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March 20, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:47
Mattias Desmet and Aaron Kheriaty Talk about Why So Many Suffer from Profound Loneliness
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Basically all age groups, with the exception of the very elderly, have seen marked rise in suicide in the last 20 to 25 years.
It's very highly correlated with use of technology.
The more technology used, the more lonely people feel in a country.
Today, two of the world's leading thinkers on bioethics and group psychology join me together for the first time.
Dr. Aaron Cariotti is a former psychiatry professor and director of the medical ethics program at the University of California, Irvine Medical School.
He is the author of The New Abnormal.
Matthias Desmet is professor of psychology at Ghent University and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
Can only seize control in a society where a lot of people feel lonely.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Aaron Keriati, Matthias Desmet, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders, and together, amazingly.
It's great to be with you, and it's great to be with my new friend, Matthias.
Likewise.
Happy to be here, together with you, Aaron, and thanks for having us on.
So you were together in a session here at this Brownstone conference this year, and you brought up the issue, and this is something we've both talked about in previous interviews, I've talked about with both of you, is this issue of loneliness.
And as the years have gone on, I keep thinking about it as a foundational issue.
So I want to start by discussing that.
And of course, atomization is this concept that comes from that.
So maybe let's start with you, Aaron.
You actually mentioned that Vivek Murthy He said himself that there was this crisis or a huge epidemic of loneliness, which is very much the case.
That's right.
Yeah, Murthy, a man with whom I have many disagreements.
But on this point, he was absolutely right.
I believe it was 2018, somewhere around then, that there was this epidemic of loneliness in the United States.
And he wasn't just using that word sort of metaphorically to describe a social phenomenon.
He was looking at it as Surgeon General from a health-related phenomenon and looking at robust data that loneliness produces.
Negative health outcomes on the same level as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
That this epidemic of loneliness was as serious in terms of compromising Americans' physical and mental health as heart disease, cancer, other things that the Surgeon General sort of traditionally pays attention to.
In connection with that, there was a couple of researchers at Princeton, Case and Deaton, who were doing a lot of work around that time on so-called deaths of despair.
And deaths of despair are deaths by suicide, alcohol-related illnesses, and drug overdose, which since 1990, 1999, had been on the rise.
So about a 20-year rise in deaths of despair.
Drug overdose deaths in 1999 were at 20,000 a year, which is a tragic number.
But that had ballooned to 70,000 a year.
By the year 2019.
And then with COVID lockdowns and our response to COVID, we basically threw gasoline on that fire.
And so that 70,000 number jumped in 2021 after lockdowns to 100,000 a year.
Same thing happened with alcohol-related deaths, 69,000 a year pre-pandemic to 99,000 a year.
And that crisis has continued to worsen.
The suicide numbers from the CDC have continued tragically to go up every year.
So basically all age groups, with the exception of the very elderly, those over the age of 75, all age groups in both men and women have seen marked rise in suicide in the last 20 to 25 years.
I think all of this suggests a profound crisis in society.
The causes are complex.
Technological developments have certainly played a role, but I would say certain social and ideological developments have also played a role.
Like, what's driving us to embrace this technology?
The technology itself is not necessarily alone leading to all of these changes.
Why have we as a society pursued the use of technologies in certain ways that lead to these kinds of problems?
You know, Matthias, you're looking at this from a different vantage point.
Perhaps I'll get you to build on that now.
Yes.
I think it's very interesting to see how loneliness, to a certain extent, is a spontaneously emerging phenomenon.
As Aaron mentioned, the use of technology plays a role.
It's very highly correlated with use of technology.
The more technology use...
The more lonely people feel in a country.
Which is surprising, of course, because we always believe that technology connects us to each other.
That's true.
At the level of the exchange of information.
But it disconnects it.
It disconnects us at the level of the resonating bond between humans.
So it destroys the resonating bond to a large extent.
So that's one thing.
Like, this is a spontaneously emerging phenomenon.
As a consequence of the increasing use of technology, what is also very interesting, I believe, is that sometimes it is intentionally created.
Like that is what Hannah Arendt said, totalitarian leaders can only seize control in a society where a lot of people feel lonely.
Okay, they need loneliness.
Loneliness which spontaneously emerged and which was used or abused by totalitarian leaders.
Because they probably didn't know, but they just noticed that their propaganda was very efficient because there was a lot of loneliness.
Once people feel lonely, propaganda, people are very vulnerable for propaganda.
And a new type of mass emerged in the 30th century, which...
Jacques Ellul called the lonely mass, meaning that, like, in medieval times, there were also mass formations and masses, but there were physical masses.
People had to meet physically in order to experience this kind of group dynamic that I refer to as mass formation.
