The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer

Published by Bombardier Books

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-63758-202-2

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-203-9

The Weaponization of Loneliness:

How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer

© 2022 by Stella Morabito

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Matt Margolis

Scripture taken from the St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint ™. Copyright © 2008 by St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press, LLC

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

In loving memory of my father and my mother, Dominic Don Morabito and Mary Matosian Morabito

It is not good for man to be alone. —Genesis 2:18

Contents

Prologue: Our March into Virtual Solitary Confinement

Introduction: The Machinery of Loneliness

PART I.      The Political Uses of Loneliness

Chapter 1.     A Brief History of Previous Utopian Revolutions

Chapter 2.     The Conformity Impulse and the Making of Mobs

Chapter 3.     The Totalitarian Impulse and the Operation of Mobs

PART II.      The Vivisection Of America

Chapter 4.     Identity Politics and the Resegregation of Blacks

Chapter 5.      Political Correctness and the Estrangement of Women

Chapter 6.     Youth Revolutionized and Programmed for Mobs

Chapter 7.     Whites Dehumanized through Identity Politics, Political Correctness, and Mob Agitation

PART III.      Mass Alienation through Institutional Subversion

Chapter 8.      Cloning Lonely Puppets: The Subversion of Education

Chapter 9.     The Long March through All Our Institutions

Chapter 10.   Attacks on Family, Faith, and Friendship

Conclusion: A Wrench in the Machinery of Loneliness

Select Bibliography

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Prologue

Our March into Virtual Solitary Confinement

…poor lonesome ghost locked in its own machinery. —Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

In 1970, a thirteen-year-old girl was discovered in my Southern California hometown after her depraved father confined her for a dozen years to a dim back bedroom. He forbade even her mother and brother to speak to her. As a young teen myself, I was captivated by the case. It was a national news item I followed avidly in the Los Angeles Times .

When found, the girl could only utter guttural noises. Her senses were so numbed by the twenty-four-seven monotony that her eyes couldn’t focus more than a few feet away, the distance between the bedroom wall and the potty-chair to which she was strapped down daily. She was unable to feel heat or cold. Those working on the case gave her the pseudonym Genie because she was a mystery, like a genie locked forever in a bottle.

I had high hopes she might eventually be able to talk about her ordeal. But the damage was severe, permanent, and irreversible. Genie made a little bit of progress under the care of professionals, but she never learned more than a few words in a pidgin mix, then regressed into muteness.¹

A little later, I read Joanne Greenberg’s autobiographic novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. The story traces her experiences of shame and guilt as a young girl. It refers to the taunts and rejection she experienced at school and at camp. She sought refuge inside her mind. As Joanne withdrew, she became severely schizophrenic. She hallucinated beauty and friends. They lived in Yr, a realm with its own landscape, climate, and unique language. While numb to the people and places in the real world around her, in Yr Joanne had strong tactile and visual senses along with the auditory hallucinations of her companions.

After years of careful therapy, in fits and starts and baby steps, Joanne was able to break free of Yr and literally come to her senses. Her psychotherapist was the renowned Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Based on her professional observations and Joanne’s case, Fromm-Reichmann offered the thesis that perceived social isolation is a major cause of psychosis, possibly a root cause of all mental illness. Most psychiatrists rejected her theory back then, and many, if not most, still reject it today.

In a 1959 article titled Loneliness, in the journal Psychiatry, Fromm-Reichmann described Joanne’s ability to convey—through hand gestures—that profound loneliness was the root cause of her sickness. The article also suggested that psychiatrists who rejected such a connection were themselves experiencing the human fear of confronting the abyss of loneliness. Indeed, Joanne’s eventual recovery was so complete that many refused to believe Joanne was ever schizophrenic.

Cases like Genie’s and Joanne’s may seem rare. But they are the tip of a deep iceberg in which the mental and emotional consequences of social isolation are far more common. Extreme isolation can render us feral, cut us off from our potential, and disrupt our ability to communicate or even to think. It can lead to psychoses, mental disorders in which a person completely loses touch with reality. Such isolation leads to a host of other pathologies, as well as self-harm and suicide.

