Loneliness and Groups

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Loneliness and Groups

The following is a collection of a few thoughts I have had on loneliness. I wrote this to a friend (although I changed a few things to make it more suitable for a public audience). Admittedly, these ideas are not fleshed out in final form (like with examples, some righteous rewriting, etc.), but I think they are intelligible enough to challenge artificially hardened schema and prompt a little independent thinking.

 

Different kind of thought

I just had a different kind of thought.

I got it from watching the following video between Joe Rogan and Johann Hari on the roots of depression (and Hari's new book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions).

It's a 2 1/2 hour video, so I don't expect many to watch it. What's worse, Johann Hari is a lefty, irritatingly so at times. Controlling the individual through society is his favorite mechanism for fixing things... (yawn) Fortunately, Joe pushed back at him when he went too far in that direction.

But he had some really deep insights into human nature--let me emphasize deep--and they got me on a roll inside my head. 

Thinking about loneliness is one of the major points I got from this talk.

 

Loneliness

One of the biggest problems for all humans is loneliness. I don't know the neurochemical soup that causes loneliness, although I do have some ideas (cortisol, adrenaline, etc.), however there is a very good evolutionary reason for loneliness to have evolved as a mechanism in our lower brain. In ancient times, when we got cut off from the tribe, we were alone in the wilderness and ripe for being dinner for another species. 

So it's not just a cliché to say there is strength in numbers. The very survival of our prehistoric ancestors depended on grouping into tribes where members looked out for each other. This meant they protected each other, hunted in packs, developed agriculture in groups, protected the crops of one another, and so forth. When a person got cut off from a tribe and was alone in the wilderness, he got cut off from all of that. 

So loneliness evolved as Nature's form of encouraging a person to seek the tribe again.

It's part of the evolutionary imperative. Prehistoric humans who, say, did not have a feeling of loneliness at the right time did not survive long enough to reproduce, therefore, they were not our ancestors. In other words, we carry the genes of those prehistoric humans who did survive and reproduce. Loneliness came with them as a survival mechanism. 

Also, loneliness is a mating mechanism (mating is another evolutionary imperative). When you're lonely, you seek company. If the company you find is sexy and friendly enough, the other hormones will kick in and nature will take its course.  

The following sounds odd today, but loneliness causes the mind to focus, to be much more aware than it normally is when a person is surrounded by a lot of friendly people. (This has been verified by neuroscience.) This makes sense when thinking about the ancients because if you are lost in the wilderness, you had better focus more than normal if you want to survive.

 

Social media and loneliness

Notice that Facebook, Twitter, even Google and other major social media platforms are motivated (at least to a large extent) on the user side by loneliness. People seek each other online, display themselves to each other, communicate with each other, and so on, to scratch their loneliness itch. And what do these tech giants offer their users as a cure for that itch? Do they offer them company? No. Love? No. Flesh and blood people? No.

They offer their users a virtual tribe--one that is not physical--based on addicting the crap out of them. There is a lot of data on their addiction algorithms and, currently, some people who were high-level members of companies like Facebook are coming out in public to say they did this on purpose and feel guilty about it (here's just one for example).

I don't believe they are going to change, either, since their entire business models has been based on raw addiction. They use euphemisms like user adherence and so on, but they are selling dopamine, cortisol, etc., laced with loneliness, pure and simple. And resulting cracks are starting to appear in giant tech companies, in media reports, in the surge of popularity of new competing startups, in the sudden interest in antitrust measures, in bleeding users, and so on.

So this is an opportunity for any new tech startup that wants to try to crack the loneliness problem and get the addiction mix right--in other words, so it attracts and holds users without turning them into zombies and adds to their lives instead of sucking their time away from them.

Currently these tech giants are trying to manipulate their users with a political agenda. Imagine how stupid this is. Instead of convincing people for real about their ideas, they prefer to trick a bunch of addicts who they keep trying to addict more and more. What could possibly go wrong with that?  

 

Communism

On a parallel note, I had a political philosophy epiphany during that video. Loneliness, not economics, is at the base of the popularity of Marxism and why it won't go away. Loneliness is so powerful a motivator that Marx was able to ignore the tendency of humans to turn into monsters when they get absolute power and persuade people that they would be better off sharing everything. People still--to this day--adhere to him. Notice that Communists even call each other "comrades." That's a hell of a signal as to the motivation underlying these people's belief. In other words, the attraction is you don't have to be lonely if you have a lot of comrades around.

This is bolstered by the concept of alienation that Marx talked about. When a person is on an assembly line, he doesn't have full control over the final product of his work. If his company does not encourage a feeling of a group mission among the workers, one they can be proud of and belong to, or some kind of shared vision where they are making the world a better place, they will show up, do work they gradually learn to despise because it's so boring, teach themselves to be emotionally dead inside during work hours just to get through the day, and start resenting the hell out of it. What's worse, this results in an enormous feeling of loneliness. There is very little sharing and community on an assembly line.