And so mass formation has always existed, but in the 20th century, it became stronger because of the emergence of mass media and propaganda.
But also because much more people felt lonely and in this way the propaganda really kicked in, became very successful and led to a new kind of mass, a lonely mass where people did no longer have to meet physically to form a mass but could form a mass while they were all sitting in a lonely state in their houses because they were all infused by the same Narratives through the mass media.
And the interesting thing is the following.
As soon as a totalitarian leader or a totalitarian system can use loneliness to seize control of the population, the first thing it will always do,
according to Rana Arendt, is replace loneliness by isolation.
Physical isolation.
Meaning that it will try to impose travel restrictions.
It will try to prevent people from meeting, like Stalin did, with more than two persons.
Because they know if you can use loneliness and replace it by physical isolation, preventing people to meet physically, propaganda is extremely successful.
You have perfect control to propaganda.
So we can see that this Atomization of society, on the one hand, was a spontaneous process.
That's the most important thing, I believe.
It was a spontaneously emerging process as a consequence of the industrialization of the world, the use of technology.
But it was also sometimes intentionally and artificially created by totalitarian leaders.
And then there is this last thing that I would want to add to that.
And it is that we really have to try to understand The complex relationship between loneliness and narcissism because they are related to each other.
And that's the deepest psychological level.
That's the root cause of the phenomenon of the emergence of loneliness in our society.
Like something that I will try to describe in a tangible way in my next book.
Our modern...
The world view started to emerge somewhere in the 16th, 17th century, when the human being left the religious view on man and the world behind and replaced it by the rationalist,
materialist view on man and the world, which believed that it's not so much God that reveals the truth.
We have to construct the truth ourselves by observing the world with our eyes.
And trying to understand the rational connections between the facts that we establish with our eyes.
So that metaphysical revolution in which the richest human man in the world was replaced by the materialist human man in the world basically boiled down to this.
The human gaze, the eyes, the focus changed.
It was no longer focused on our ethical awareness and ethical rules and stuff.
No.
It was focused outwards.
We started to believe that the real world is the world that we could observe with our eyes.
And that was the moment where we also started to believe, at the level of our own identity, that we could see who we are in the mirror.
We are our outer mirror image, our ideal image, and that at the same time, immediately, on the one hand.
We isolated the human being from other human beings because in all human interactions, we were like a few percentages, which was enough to have a substantial impact, more focused on our own ideal image, meaning that we couldn't see the image of the other anymore.
We resonated less with the other because we were more focused on our own outer ideal image and our own ego.
And that the ego is literally like a superficial shell of your own being.
And if you invest a lot of psychological energy, if you focus your attention on your outer ideal image, you get disconnected from the other because you do not mirror.
The other's image anymore.
And there is no spontaneous emergence of empathy anymore.
So the human bond gets weaker.
The real human bonds.
And that at the same time explains like it's this rationalist fuel man in the world at the same time led to isolation and narcissism.
And you can see that in living color as young people are...
Curating and airbrushing their ideal image and projecting it literally onto Instagram.
And they can't experience the real being together with other people in spontaneous, convivial friendship and relationship.
You know, young people going to a dance.
And the whole purpose of the dance is to take pictures and post them.
Otherwise, it's like it didn't happen, right?
And another thing that happens in that context is that one's own interior life...
Disappears.
And so the possibility for real human friendship, intimacy, and connection that Matthias is describing also disappears because it's one person's character armor, which is a psychoanalytic term that the analysts 100 years ago used to describe the narcissistic personality.
It was characterized by this hardening, one person's character armor bumping up against another person's character armor in a society increasingly.
Isolated and then characterized by conflict when people are together or are trying to connect.
The other thing I'll say, just to riff on Matthias' comments about the rise of a kind of rationalism over really the last 500 years, is that the endpoint of that hyper-rationalist program or process can be seen,
for example, in the philosophy of Karl Marx.
And I'm not talking about his economic theories.
I'm talking about Marxist metaphysics, his view of ultimately the world and how we know things and what human beings are.
I mean, the first thing he said is basically, there is no such thing as human nature.
We are what we make.
And the whole project of rationalism and its kind of apotheosis in the 19th century was that we can recreate ourselves.
We can recreate the world.
We can recreate ourselves by recreating the world.
That was basically the Marxist revolutionary program.
And there is no already given elements in the world or in human nature that need to be respected and regarded or treated with a kind of contemplative gaze.
Everything needs to be subjected to our rationalists.
This leads to a top-down managerialist society of total control and totalizing surveillance.
It leads to...
It leads to sort of extreme ideologies like transhumanism that begin from the premise that there is no such thing as human nature.