Severe loneliness leaves us in despair, dysfunctional, distrustful, and incapable of communicating. The stress contributes to a multitude of physical health problems, including high blood pressure, heart ailments, dementia, and stroke. But it also erodes our sense of agency, making us thoroughly vulnerable to the dictates of others. The hidden danger is that we are all subject to having this vulnerability exploited.

Joanne’s escape into psychosis parallels other forms of escape from reality that have plagued our society and culture in recent decades, including the opioid epidemic, excessive screen time, and the pull of virtual reality. New technologies have intensified the lure of such addictions beyond the older escape hatches of alcohol, gambling, and print pornography.

All have contributed to a loneliness epidemic and a mental health crisis accompanied by spiking suicide rates, especially among youth. Alienation, the feeling of being disconnected from other people, of being isolated, unloved, alone, is the common denominator that doesn’t change as we pursue those escapes. We can try to flee into virtual reality, but the digital world is no substitute for flesh-and-blood human companionship.

This book is the result of many such observations that captured my attention throughout my childhood and adult life. As a child in the schoolyard, I first began to take mental notes on the effects of ostracism. In middle and high school, I studied from afar the weirdness of the cult of popularity. I noticed how associations could shift based on rumors and reputation and a group mindset.

I also noticed how mobbing tends to have an atomizing effect on the bully, the victim, and the bystander alike. All sorts of relationships suffer in environments in which people defer to social labeling. Friendships get nipped in the bud. Victims withdraw when feeling isolated and humiliated. I’ve never forgotten how a mercilessly bullied junior high schoolmate chose the ultimate withdrawal of a grisly suicide.

Later in college, while living close to a very active Fraternity Row, I pondered its bestial dynamics and pecking orders. I also worked for a while as an administrative assistant in a social science department. There I was a fly on the wall while similar tribal forces played out among faculty members who’d operate as a mob, swarming to get a rival denied tenure or canned for thinking wrongly.

But patterns of weaponized isolation writ large really stood out to me when I studied Russian and Soviet history as a graduate student. Totalitarian forces always seek to destroy private life and set up a surveillance state. If they succeed, it heightens a sense of isolation that results in dependence upon the state. During Josef Stalin’s Reign of Terror, millions of Soviet citizens were sent to gulags or executed as political criminals if suspected of noncompliance. Victims were publicly demonized as nonpersons. The terrified masses complied.

I continued to probe these phenomena while serving in the 1980s at the Central Intelligence Agency as an analyst of Soviet propaganda and its state-controlled media. That work cemented my understanding that oppression is inevitable in one-party states that sustain themselves through constant propaganda and censorship and the subversion of any independent institution. They’re driven to control the speech, thoughts, and, therefore, the associations of their presumed subjects, usually through some form of demonization.

After leaving my job to raise a family, I could feel the American social fabric unraveling as I read up on human life issues, including abortion, Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s assisted-suicide machine, and murmurs of euthanasia and eugenics. I also tracked the development of political correctness, identity politics, family breakdown, K–12 reforms, radical environmentalism, campus speech codes, and woke-creep in religious institutions, in the military, and in corporate America. I watched the growth of gender ideology, including nascent propaganda on transgender kids, which I detected in my local public library in the mid-1990s.

Much of the media’s marketing of all these agendas was overly forceful, often demonizing those who might disagree. Most seemed to accept the propaganda to avoid being labeled a bigot. To get a better handle on that, I investigated the huge body of neglected research on the conformity impulse and behavior of crowds.

I finally concluded that there is a machinery at work—a machinery of loneliness. Tyrants operate that machinery—wittingly or not—in order to disarm those they wish to control. It happens all the time in toxic workplaces or in destructive cults, as well as in politics.

I think we understand these phenomena instinctively. Unfortunately, most of us do not understand them consciously. That’s a major failing that cries out for correction. We must become more aware of these dynamics to develop counterstrategies that can preserve our freedoms. I hope this book can aid that awareness by laying out some of the patterns of the weaponization of loneliness.

Consider a few questions. In terms of the effect on the human psyche, how different is the playground taunt of cooties to cancel culture? How different from Big Tech’s efforts to smear and deplatform the unwoke? How different from being supervised by a petty tyrant in a toxic workplace? Or from a cult leader like Jim Jones, who isolates his recruits in a jungle? In the end, aside from degree, how different are any of these from world-class dictators like Mao Zedong or Josef Stalin, who could arbitrarily label anyone as a public enemy and have him exterminated both socially and literally with the silent consent of a population terrified of that same fate?

