In recent weeks, memes have been circulating about comedy shows and satirical websites having to shut down: “We’re sorry, but we can’t come up with material that’s crazier than real life right now.”
Regardless of your views on the US presidential election or, for that matter, politics in much of the rest of the world, we can all probably agree: The news feels overwhelming. Our social discourse seems to have gone off the rails. We’re talking past each other at a higher volume and with greater vitriol than ever before.
But why?
Ask ten people this question, and you’ll get ten different answers: polarization, ubiquitous phones, social media, economic inequality, a decline of traditional values, pollution, and war.
But the woman who was arguably the greatest political philosopher of the 20th Century had a different and unexpected answer. More than 70 years ago, she predicted a great deal about humanity’s current situation.
Hannah Arendt saw loneliness as a phenomenon that turns decent, humane societies into brutal, divided states.
While leading authorities like the US Surgeon General and the World Health Organization have called loneliness and social isolation an epidemic with real implications for human health, the conventional wisdom has been that it’s not really a top-tier issue. It’s a personal, emotional, subjective challenge rather than a collective political problem.
But Arendt begged to differ.
As a German-Jewish political theorist and historian, she drew on her firsthand experiences of Nazi fascism to identify social isolation as an essential underlying condition behind societal breakdown and authoritarianism. While Karl Marx diagnosed the core problem of modern life as “alienation” and Max Weber called it “disenchantment,” Arendt used this seemingly mundane word—loneliness.
By the word loneliness, she meant something specific and a little bit unexpected. While we typically think of loneliness today as an unmet social need, Arendt described the word as the loss of a common ground of experience between people. She called loneliness a “wilderness,” where you can’t trust others or trust that you inhabit the same reality. It’s where there’s no such thing as objective facts. It’s where there’s not sufficient trust across society to enable collective action to solve shared challenges. She described loneliness as a state of “abandonment,” where many people lose the capacity to imagine better futures and, accordingly, feel stuck or trapped in their circumstances.
Sound familiar?
While we might regard these as unfortunate consequences of an age when life happens on TikTok or Twitter, she identified such conditions in the run-up to the fascist takeovers in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the decades leading to the Second World War, the rise of the radio transformed the social fabric in Europe and elsewhere. People stopped getting their information from local conversations or trusted sources in the community. They started tuning in—often on a solitary basis—to round-the-clock real-time broadcasts. Radio didn’t require literacy like a newspaper. It didn’t even require relationships. Radio programming could present a controlled narrative without space for public debate or contradiction. Authoritarian governments took advantage of this new medium to not only propagate their ideologies but also—as Arendt observed—to keep people isolated, polarized, and often fearful.
Like the rise of radio in prewar Europe, the rise of social media has today allowed for the rapid dissemination of controlled narratives and the amplification of some voices at the expense of others. Algorithms create echo chambers, often limiting people’s exposure to diverse viewpoints and reinforcing existing views—creating the kind of “loneliness” of which Arendt warned. Today, social media is often replacing deep social connections with superficial interactions. From 2003 to 2022, US men reduced their average time spent face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For teenagers, the reduction was more than 45 percent.
Hannah Arendt didn’t predict the rise of social media. But she did warn about what would happen if people lost their connection to community and a common fact base.
Does all of this mean that our societies are headed for a totalitarian takeover? Not necessarily. But it does explain the depth of division and the sense of alienation in our society—and it helps to explain some of the growing openness toward authoritarianism in politics around the world.
The good news is that we can draw on Hannah Arendt’s insights to build better societies.
What Arendt called loneliness is the phenomenon I’ve described in this Psychology Today post as “social isolation”—the deficit of connectedness not only to other people, but also to a sense of voice, choice, agency, and shared meaning and purpose.
Social isolation is more serious than we commonly think it is. But the power of belonging is real.
Investments in high-quality schools, community centers, libraries, public transit, arts, and mental healthcare are all investments in our shared belonging. We can say the same about programs that inspire people to serve their communities and societies for the public good. And we can say the same of efforts to transform the economics of social media so that no company can profit from algorithms that promote division. By making belonging a central focus of not just policymaking but everyday discourse and decision-making, we can heal the modern crisis of social isolation and address the underlying brokenness that so many of us feel.
Nearly a century ago, Hannah Arendt understood something that most political and economic thinkers still don’t recognize:
The health of our society depends on our state of connectedness.