{"id":201216,"date":"2021-12-13T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2021-12-13T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=201216"},"modified":"2021-12-11T09:45:43","modified_gmt":"2021-12-11T09:45:43","slug":"a-great-loneliness-has-befallen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/12\/a-great-loneliness-has-befallen\/","title":{"rendered":"A Great Loneliness Has Befallen…"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Great Loneliness . . . <\/strong><\/p>\n

10 Dec 2021 – <\/em>A great loneliness has befallen the world\u2019s people. Amid the perilous Covid-19 Pandemic, a desperate sense of loneliness, detachment, alienation, and distance, has emerged with unanticipated consequences for morbidity and mortality.\u00a0 Each person, each society, each nation, has become a risk for others, for fears of contagion. \u201cLoneliness,\u201d a felt sense of personal vulnerability and despair, has proliferated across ages, genders, income, location, and is approaching pandemic levels.<\/p>\n

Loneliness: Yet another Pandemic? <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cLoneliness,\u201d is a physical, psychological, and spiritual condition, often bringing suffering amid the isolation and solitude. The experience of \u201cloneliness\u201d is increasing amid terrifying fears it will become a pandemic. Loneliness\u201d is often accompanied with an intense sense of personal victimization, immobilizing alternative for escaping its presence.<\/p>\n

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic and global challenges of climate change, toxic pollutions, and risks of extinction, humanity is faced with harsh choices between compliance with authority-imposed restraints on individual rights and human rights. There is considerable conflict regarding choice. Protests have arisen across the world, especially among the young, perhaps the most vulnerable to the perils of \u201cloneliness.\u201d Pressures to acquiescence represent a struggle and resistance against massive institutional forces.<\/p>\n

Government and authorities, argue against resistance, demanding absolute conformity and adherence: \u201cVaccinate or risk infection or death.\u201d Unprepared government, medical, public health, and economic systems yielded to pressing challenges. Medical care systems (i.e., doctors, nurses, hospitals), already burdened by the treatment of familiar acute and chronic disorders, found itself crushed before demands and expectations, pleading we are bursting with cases and can no longer offer adequate care.<\/p>\n

Local and national government have responded with \u201chyped media news\u201d vacillating between assuaging announcements claiming \u201cprogress,\u201d and statements of rising numbers of infections, disabilities, and deaths.<\/p>\n

Major pharmaceutical companies (i.e., Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson), have made extraordinary efforts to develop immunology treatments and preventives, using innovative genetic interventions. Certainly, they deserve accolades and praise.\u00a0 However, amid their rising stock prices, high salaried executives, and general sense of distance from suffering, many people are ambivalent about policies and regulations.<\/p>\n

Scholars, professionals (e.g., Murthy, 2020) Congress, and corporate leaders have acknowledged the problem, calling for more mental health interventions. As a former surgeon general under the Obama Administration, Murthy\u2019s (2020) volume entitled, \u201cTogether: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World<\/em>,\u201d\u00a0crystalizes concerns, calling for greater community renewal and support. Connection is the key!<\/p>\n

Covid-19 Impacts<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is much uncertainty regarding the cause(s) and source(s) of Covid19 and its variants. Accepted \u201cscientific\u201d views of virus culpability, coupled with widespread distrust in proposed and enforced treatments and prevention, (i.e., multiple vaccinations, masks, lock-downs, business shutdown, and entertainment closures) have resulted in a felt sense of severe \u201cloneliness,\u201d no longer limited to temperament-disposed people. Everyone is susceptible.<\/p>\n

A vacuum for rumors, intrigues, and conspiracies, is flourishing. Some people have acquiesced, others have resigned, and some have withdrawn into the privacy of their torment. Tragically, a tide of defenselessness has spread across the land. Doubt, suspicion, isolation, detachment, the seeds of \u201cloneliness,\u201d thrive.<\/p>\n

Even as social-activists make efforts to build ties and connections at local and national levels with organized protests and internet communication sources (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tic Tok, Google), challenges to community roots of \u201cloneliness\u201d have become endemic, discouraging optimism. \u201cLoneliness\u201d is embedded in a larger context of social, political, economic, and moral problems. It is a product of these problems, and contributes to them.<\/p>\n