The underlying dynamic is the same: a machinery of loneliness that threatens to turn people into social pariahs in order to extort compliance. History is filled with sordid documentation of the damage done by totalitarian regimes that rely on that machinery fueled by the conformity impulse and terror of isolation. We can only imagine how much worse it gets with such tactics wielded on a global scale through exponentially growing digital technologies.

The weaponization of loneliness drives just about everything in human affairs. The threat of social isolation tends to determine what we say or don’t say. Then it begins to regulate what we think and how we behave. It very often determines those we shun and those we don’t. Sadly, we seemed locked into that soulless machinery, like Walker Percy’s lonesome ghost.

If we are to exit this path to slavery, we need to challenge both those who would lead us down this road and, even more importantly, bystanders inclined to mindlessly follow. We need a conscious investigation to help crack the code of the weaponization of loneliness and its modern mechanisms such as identity politics, political correctness, and mob formation. We must aggressively defend the private sphere of life because that is the only safe haven for developing the power of human connection. Only then can we start defending ourselves against attempts to isolate us, especially from those we love and those who love us.

Introduction

The Machinery of Loneliness

Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Terror of isolation is the natural bedrock upon which tyrannies are built. Severe loneliness is an abnormal state for human beings. That’s why the prospect of being condemned to solitary confinement is akin to the biblical curse of being cast into the outer darkness. It renders us so vulnerable that in the hands of tyrants, this terror of being alone is the perfect weapon to control our actions, our speech, our associations, and our thoughts. We may be oblivious to the practice, but loneliness is constantly weaponized. This will continue to happen by stealth unless we wise up to the process and become self-aware enough to build counterstrategies.

You may even know of someone who manipulates that fear. Gaslighters do it by limiting their partner’s social contacts. Toxic bosses do it by making unreasonable demands that result in firing if not met. Queen bee divas may spread rumors and smear their perceived rivals in order to isolate them. The leader of a dangerous cult will create a codependent family-like structure in which recruits must comply with every demand to avoid being punished with shunning.

But perhaps dictators are the most experienced in such tactics. The consequences are grimmest when whole societies fall under the spell of their manipulations. Why do people fall for it? For one thing, we seem to have a hardwired flight response whenever faced with the threat of social rejection. For another, we are not tuned in to the mechanisms of such psychological warfare.

Resistance is especially hard if we are acting alone and are not even aware of our emotional vulnerabilities. Particularly when conformity is enforced by mob action, we respond in the hope that compliance will help us avoid a sentence of ostracism and maybe even gain us the social acceptance we crave. Thus, the conformity impulse easily contributes to a social contagion, which can feed on itself until tyranny is firmly established.

That is precisely how tyrants get away with their schemes, time and again. They instinctively manipulate the primal human fear of loneliness in a sort of bait and switch scheme. We see it in cancel culture, deplatforming, and various forms of public ridicule and smearing. Relief from social isolation is the bait they offer in exchange for compliance with their agendas. The switch is nothing but more tyranny, along with even more loneliness and fear. Thus, the cycle of fear and compliance upon which tyrannies depend becomes self-perpetuating.

We cannot mount an effective resistance to this noxious state of affairs until we become fully aware of these patterns and how they direct our behaviors. We may certainly have an instinctive awareness, but that is not enough. We must become actively conscious of the markers of the weaponization of loneliness to resist their powerful pull and to embolden others to do the same. Otherwise, we will continue to be sitting ducks for the designs of tyrants.

The Phantom Shadow of Tyranny

Americans have long sensed tyranny creeping into their lives. The disquiet hovered in the background for a long time, though most couldn’t put their finger on it. When signals surfaced—such as antispeech codes written into federal law in the 1990s allegedly to curb hate—we tended to shrug them off. After all, wouldn’t acceptance of the code simply mean we were promoting civility over hate? It was too frightening to believe those speech codes could really lead to direct attacks on freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Other indicators of a new kind of authoritarianism multiplied over the course of decades, usually with the claim that they were needed to ensure justice against racism or sexism. In the 1980s, multiculturalism took root, then morphed into identity politics and intersectionality.

