THE WEAPONIZATION OF LONELINESS: HOW TYRANTS STOKE OUR FEAR OF ISOLATION TO SILENCE, DIVIDE, AND CONQUER

Stella Morabito

(Bombardier Books, 2022, paper, 304 pages, $19.99)

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM

Mattias Desmet

(Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022, hardcover, 240 pages, $28)

Reviewed by Jason Morgan

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Over the past few years, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, information squelching (and often outright censorship), social distancing, mask requirements, cancel culture, and murderous riots have torn the very fabric of American life. And not just American life—worldwide, societies are reeling from what appear to be deep and pervasive problems in our shared human lives. We do not trust one another, do not like one another, do not appear to want or need one another, and have come to have little to no patience even for the presence of other people in our vicinity. We are, in short, lonely. Suicides, depression, drinking, drug use—all the symptoms of a breakdown in interpersonal relationships—have been skyrocketing as the pandemic and the ills that attended it have beaten the world black and blue.

We know this is happening, but what in the world is really going on? The coronavirus pandemic was of course a problem in its own right, but it also exacerbated pre-existing maladies. That is just the point. The problems were with us before the pandemic hit, and don’t appear to be getting better now that the manic years of the early twenties are giving way to grim, abiding reality once again. How have we turned into people who exemplify the war of all against all?

A good set of answers can be found in the 2022 book The Weaponization of Loneliness. Here, former CIA analyst and current Federalist and Human Life Review contributor Stella Morabito tracks the mechanisms by which our basic human need for acceptance and belonging has been twisted by “tyrants” (in her words) into atomization, alienation, and even cruelty toward our fellow human beings.

Morabito begins with some useful historical sketches of similar episodes from the past: Robespierre’s French Revolution, Cromwell’s regicidal England, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China. In those cases, Morabito argues, the basics of life in common—faith, culture, even the often-overlooked importance of private conversations—were systematically undermined by people or groups seeking total control. The tyrant hates organic social cohesion, Morabito explains, citing a raft of other thinkers who argue similarly. Anyone who wants to bend society to his will, therefore, has to destroy the things that bind people to one another, so that they will sway to his tune like a million cobras in a million separate baskets.

“Totalitarians have always targeted the private sphere of life for destruction,” Morabito notes. “The rallying cry ‘Abolish the family!’ comes straight from The Communist Manifesto” (xxix).

This is just the beginning of Morabito’s analysis, however. The Weaponization of Loneliness does much more than provide historical context for the social ills of the present. In fact, Morabito makes a distinction that I think raises The Weaponization of Loneliness to the status of a must-read. In the past, she observes, identifiable psychopaths were prominent in their drives to remake society after their deluded visions, but today it is people who are “almost-psychopaths,” working not so much against as with society and its institutions, who are tearing our world apart. Yes, identity politics, political correctness, cancel culture, and other trends that feed on social isolation are stoked by people in government, academia, and the media, Morabito argues. But there is not really a Hitler, Stalin, or Mao to whom one can point as the ganglion of evil impulses. The pathology is diffused. Mobs form, Morabito notes, almost of their own volition. People in positions of power and authority whip up mob anger and hatred, true. But the mobs that burned down Black businesses in major American cities in 2020, the Twitter mobs that swarm doctors and professors who question party lines on history, medicine, or a dozen other subjects, the mobs that ransacked Portland and attacked journalists as “fascists,” the mobs that torch pro-life pregnancy centers (as the FBI apparently looks the other way), the mobs that shriek “homophobia” and “transphobia” when gender ideology is subjected to scrutiny—these are products of a post-truth environment in which people have lost the ability to engage with reality using their common sense. Morabito makes a powerful case that the weaponized loneliness of the present is systemic (to borrow a freighted term), beyond the ability of any one tyrant to control.

“Unlike radical revolutions we may have read about in history books,” Morabito argues, “there appears to be no primary force cultivating the oppressive trends multiplying around us” (3).

And yet, the past does matter. We did not spontaneously self-destruct as a society. Somebody had to throw the grenades. A lot of somebodies, in fact.

