Alone With Your Thoughts

How Loneliness, Fascism, and Disinformation Work In Concert

I didn’t mean for last week’s piece about talking to strangers to be a two-parter, but I’ve just returned from a few days of being blissfully unplugged, and, as I stared at the waves on a windy coastal bluff, I found myself contemplating the difference between loneliness and solitude and what each has to do with our current national crisis.

This distinction was one that interested the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose subject was totalitarianism. She understood that solitude isn’t the absence of social connection but rather the ability to withdraw from it temporarily, knowing that it will be there when you return. She wrote:

“What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self, which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals.”¹

We develop a sense of our own selfhood, in other words, both by being with people we love and trust and by being alone with our own thoughts and feelings. These are not opposites, but complimentary states. Loneliness, in contrast, is an unmooring, a state in which we lose our sense of who we are and where we belong. If solitude clears the mind, loneliness clouds it, luring us into the dangerous habit of believing everything we think.

This second state of affairs is a pretty accurate description of our current moment. In a recent Gallup poll, a quarter of young American men aged 15 to 35 reported feeling lonely a lot of the previous day, which is about ten points higher than the median for 38 other developed countries. As the Atlantic reported last year:

From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 reduced their weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week.

We’re used to thinking of fascism as a collective endeavor, born out of group-think, mob mentality, or mass hysteria. But Arendt believed that loneliness is the real culprit, with the madness of the crowd being a secondary effect. She defined loneliness to mean the kind of disconnection in which there is no sense of shared experience or shared reality. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she wrote:

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 (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Sound familiar?

Reality is, much as we hate to admit it, collectively determined. We construct a coherent narrative for our lives and for the the world around us in concert with other people—family, friends, and neighbors, along with experts that we have collectively agreed are reputable. When these personal and institutional ties unravel, people find community virtually, via online groups, or through one-way, parasocial relationships with influencers, podcasters, celebrities, and tyrants. Too often, these substitute relationships funnel people into conspiracy theories and cynicism, an ideological thoughtlessness which then further isolates them from anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the alternate reality that they now insist is the Real Truth.

As Arendt scholar Samantha Rose Hill has written:

Put very simply: people who subscribe to ideology have thoughts, but they are incapable of thinking for themselves. And it is this inability to think, to keep one’s self company, to make meaning from one’s experiences in the world, that makes them lonely.

This is the situation in which many Americans now find themselves. It is a place of disillusionment and disconnection that is both the product and the cause of a profound loneliness. The people Arendt worried about were the people who believed all politics is pointless and corrupt, that there is no point in working for something better because everyone is out for themselves and the game is rigged. As Arendt scholar Lindsey Stonebridge explains:

She’s talking about the rise of an “unorganized mass” of “mostly furious individuals” with nothing in common except for their contempt for the present order. She calls this “negative solidarity” and it’s the raw material of totalitarianism, because it’s a world without connection and friendship, where the only basis of collective action is some kind of awful combination of anger and desperation.

As I write this, my inbox is filling up with essays, polling data, and news stories about how Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files is fracturing the MAGA coalition. Polling indicates that young men, and the manosphere influencers who often shape their thinking, are angry that the truth has yet to be revealed and are unwilling to take Trump’s suggestion that they think about something else.

The irony is that, for years, outrage about pedophile rings was the something else—a useful distraction from class-based issues like housing scarcity, health care costs, wage stagnation, job-killing automation, substandard working conditions, and so on. Conspiracy theories about Epstein or Pizzagate have the benefit of being—or seeming to be—apolitical. They have no underlying analysis other than “I don’t like pedophiles, therefore the people I don’t like must also be pedophiles and the people I do like can’t possibly be pedophiles.” The information about Trump’s friendship with Epstein has been out there for years, but nobody seemed to care. Now, for reasons that are opaque to me, they do. The real danger to Trump and his ilk will be if the popular analysis shifts to something that connects more dots, something along the lines of, “The insatiable pursuit of consumption and domination by the rich and powerful harms everything and everyone.”

But drawing a line between, say, the rape of underage girls, the incarceration of immigrants, and the despoiling of the planet requires thought, and in the noisy, opinion-driven world we live in, thought has less and less room to prosper. Arendt valued thinking above all else, believing that the ability to have our own thoughts, to discern, and to critically engage with reality is what keeps us from devolving into monstrous cruelty. Her insight about the banality of evil came from watching Adolf Eichmann’s self-important blather at his trial; he was a man incapable of insight, empathy, or reflection and therefore could blithely ignore the horror of his own deeds.²

Critical thought, in contrast, is what is causing some members of both ICE and the California National Guard to question the morality of their collaboration with the cruelties of this administration. It’s what allows people to resist lies and propaganda. It is, as George Orwell so memorably wrote, the final casualty of totalitarianism.³

It may also, unfortunately, be one of the first casualties of generative AI. A recent Cornell study divided its 54 subjects into three groups and then asked them to write an essay. One group could use Chat GPT, one could use Google, and one was “brain only.” Over the four months of the study, researchers found that the AI-users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” when compared to the other two groups, and “struggled to accurately quote their own work.” Asking a robot to do your thinking for you, it turns out, makes you dumb. Or, as Arendt put it, “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”⁴

AI is how the technocrats want to solve loneliness as well, asking us to turn to chatbots rather than one another.⁵ This is the future they envision, one in which everyone is alone with their delusions, unable to discern the difference between fact and fiction, right and wrong, friend and robot, hope and fear.

We don’t have to go along with this dystopian vision. We resist by reclaiming both solitary reflection and deep connection, by refusing to use or promote the technological tools of totalitarianism, and by continuing to teach and to practice critical thinking. We resist by thinking, by relating, and by caring.

And, of course, we resist by talking to strangers.

With a sigh,

Dashka

1. Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

2. "What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.” —Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt

3. “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —1984, George Orwell

4. Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

5. Research indicates that—surprise!—lonely people feel lonelier after interacting with a chatbot than they did before.