Likewise, when the canon of Western civilization came under direct attack in the 1980s, few expected it to be followed by direct attacks on free speech on college campuses. But it was, and with a vengeance. Such unintended consequences seemed to be popping up everywhere. Trends to control speech and behavior were isolating us from one another, and yet they began to intensify rapidly and spread throughout society’s institutions.

Many felt very queasy as this shadow of tyranny enshrouded us further. At the same time, we tended to go along with it. Besides, it wasn’t possible to pinpoint any single source. Yes, tyranny seemed to be in the air, but we whistled past the haunted feeling and tried to get on with our lives.

Yet, in increments over the decades, we became less likely to express ideas openly—to neighbors, coworkers, classmates, or even family members—for fear of being accused of wrong think. Even when asked for an opinion, we found ourselves tiptoeing, fearful that a politically incorrect statement would get us shunned. Many would nod in understanding at the results of a 2020 Cato Institute poll: a whopping 62 percent said they had political views they were too fearful to express.²

We were feeling more alone than ever, even before authorities shut the country down because of COVID-19. There were already numerous feature stories written about a loneliness epidemic. Children brought up in traditional households were more likely to find their beliefs ridiculed in school by peers and teachers alike. College students learned that expressing a politically incorrect opinion in class could easily result in a poorer grade or worse. Many would also come home to berate their parents over politically incorrect views on the environment or white privilege.

But the effects of enforced isolation, brought on by heavier doses of propaganda that spread instantly—and globally—on the internet began to take their toll. Ideologies most Americans had never heard of before—like critical race theory and transgenderism—took center stage. There was not even time to digest those dogmas before they were enforced by just about every institution, including Hollywood, the corporate world, financial institutions, the media, medicine, academia, K–12 education, and even in the military and as yet traditional religious institutions.

The whole woke revolution took controlled speech a giant leap further by compelling speech, as with pronoun protocols that applied heavy penalties for misgendering someone. All such agendas also carried a heavy dose of hostility against anyone who might disagree and enlisted social media mobs to enforce that demonization. Saying the wrong thing about these new isms—even asking an innocent question—could get you canceled on social media or get you fired from your job. And it was coming from all directions, from all institutions.

Our tech devices magnified the sense of helplessness, as social media increasingly told us what to think and how to think. We were feeling more alone and isolated than ever before, but we didn’t know how to express it. Why were divisions in society growing so hostile? Why couldn’t we have normal conversations without the fear of being canceled by mobs? How to make sense of blatant attacks on free speech, on conscience, on even raising our own children?

We began to wake up to the fact that once such a chilling effect on speech took hold, we became more separated from one another, more atomized. And on a mass scale. These trends all seemed to converge to produce a totalitarian moment that felt inescapable. It is similar to the development of other tyrannies in the past. But it is also different in its modern form because this one is highly technological, impersonal, and global.

Nevertheless, the methods and goals are the same. It all begins with isolation. The totalitarian can easily induce self-censorship as long as people perceive it as an escape from the fear of social isolation. And yet by self-censoring we cut ourselves off from others and thereby become more isolated, not less. This self-imposed isolation—due to fear of isolation—is our greatest enemy because it is being used to erode our freedom.

A Wake-Up Call: 2020 Fast-Tracked Our Isolation

The use of state-enforced lockdowns due to the COVID-19 virus proved to be the catalyst that accelerated our divisions and atomization. At first, and in good faith, Americans complied with a host of medical mandates—social distancing, masking, shutdowns, and later vaccines—to do their part for public safety. But the increasing coerciveness of the directives—requiring a vaccine to stay employed, for example—gave people pause. The extreme coercion seemed to clarify something totalitarian was afoot, especially since this virus was nearly 100 percent recoverable for those without serious health problems.

Americans had generally agreed to disagree in the past, but as propaganda stoked fear of random death from the virus, strange new hostilities erupted. After elites in government, media, and Big Tech demonized anyone not in line with the mandates, many people responded by disowning friends and family members who weren’t with the program. In fact, the COVID-19 mandates blatantly enforced our isolation from one another, often in the most intimate and brutal ways. It began with a thousand cuts, including distancing and masking, but then moved on to destructive lockdowns and to draconian vaccine mandates. These restrictions on distancing often meant that patients in hospitals were not allowed any visitors at all. Brutally separated from loved ones, many were left to die alone.