Communism, just like the major social media platforms, is a false cure for loneliness. Depending on the context, the allure is that it (or social media) is the only cure available where a person can also be productive and do good things in the world. So people flock to these false solutions in droves. Loneliness and the wish to do good drives them. What's worse, the scumbags who only want power know this and take full advantage of it.

 

Ayn Rand

Believe it or not, loneliness drives a great deal of attraction to Ayn Rand's ideas. The people I mean have wanted to use their minds to do things as they grew up, but they got hurt by being penalized by the groups they lived in for exercising their independent thinking. Don't forget that groups encourage groupthink (to varying extents) for the health and strength of the group. That's reality and it's true for all groups. This groupthink may be on a spectrum on following some basic rules on one end on up to total conformity on the other, but the majority of members have to want to think pro-group for the group to continue existing.

For an independent thinker, a call to groupthink and penalties (including mockery, etc.) for thinking differently prompts an enormous feeling of loneliness when truly valuable thinking has occurred. When they discover Rand telling them they have been right all along and the evil group that hurt them was wrong, they feel like the world makes sense all of a sudden.

Now here's the rub. Ayn Rand was very good at presenting a community of independent-thinking producers while making it appear as total individualism. That's in her fiction and even in her essays. Her fictional heroes fall easily into a good-guy tribe. They socialize together at times. They recognize each other by specific signaling. This is not a formal tribe and I'm not using tribe here in its derogatory meaning. But, for the most blatant example, think of John Galt. He was definitely the tribal leader in Galt's Gulch. And all the members felt loneliness on the outside--if you look in between the lines pertaining to each respective one in the book, it's there and it's clear. In other words, she presented a fix for loneliness with a tribe without mentioning loneliness or tribe. 

When you look at what she does as opposed to what she says on this point, you can see it. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

But out here in the rest of reality, tribes of all kinds continue to be the cure for loneliness and this is a human condition. This means Rand's appeal to independent thinking and reason are not suited to curing loneliness. It's suited to a person transforming reality and achieving great things--and those are wonderful parts of being human for which she provided a much needed moral defense--but not suited to a person curing loneliness.

Notice that the high-end achievers who do well with Rand's ideas have their own tribes in order. I'm thinking about people like President Trump, Mark Cuban, Peter Thiel, and so on. They have their private social networks (families, friends, colleagues, etc.) based on specific tribal social glues (like sports, family, etc.) and they are very happy with them. 

The people who get disgusted with their own communities (and hurt by them) and try to develop a community around Rand's ideas generally end up making a holy mass out of it. (Shall I name names?  ) This is because a group (any group) needs groupthink enough for the group to survive and grow. But these folks are initially independent thinkers who were lonely, and generally lonely for very good reasons. They were victimized.

On finding Rand, and then finding other people who like Rand, many of them give up their independent thinking just because curing the loneliness and belonging to a tribe that, initially at least, looks like them feels so damn good. Ironically, for some of these people, Rand's call to independence turns them into conformers and group enforcers of the worst sort. 

 

The takeaway

There is nothing wrong or shameful about feeling loneliness. And that means there is nothing wrong with belonging to a group or groups (a tribe or tribes)--or even wanting to belong--because this meets a fundamental need within the human psyche in the lower brain. This need is in all of us from our evolutionary past. We came that way. But because this is lower brain stuff, it in no way contradicts the selfishness and individualism needed for using the upper brain to achieve greatness. I think learning how to ground your lower brain in a manner that lets your upper brain soar is the epitome of wisdom. And denying the nature and needs of your lower brain is a surefire recipe to sabotaging your upper brain.

Like I said, these are not complete thoughts yet. I had to get them out, though.

Also, maybe they'll get under the skin of some lonely person or other and help them change things for the better...

That would please me.

 

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Well, this just adds another layer of identifiable complexity to human existence.

Human beings cannot survive on their own. Hence the family then the tribe. Add in wealth and a monstrosity like communism is affordable--seemingly affordable--and all means are justified by the ends. Leftists are suffused with moral hubris. They don't have to think or justify. They've already got it right.

--Brant

[Jules Troy]

That is very insightful!

[Peter]

Much of our identity does derive from various “groups” starting with the family, then extending into the community and nation. I live in a rural area and my nearest neighbor of maybe three years, is now only a couple of hundred yards away and visible from my front window. And that is a good thing to me, even though we had no real neighbors for three decades. I just need to be more careful with the curtains.

And I like going to the food store, Barnes and Nobles, or Walmart even if slow pokes in the aisles are a nuisance, just to mingle and see others. I still go to the library but I rarely sit to read a book or a magazine.  

Say, who’s up for a trip to the Mall?   

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I have never heard of this guy, Daniele Bolleli (Joe Rogan's guest), but based on what he said below, I like him.

From this one impression alone, I believe it is reasonable to say he and I agree with each other about groups and, probably, many other things.

Michael