Cell phones have become essential for widespread communication, increasing information about our perilous reality. Government announcements, designed to advise, console, and compel behaviors are losing credibility, considered as propaganda amid repeated calls for unity, citizen responsibility, and trust in government.<\/p>\n

Doubt and denial have risen to disproportion levels. Across the world, and especially in the USA, national character and popular cultures are changing, bringing increases in authoritarian control and population fractionation, across regions, political, and demographic boundaries.<\/p>\n

Tragically, humanity and its leaders forgot about the omnipresence of change, ignoring \u201cchange\u201d in popular culture. If one forgets \u201cchange,\u201d a toll must be paid. Change is always occurring, at all levels, and requires constant adaptation and adjustment. Life is change! Change is life!<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Lonely Crowd . <\/strong>. .<\/p>\n

I am reminded of the classic volume, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character <\/em>(Reisman, Glazer, & Denney, 1962; 1949), which analyzed post-war changes in socialization agents and institutions, finding widespread anomie and alienation in American Character. The authors described social \u201cestrangement,\u201d a sense of isolation even amidst \u201ccrowds.\u201d They proposed emerging inner-directed and other-directed character orientations, challenging long-held traditions and expected cultural conventions.<\/p>\n

In the post-war Eisenhower Era, discontent with convention became widely apparent. Within years, the USA was involved in Vietnam War, misguided by the policies of \u201cDomino Theory\u201d and \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism.\u201d Protests and social activism among the youth and intellectual sectors of society were suppressed, and strongly condemned by government and corporate oligarchs and plutocrats who demanded conformity to a society which was, in fact, corrupt, immoral, and abusive, serving the privileged wealthy, powerful, and positioned.<\/p>\n

Myths of the USA as an open democracy, free from the stereotypic corruption of emerging and developing nations, were broken, creating a widespread distrust which has gravitated to present times. \u00a0A documentary affirmed what was believed, but tragically ignored and denied: \u201cHow Organized Crime Infiltrated American Business after WW II and Corrupted National Politics from Truman to Trump<\/a>\u201d (Kuzmarov, 2021)<\/p>\n

Life\u2019s Fragility and Vulnerability: Risks of Extinction <\/strong><\/p>\n

Beliefs in life\u2019s fragility, including risks of extinction, are today widespread in the USA and across the world. An unfamiliar threat from a life form, ignored, except by laboratory and medical scientists, revealed shocking possibilities. Humanity was not all powerful! Submicroscopic life forms threatened survival, even as climate change and other global events, poverty, starvation, civil wars, added to contemporary times. It was a case of the microscopic and the macroscopic simultaneously challenging survival.<\/p>\n

A new vocabulary became commonplace, as humanity experienced survival risks: quarantine, masks, lockdowns, border closing, layoffs, DNA immunology, vaccination-verification-authorization, booster shots, age categories, and virus variations (e.g., Delta, Omicron), each variation bringing new risks, threats, and suffering to all.<\/p>\n

\u201cImmunity\u201d is today a \u201cpopular\u201d term, especially as disabilities and deaths surge from Covid-19. \u201cKeep distant!\u201d \u201cTry not to touch!\u201d \u201cHugging and kissing may have deadly consequences!\u201d \u201cIsolate!\u201d \u201cAvoid crowds, entertainment, and recreational settings!\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWork from home if you can!\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIf you must work, take individual and workplace precautions.\u201d<\/p>\n

In slaughter houses, devoid of protections, worker death rates are spiraling out of control, bringing disproportionate infections and deaths among Hispanic\/Latino, immigrant, and the poor, willing to risk lives for paltry salaries for family survival.<\/p>\n

Loneliness . . . Being Alone<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are differences between \u201cloneliness\u201d and \u201cbeing alone.\u201d\u00a0 Many people prefer to \u201cbe alone,\u201d they revel in the solitude and isolation, welcoming the opportunities for activities devoid of human contact.\u00a0 The term \u201cintrovert,\u201d as a temperament, does not capture fully the preference for \u201cbeing alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loneliness is different. Loneliness involves an unrequited sadness, often of such intensity and frequency, it becomes a disorder. Mental health professionals make distinctions among different types of \u201cloneliness\u201d including emotional, social, situational, and chronic<\/em>.\u00a0 I find these distinctions to be inadequate because they<\/p>\n