The censorship of several reputable medical experts who offered different opinions on treatment was unprecedented. Suddenly, the industry of faceless fact-checkers exploded on Big Tech, claiming that anything not in line with the narrative was misinformation. Clearly, a new sort of tyranny was taking hold.

Conformity Erodes Resistance and Enables Tyranny

Mandates—whether because of COVID-19 or anything else, whether enforced or periodically eased—have a conditioning effect. The promise of getting back to normal if only you do this and that is common to a conditioning method that has long been used by tyrants. This process is helped along when there is a high level of social conformity because people tend to mimic the obedience they see in those around them.

Even when draconian directives end, those who capriciously issued them seem to take notes for the next time: How to measure the compliance rate? How to nudge and modify behaviors? How to raise the ante in the future? How to keep those options open?

Consider, for example, how Americans accepted greater degrees of domestic surveillance after Congress passed the PATRIOT Act in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The newly established Department of Homeland Security asked Americans to aid in finding terrorists. The Transportation and Security Administration carried out unprecedented baggage and body searches, sometimes by obnoxious agents, on a permanent basis. Most accepted the new normal as a small price to pay for safety. But we had no idea such surveillance would be used in the future to label as domestic terrorists peaceful protestors or parents who voiced politically incorrect concerns at school board meetings.

Similarly, when restaurants and other public venues required proof of vaccination for entry, there was a startling level of conformity. Before long, the federal government mandated vaccines for businesses, healthcare workers, and the military, with virtually no allowance for any exemptions. Showing papers to keep your job or go to school or even go to a concert materialized. Freedom of movement—to board a plane or bus, for example—increasingly depended upon your willingness to obey orders such as to mask up. And if an accompanying toddler put up a fuss about wearing a mask, the entire family would get booted off the plane.

Mass conformity with such processes opens the door wide to a social credit system like China’s, in which a citizen’s access to goods and services depends entirely upon his or her political compliance. It also gives leaders an excuse to fence themselves off from accountability, both literally and legally. In the name of safety, elected representatives shut down public access to statehouses across the nation as well as to the United States Capitol. The Capitol office buildings were fenced off, preventing constituents from having any direct contact with their representative in Congress. COVID-19 measures also helped the ruling classes develop a two-tiered system in which they placed themselves above the law when it came to complying with their own mandates.

In part, the conformity that allowed this cycle to continue was driven by fear of the virus. But even as states dropped the mandates when the evidence against their usefulness couldn’t be denied, the conditioning process had already reached a higher threshold. The ultimate effect of this process is yet to be seen. What happens when the goalposts get moved again? What strange new narratives and agendas might whole populations agree to next time?

The Entangled Interests of Modern Tyrants

What do we know about powerful actors who tend to push social control measures? Why do so many of them—especially in government and corporations, aided by Big Media and Big Tech—seem to line up in the same formations, with the same demands?

For clues we can look at the apparent collusion of those same actors in the immediate wake of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade on June 24, 2022. They all seem tied together by a common outlook or a common psychology in which their prime motivator was power through social control.

As soon as the ruling was announced, their behavior was so aggressive that you could reasonably wonder if abortion was their only means of survival. President Biden issued an executive order establishing an interagency task force to get around any state restrictions on abortion. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) fervently declared war on crisis pregnancy centers, insisting they be replaced with more abortion clinics. The Department of Justice did virtually nothing to address the increased vandalism and attacks on crisis pregnancy centers or continued mob action at the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices, which included an assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Even more telling, hundreds of large corporations instantly announced they would pay all abortion expenses, including out-of-state travel, to pregnant employees. These companies openly admitted they needed abortion to boost business. (Indeed, abortion is cheaper for companies than adding a child onto health insurance or allowing for family leave.) In like manner, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen essentially argued that the economic health of the nation depended on unrestricted abortion. Meanwhile, propaganda campaigns continued to urge youth to forego having children in order to save the planet.

But all those anti-child reactions to Dobbs seem to have a far darker effect in common. They serve to atomize people by cutting them off from the