Loneliness, Fascism, Collapse
The slow death of compassion.
The entire idea of loneliness is only a few hundred years old.
Now, it’s everywhere.
The word itself didn’t become commonplace in western cultures until midway through the nineteenth century. According to an article in Aeon by Samantha Rose Hill, “the word was rarely used” before then. Then it started to become more common, but mostly in a religious sense. As Hill writes, “amid modernity, loneliness lost its connection with religion and began to be associated with secular feelings of alienation” and “use of the term began to increase sharply after 1800 with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution...”
Now, we’re lonely all the time—even when we’re surrounded.
For the last few years, politicians and wellness influencers have evoked our loneliness crisis all the time as a pretext for all kinds of ulterior motives. They’ve used it to encourage more shopping and eating out, activities considered “social” in the most superficial sense. They’ve used it to ban social media apps. They’ve blamed our loneliness on all kinds of things they want to regulate or eliminate.
They’ve used it to sell AI girlfriends.
They tell us to talk to strangers and smile more. They talk about the dissolution of the family. Everyone has a theory about what’s happening.
Here’s mine.