We could just recreate ourselves and become demigods or bigger, faster, stronger through the use of, let's say, biotechnology or nanotechnology or other technological enhancements.
So we're in the process of creating this unreal world.
And then trying to conform ourselves to a kind of virtual unreality that we were never built for.
And that can only lead to unhappiness and misery and all kinds of downstream social problems.
Aaron, Matthias, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Aaron Cariotti and Matthias Desmet.
There's two things that just struck me.
One of them is this spontaneous rise of loneliness through technology.
It's curious that a lot of these masses, it's all mediated, I don't know if ironically or just obviously, through technology.
So it's almost like the connection gets, to use the word, denuded through the fact that a lot of it seems to be mediated through technology.
So it makes sense you would prevent physical contact at some level.
The other thing that struck me is this cause and effect question.
Is it with this, the totalitarians taking advantage of the spontaneous rise of loneliness, could it be the cause and effect is reversed, in fact, that the technology itself gives rise to
I'd like to get you...
I mean, I think it runs in both directions.
So the technological developments obviously have an impact, but also the ideologies drive the technological developments and the widespread embrace of those technological developments.
So you think about lockdowns during COVID, which is the most extreme example of what Matias was describing before.
I mean, the 20th century totalitarian dictators from Stalin to Hitler never dreamed of such rigid controls on...
I mean, they never told...
People to stay six feet apart.
They never told people that they couldn't go to, you know, couldn't go outside or go to work.
So the world globally and supposedly free Western democratic societies embraced a level of control and organized loneliness that had never been seen before.
And the question is why?
And some people have pointed out, well, if the laptop class had not, you know, already Had available Zoom technology, then lockdowns never would have been possible.
And there's certainly truth to that.
But I think also we had been conditioned for decades into thinking that it's possible to live a human and humane life staying in my room and, you know, ordering my food from people that I will never actually see and actually never encountering a real person face-to-face.
Somehow...
Human beings globally had developed the belief that it was actually possible and in some cases even desirable to do that.
I think it was clear that the human bond had become already very painful for most people.
Most people felt lonely.
Most people suffered from anxiety.
25% of the world population deals with the psychiatric disorder which almost always...
It's part of a social problem, a problem and a connection with other people.
So many people actually, like many young people in Japan, don't have sex anymore.
Many young people just prefer virtual reality over in-person contacts and conversations.
And I feel it as well.
Something that is very enticing in the use of your mobile phone.
Addiction, I think, and the most dangerous one definitely in our era.
And in that way, as soon as you start to see how throughout the last two, maybe three centuries, the social fabric deteriorated step after step.
How, for instance, the introduction of television, radio reduced the number of...
In-person contacts we had maybe with 50% or more and then the introduction of the internet with another 30%.
How the disappearance of the physical labor working together in a physical way also destroyed the direct contact between human beings and so on and so on.
Then you start to understand how suddenly people who just Because of their blind belief in this rational system, in this rationalist worldview, and their blind striving towards rational control,
and manipulation of nature in general and society in particular, how these people started to feel that maybe the next step could be taken and that we slowly could get people used to the fact that maybe it was better for everyone,
that people stayed in their houses from now on.
Better for nature, better for climate change, better for it will protect you from dangerous viruses and so on and so on.
That's indeed the situation we find ourselves in now.
And if we do not start to really think about how we can escape it, I believe humanity might end up in a very well-organized prison.
Yes.
It's a kind of bizarre thing to think about.
It's a funny image.
You have to laugh, but it's kind of a very dark.
Well, there's a real lack of intellectual humility behind these converging ideologies, if you will, and converging uses of technologies.
I think there is a lack of self-awareness and understanding, first of all, that the world is enormously and beautifully complex.
And the sort of hyper-rationalist ideology says, no, we can figure everything out, and then we can...
Put the really smart people into positions of permanent power.
And they can, in a top-down, sort of managerialist, control, organized fashion, tell everyone what to do and figure out all the dangers and minimize them and kind of refine all the pleasures and maximize them.
And it's a very naive view of...
The cosmos and of the world that we live in and the immediate lived environment, which is enormously complex beyond our reckoning and beautifully beyond our ability to...
To fully comprehend it.
So science, and I should say, and I'm sure Matthias would say the same thing, both of us are a fan of science as a process for discovering more and learning more about the natural world.
And I'm not opposed to technology as a way of managing our lives and the environment.
But to put those things at the service of human beings and put those things at the service of the actual complex world in which we live in is going to require a very, very different approach than the path that we seem to be going down now.
Well, Matthias Desmet, Aaron Cariotti, such a pleasure to have had you on together.
Thank you.
Likewise.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you all for joining Aaron Cariotti, Matthias Desmond, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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