Loneliness

Photograph: Feri Lukas/Rex

A profound piece by George Monbiot in the Guardian, The age of loneliness is killing us.

Some quotes:

When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war “of every man against every man”, he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominins of east Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any that has gone before.

Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults. Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction of older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50, and is rising with astonishing speed.

Ebola is unlikely ever to kill as many people as this disease strikes down. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity. Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut. We cannot cope alone.

Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage.

British children no longer aspire to be train drivers or nurses – more than a fifth say they “just want to be rich”: wealth and fame are the sole ambitions of 40% of those surveyed. 

We have changed our language to reflect this shift. Our most cutting insult is loser. We no longer talk about people. Now we call them individuals. So pervasive has this alienating, atomising term become that even the charities fighting loneliness use it to describe the bipedal entities formerly known as human beings. We can scarcely complete a sentence without getting personal. Personally speaking (to distinguish myself from a ventriloquist’s dummy), I prefer personal friends to the impersonal variety and personal belongings to the kind that don’t belong to me. Though that’s just my personal preference, otherwise known as my preference.

[Read more here]

I'm lucky. Even though I have no real friends (I lost 2 of the straight friends I had when I came out to them), I have a wife and one child back home, and 2 other children whom I see often.. But I am bisexual.  I have a close family,  What about those who don't?  What about gay men, never allowed by a judgemental society to get married?

Compassion

Compassion (Latin cum=with, passion = suffering) or its Greek-derived equivalent sympathy (syn = with, pathos = feeling) shouldn't really have anything to do with right and wrong.  When somebody is suffering, it's irrelevant whether it's their own fault or not.  That's hard to do, actually.  When someone has caused their own strife we are inclined to feel less sympathy for them.  And yet, if we were the ones suffering, wouldn't we still want to be comforted?  Wouldn't we want those we love, our friends and family, to just give us comfort and support, even knowing that our travails are our own fault?  And if we would like that, how can we refuse it to others?

According to Frans de Waal, whose thoughtful, thought-provoking and eye-opening book (The Age of Empathy) I have just reread (for the third time), we are hard-wired to empathy and sympathy.

Some quotes from Professor de Waal:

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures

I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores.

In 1879, American economist Francis Walker tried to explain why members of his profession were in such "bad odor amongst real people". He blamed it on their inability to understand why human behavior fails to comply with economic theory. We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it. Psychological tests have shown that economics majors are more egoistic than the average college student. Exposure in class after class to the capitalist self-interest model apparently kills off whatever prosocial tendencies these students have to begin with. They give up trusting others, and conversely others give up trusting them. Hence the bad odor.

Don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also our closest relatives, the primates. In a study in Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards, licking their blood, carefully removing dirt, and waving away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions, and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof. What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick for which we have fallen for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone.


Sympathy and compassion are not weaknesses. They are strengths. They are what makes us human, and allow our vast human tribe to survive.  The hyper-competitiveness of the standard male model is dysfunctional and destructive, both to those who believe in it, and to the rest of us. We--our society--need something better.  I once thought that gay men, having had to come to terms with the fact that they are not (according to society) "real men", would have reinvented masculinity to tone down the selfishness and competitiveness and lonely struggle that straight men have to endure.  Alas, it's not happened.

Opium of the people

Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.

Lenin, via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people

Drives

We humans have lots of drives and needs: shelter, food, warmth, among others.  But for the most part, in Western countries, these needs are satisfied, and we are left with our unsatisfied needs/drives: love, companionship, and sex.   Oddly enough, though Western capitalism feeds and clothes and warms us, providing (again, for the most part) for our physical needs, it's not very good at filling our emotional needs.

 We are lonely and alone.  We are, most of us, atomistic nothings in giant cities, so big we can never know them fully, so populous we can never get to know everybody.  24% of households have just one person in them.   No wonder so many people have pets!

Suicide in Oz killed 2,272 people in 2011.  And that's those acknowledged as suicide.  Many "single vehicle" accidents, especially in the bush, are disguised suicides.  Interestingly, only 1,277 ppl died in motor vehicle accidents in 2011, only half the official toll from suicide. Drug-related deaths totalled 1388.  Some of these are surely slow-burning suicides.  Note, as an aside, how many resources are deployed to combat road deaths and how few to stop the more numerous suicides and drug deaths.

Ironically, the biggest killer by far is the different forms of heart disease: 26,613 in 2011.  Another 32, 525 die from strokes, prostate cancer, dementia etc, all of which are primarily environment-related.  The excessive prosperity of our system leads to overeating and especially overeating easily prepared and readily available food ("junk food").   Two thirds of Ozzies are obese, double the ratio of 20 years ago.

Just to put it all into perspective, only a little over 200 people a years are murdered.

Our civilisation, then, overfeeds us.  And it's killing us.

How much eating is "comfort food"?

A huge amount of mine is, I know.  We hunger for love and affection; for sexual love, not random encounters; for meaning.  And meaning comes from loving and being loved.

Yet, in a way, the need for sex and the need for love are sometimes opposed.  A man may dearly love his current partner, yet lust after others.  If he satisfies that lust he may destroy the relationship with the person he really loves.  But the need for sex, for "hotness" is very powerful.  We humans like sex, we want more of it, at some deep level within us it fulfills our needs.  But we also deeply want to be loved and to love.

Our culture struggles with these often irreconcilable needs.  We deplore it when famous or wealthy or powerful men break their marriage vows.  Yet so many keep on doing it.  Why?



What we need is less food, less consumption, and more friendship, love and sex.

[ Some previous thoughts on all this:

Our Cheatin' Hearts
Normal Plus
Friends
Friends and Enemas ]



Sources:

All deaths
Road deaths
Drug deaths
Obesity in Australia
Sex at Dawn