinction between false and true compassion, especially if they’ve dealt with guidance counselors and therapists. Some therapy is compassionate while some compassion is therapeutic. The lonely are antisocial, not stupid.
But where false compassion is likely to repel, forced authenticity is likely to attract. No society that cherishes its survival can function without a standard of conformity. And conformity on its own is commendable, so long as the method has no illusions as to its purpose. Some conformities fail to meet that threshold, such as that which champions authenticity, which carries itself on an ambiguity, if not a duplicity, of definition. The lonely hide from themselves and from the world behind bad habits and vices. Finding comfort with themselves brings them closer to the world, because when everyone is free to be unique everyone is happier to basically the same degree. But authenticity must be authorized. Insincerity is not only a serious concern, but the dominion of a central beholder. And that beholder must possess a significant blindness in order to do her job properly; that is, to ignore that some forms of insincerity are truer than the mandated authenticity. If that gets out then everyone else will realize that fellowship is no less lonely than isolation.
From the shallows of these proposals arises a loneliness that is not only more widespread but also the source of modern society’s special dissonance. The world is at variance between those who can only live out their loneliness in all its pain and those who are blessed with the emotional ingenuity to delude themselves into believing that they are anything but. Left unaddressed, this dissonance becomes corrosive; but neither can it be eradicated per the desires of our authoritarian dreamers. Loneliness is the dominion of the lonely. That dominion is declared through the reclamation of privacy.
In the course of five decades privacy went from a liberal watchword to an afterthought. As privacy declined, the pressure to be your whole self at all times increased. A manichean situation of total presence and total absence emerged. Sensible social customs like omission and compartmentalization were seen as transgressive. The delinquency of loneliness was the only logical outcome. But a totally public world has significant weaknesses, chief among them a sensitivity to language. Nothing short of a great vowel shift-style disruption will make daily speech all surface and no depth. Until then, every word that conveys details overtly has the power to reveal other details covertly, from your living situation to your career status to your sexual experience to your mental health. Where this would otherwise be entirely natural, it now has the potential to tear an already delicate social fabric to shreds. Partial concealment is only a short step away from the total concealment of the “lonely.”
Against the activist’s compassion and the authenticity of their world, however, simple reticence carries insufficient force; and secrecy is only an affectation. To protect the self from the demands of exposure the self must be reconstituted out of its sense of completeness. You are not a being or a body as such, but a supply of goods. Every supply of goods must be carefully inventoried; some of those goods are ready for display, while others are kept in storage. A retail business places its best products to the front. As a person you do the opposite. You undertake a process of psychic dismemberment, by which the most precious cargo of your mind, your emotions, and your experience are arranged out of public view. They are not hidden, but rather cordoned off from the prying world. They are placed in jars or more exquisite encasements, to be given a reverence that no outside judgment can possibly conceive.
That does not mean that the public-facing self is a blank slate or a husk. Dismemberment is not an arbitrary or crude process. Once your most valuable inventory is encased, what goes out front is put towards the construction of fantasy. All communal fellowship has a fantastic element. When you make up a mass of other selves, you complete a contrived scenario, whether it is a first date, a party, or a family.
Dismemberment without contrivance is possible, in fact it’s reality. More to the point it’s reality as seen by someone other than yourself. If it is not strictly grotesque it is still a level of truth resistant to the regulatory capacity of authenticity. Avoiding the grotesque and rejecting authenticity is, to be sure, difficult to accomplish. It requires adopting concepts thought to be every bit as criminal as loneliness. But once adopted into the fantasy, those concepts find a new life: redaction is a thrill, shame has vigor, hypocrisy a romance. The ultimate result does not make loneliness extinct so much as it dissolves loneliness into a more accurate conception. When everyone is dismembered, no one is lonely.