As Morabito lays out in great detail, our social anomie has long been incubating under the watchful eyes of some very insidious characters. Social saboteurs (my term, not Morabito’s) such as education “reformer” John Dewey (1859-1952), professional agitator Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), bad-faith professors Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) and (unrepentant terrorist) Bill Ayers, and sexual revolutionaries Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), his companion Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956), and Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) paved the way for the conceptual and anthropological chaos we see around us today. Readers will likely be as fascinated as I was to see Morabito connect these various strains of antisocial behavior into a very disturbing tapestry of a century gone wrong.

But to make this case for human agency is also to buttress Morabito’s larger, Gramscian argument that it is the culture which has turned against human society. Gender dysphoria in kindergarteners, pronoun tyranny, critical race theory, Marxists masquerading as Black Lives Matter activists—all of this is in the air, agreed to by many in public out of fear, but not manipulated by this or that mastermind behind the scenes. It is disharmony that has taken over, and it is rooted in the fundamental breakdown of human communication. Morabito returns often to Allan Bloom’s 1987 work The Closing of the American Mind to reinforce her argument that it is not Person A or Person B who is to blame for our social problems, but the disintegration of American social (and moral and intellectual and spiritual) life as a whole. The breakdown has momentum now, in other words, and not even a tyrant could take the reins of this team of horses gone mad. As Morabito writes, when protestors turned out in social-media-fired droves to cancel Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 2018, they shouted, “Believe all women!” But when Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated to the Supreme Court just three and a half years later, she could not answer the question “What is a woman?” This is not someone’s sick control of society—this is a sign that society itself is sick. Morabito focuses on the United States in much of her outstanding book, but we should remember that the disorders wracking our world are global. While she does an excellent job of analyzing the psychological pathologies that are crippling the United States, relying partly on the work of other social analysts (American and otherwise) such as Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Edward Bernays (1891-1995), Margaret Thaler Singer (1921-2003), Carl Jung (1875-1961), Joost Meerloo (19031976), and Solomon Asch (1907-1996), there is even more to the story than Morabito’s study reveals.

This is where I turn to The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium who has given us what I think will be a classic of the Covid era, perhaps akin to the work of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), which Desmet and Morabito both cite extensively. Desmet’s 2022 book is a probing, fearless rethinking of the entire scientific order, in the manner of a Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) or Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). It seems destined to become an index volume that future scholars and curious laypeople will read to try to understand (good luck!) the craziness of the corona years. Desmet is young, but he commands a wealth of knowledge about not only psychology but history and science, and he has the courage to follow his own mind rather than the bleatings of the herd. The Psychology of Totalitarianism is a bleak book in many ways, a portrait of the frailty of human reason. But it is also, by that same token, a needful one. We are not, Desmet tells us, nearly as much in control of the world as we think. Desmet’s argument, at its most basic, is that human beings are limited creatures with a rather bizarre psychology that makes it difficult for us to arrive at and understand bare, factual, statistical truth. Desmet states this argument in various ways throughout his book, but a good example appears in a fascinating chapter on “the living universe,” where he describes how the world around us (as chaos theory has partly revealed) has a mind of its own, and how human minds do not often do very well in understanding this. In this vein he writes:

A society primarily has to stay connected with a number of principles and fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of speech, the right to self-determination, and the right to freedom of religion or belief. If a society fails to respect these fundamental rights of the individual, if it allows fear to escalate to such an extent that every form of individuality, intimacy, privacy, and personal initiative is regarded as an intolerable threat to “the collective well-being,” it will decay into chaos and absurdity. The belief in the mechanistic nature of the universe and the associated overestimation of the powers of the human intellect, typical of the Enlightenment, were accompanied by a tendency to lead society in a less and less principled manner. (157-158)

This is where Desmet brings into his sights the Enlightenment, which he sees as one of the major drivers of, ironically, irrational behavior in human beings. Desmet does not dismiss the Enlightenment out of hand, as the above paragraph about individual rights makes clear. But he does note that the Enlightenment places too much emphasis on reason, which, Desmet says, is not as reasonable as we would like it to be. Human beings are highly susceptible to group pressures, and we routinely throw our reason overboard to please what we perceive to be the group’s preferred way of thinking (or not thinking, as is more often the case). Desmet continues:

Within a purely mechanistic way of thinking, it is extremely difficult (not to say impossible) to ground ethical principles. Why should a machine man in a machine universe have to adhere to principles and ethical rules in relationships with others? Isn’t it ultimately about being the fittest in the struggle for survival? And therefore, aren’t ethics and principles a hindrance rather than a merit? In the final analysis, it was no longer a question for Enlightenment people to adhere to commandments and prohibitions or ethical and moral principles, but to move through this struggle for survival in the most efficient way based on “objective knowledge” of the world. This culminated in totalitarian and technocratic forms of government, where decisions are not made on the basis of generally applicable laws and principles but on the basis of the analysis of “experts.” For this reason, totalitarianism always chooses to abolish laws, or fails to implement them, and prefers to rule “by decree.” [. . .] This is perhaps the most direct and concrete illustration of Hannah Arendt’s thesis that ultimately totalitarianism is the symptom of a naïve belief in the omnipotence of human rationality. (158; emphasis in original)

It is worth noting, in the context of Desmet’s analysis of “experts” who provide totalitarians with the (pseudo-) scientific justification they need to carry out absolute rule on “Enlightenment” principles, that Stella Morabito’s book cover features a photograph of an old television set tuned to a grainy image of one Anthony Fauci. “I am the science,” said this “expert.” As Desmet might reply, “Precisely.”

There is much else in Desmet’s extraordinary book about how masses are formed out of broken-down people, and how our psychology, particularly as it develops during early childhood, can contribute to the manipulation of masses of adults. I was not always completely convinced by Desmet’s psychological arguments (some of them were a bit too determinative for my tastes), but they are nevertheless compelling and a refreshing take on the sorry state of our disordered world.

To give just one example of some psychological analysis with which I very much agreed, Desmet argues that our need to belong—something that Morabito also stresses—leads us to accept patently untrue propaganda, simply because such acceptance is the ticket to our being accepted as part of the group. “In all major mass formations,” Desmet writes,

. . . the main argument for joining in is solidarity with the collective. And those who refuse to participate are typically accused of lacking solidarity and civic responsibility. This is one reason why the absurd elements in a story do not matter to the masses: The masses believe in the story not because it’s accurate but because it creates a new social bond. (97; emphases in original)

This is a theme running throughout both Desmet’s and Morabito’s works here under review. Indeed, much of Desmet’s book is an effort to understand how people around the world bought into what would probably appear, in non-pandemic times, to be utterly unscientific pronouncements and preposterous demands—even to the point of injecting experimental serums that fiddle with our cells at the ribonucleic level. The answer to this mass insanity is in the gray matter between our ears, which, Desmet reminds us, is not nearly as good at thinking clearly and dispassionately as High Enlightenment discourse tells us it is. “Trust the science?” Well, it depends—who is the scientist, and who does he or she work for?

Stella Morabito’s The Weaponization of Loneliness and Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism are, in my view, both essential books for our time. They provide thought-trails out of the morass of herd behavior and unscientific tail-chasing. They remind us that we are human beings and that we do not have to be pushed around by tyrants. It is for these reasons, and because both books deal with similar subjects in complementary ways, that I recommend that they be read together. As a bonus, Morabito provides an uplifting closing chapter about what we can do to stop being lonely and start living human lives again. Have conversations, she tells us. Speak the truth in public. Don’t be afraid. We can recover our humanity and our societies, Morabito is telling us. But first we have to figure out what’s wrong.

Along those lines, here’s a really great idea that Morabito offers—start a book club. Read texts with friends and neighbors, she encourages us, and discuss them like civil adults. Brilliant, and I absolutely agree. Let me add this: When you start your own book club, put The Weaponization of Loneliness and The Psychology of Totalitarianism on the list for Week One.

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Original Bio

—Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.