Why liberalism itself wants us to be alone

In our loneliness we are never alone. It is the one thing thought to bring us together — our loneliness.

So many of us feel lonely that doctors are calling it an epidemic and the United Kingdom is appointing a minister of loneliness. Loneliness en masse is a mental-health crisis, we’re told, that medicine and bureaucracy might resolve.

And it’s certainly conceivable these things could help, perhaps even significantly. But it is too simple to understand the matter of loneliness as originating in the mind. What’s more, such an understanding reproduces the problem. We do not merely feel alone in liberal societies. Liberalism wants us to be alone. Liberalism privileges the isolated mind over the community mind.

The centre of the liberal universe is not the group, a group, any group. It is the individual. And liberalism’s ideal individual is self-actualized, free and radically disconnected from others.

It is not our purpose, but my purpose; not our goal held in common, but mine. My privacy rights, my property rights, my human rights, my voting rights. My life, my liberty, my pursuit of happiness.

Now, you have yours too, of course. We can’t — excuse me, I can’t — violate someone else’s rights just to make the most of mine. There are equal rights in a liberal system. But under liberalism, holding a right tends to be a solitary exercise.

This, of course, is preferable to the most extreme alternative: no privacy rights, no property rights, no human rights, no voting rights and dangerously restricted opportunities for life, liberty and all the rest. That would be tyranny of the whole over every part.

But liberal countries often seem to lack even the vaguest notion of wholeness, let alone feature an intractable insistence upon it. Ours is a type of group that has little reason to consider itself one.

Over what can we bond? A relative lack of oppressive legislation? Well, perhaps we ought to, but a lack of something is not easily celebrated. How about tolerance? Being barely able to stand your neighbour is better than declaring war against him, but still not quite enough to inspire love of country. The separation of powers? Most busy people would be bored by the time they reached the word “of.”

When people are free to choose, they may choose so differently from one another that they recognize nothing of themselves in each other.

It is at this point that liberalism may become a threat to itself; the point at which loneliness is not only a political issue endemic to liberalism but a political threat to liberalism: If liberalism can’t inspire people to come together, they may unite against it.

Don’t have a sense of greater purpose? Here’s an imaginary threat to your family — go get it. Don’t feel that you belong? Try your hand at excluding people — Muslims, Jews, women, gays — in the worst ways imaginable. Trouble connecting with others? There’s a rally tonight and a lot of people who look just like you will be there — BYO tiki torch.

This is what I was thinking, anyway, when I learned that the United Kingdom is appointing a minister of loneliness; and, when I learned that the position came out of a commission on the same issue; and, when I learned that the same commission on the same issue was set up by the liberal Jo Cox, that talented, kind and dedicated British member of Parliament who was murdered last year by a neo-Nazi and Klan enthusiast.

She was trying to help people not at all dissimilar to her killer: mentally ill and quite alone.

There was something missing in him — in his life and in his mind. Still, there may be something missing in our own society, as well.