by Christopher Hall

Some time ago – I can’t remember if it was before, during, or after the pandemic – I read Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, which is an account of Christopher Knight, a man who, in 1986, drove his car as far as he could into the Maine wilderness, adandoned it, and then proceeded to live in the woods without human contact for 27 years. My first reaction, and I sure I’m not alone in this, was to say “Ah, wouldn’t that be nice, to get completely free from everyone!” followed very swiftly by the realization that I wouldn’t last a day in such circumstances, not just due to my total incompetence as an outdoorsman, but also that I have a limited tolerance for isolation. I live what’s likely a more solitary life than most, but I still need contact with people, at least on occasion. Nevertheless, I remain impressed with Knight; like a person who has complete immunity to some serious disease, Knight seems to have been completely invulnerable to loneliness.

A Google search will provide you with a raft of recent articles which informs us of the deleterious social, mental and even physical effects of loneliness, and their increasing pervasiveness. In January of this year, the Atlantic published an article entitled “The Anti-Social Century” about our tendency to isolate even in settings where we used to commune with others; we go to the bar, take out our phones, and drink in a solitude nearly as complete as if we just stayed home. Now, not three weeks after the Atlantic published the above article, it published another one questioning the existence of a loneliness epidemic, so perhaps we can rest a little easy – but the potential seriousness of the issue ought also to concern us. Loneliness is not just a private or purely social concern; there are, as Hannah Arnedt told us, serious political concerns here. Lonely people lose their connection to others and, Arendt thought, to reality itself. These people become deeply manipulable and subject to the predations of those who would unite them into groups bent on destruction; loneliness is a precondition for totalitarianism. A common quality of contemporary warnings against the dangers of loneliness is that we all must “reconnect;” stop looking at your phone at the bar and talk to somebody – the bartender’s always there, right?

This has a parallel to those skeptics of liberal societies on both the left and the right who find that the individualism encouraged there does not have universally positive effects, and can lead precisely to the sort of dangerous alienation Arendt detected. If liberal autonomy, the right of every individual to chart their own path without interference from others, leads inevitably to loneliness, and if loneliness leads to the worst forms of community, then we must chart paths towards the better forms. For the left, we need to return to the associationism that things like labour unions and other community organisations used to encourage. For the right, returning to traditional institutions like the church is most often the source of such beneficial community.

None of these and other solutions to the loneliness question strike me as completely convincing, as there is as yet no answer to the key question: what are the boundaries between healthy individualism and communitarianism? When does the impulse to communalism tick over into illiberalism? Put another way: at what point do other people *stop *being Hell?

I began to ask this question during the pandemic, when for the most part my sole source of contact with others was through the internet. It increasingly seemed to me, despite some brighter lights in places, that the Sartrean gaze, the willingness to judge, assess, define and categorise others, is the dominant form of discourse there. Instead of being locked up in a room in Hell with a couple of other people, you are locked in with millions, most of whom are more than ready to tell you who you are. And, you find, you become more and more ready yourself to begin inflicting this gaze on others. In the “reaction economy” of the online world we are constantly poking and prodding at each other, trying to get others to see us, and to see us seeing them. And this, I’m sad to say, is a perspective that, for me at least, has bled out into the meatspace world. “Influencer” culture is not a one-way street, after all; we are meant to respond as we are allegedly being influenced, and such responses are worth money whether positive or negative, which explains the persistence of people whose sole means of subsistence seems to come from being idiots on the internet. I’m not convinced this is anything new to the age of social media, or that social media has rewired us to think this way, but it’s a bad mode of relations with others that, at the very least, isn’t getting any better.

All of this may be saying nothing more than we simply need to find the right kinds of connection – the rich, fulfilling and meaningful kind; even if this might not be readily available in the online world, we can act right there and elsewhere. Empathise instead of judge; find in the Otherness of other people a core of being which is not yours interfere with, merely recognize. Toxic communalism is a tendency in exactly the opposite direction. But this brings me precisely to my point; is the duty to escape such forms of connection not rooted in our ability to eschew connection – to be satisfied with being alone if nothing better is on offer?

This is how I’ve come to define The Christopher Knight Problem. Isolation, autonomy, individualism – however we choose to categorise it – leads to loneliness which leads to the most debilitating forms of communitarianism. But if we eliminate the middle term, we presumably break the chain, so we simply must encourage in ourselves a tolerance for loneliness. We’ll likely never reach Knight’s levels of immunity, but is the solution to the problems of liberal individualism necessarily to run towards the opposite direction? What if the solution to the current political double-bind is for everyone to simply to find better ways of being alone?

I’m referring to this as a “problem” rather than a “solution” because I don’t seriously think anyone will believe the process for democratic renewal runs through increased comfort with alienation. But political feelings and impulses cannot be entirely divorced from the more everyday impulses and actions we conduct, and I think we may need to get beyond the idea that the cure for everything is simply to form better connections – or rather, the connections others think we should form. The left and right want to fix loneliness by steering us towards communities and identities of different kinds, and, so long as one finds something positive there, I can’t really fault this solution. But it may be just as prudent to find ways to be more accepting of the loneliness within us – and others – and to be better satisfied with being, at least on occasion, both silent and invisible. (There are many times where being silent and invisible would be the worst possible thing to do, naturally. I’m not advocating for total political quietism here.) I’m not sure that Francis Fukuyama is entirely right that the internet is the source of our current dysfunction (it seems to me neoliberal politics and economics have played a much more significant role than Fukuyama’s willing to admit) but there’s been a destructive decay in our ability to be rooted in a self which simply doesn’t need the engagement of others – and the internet has been a significant vector for that.

Total autonomy, of course, is a complete impossibility. Even Knight was parasitic; he stole from the surrounding cabins to sustain his existence (he was eventually caught because he broke into a nearby camp for supplies). We were all raised by other humans and thus are built out of the impressions and judgments of others. Our daily life consists in benefiting from the efforts of others, but even if we abandoned those, and went somewhere to live in total self-reliance, which, again, not even Knight could manage, we’d still be beholden in some very real sense to what other people have done for us.

Here’s the danger: if total individualism is impossible, total communalism may not be. The Cold War dystopias, like *1984 *and Zamyatin’s We, provided us with pictures of human existences which had become completely subverted to the community. We can never get to the point where we purge the influence of other people from our minds, but we may be able to get to the point where that influence consumes us totally. Without advocating for such nonsensical fears that free healthcare and restrictions on assault rifles are direct manifestations of communism, it’s reasonable for us to be slightly more worried about the communal than the individual impulse, since the former has the ability to be totalizing in the way the latter does not.

Liberal dialectic has a history of incubating toxic communalism as its antithesis. John Milton thought free speech should be denied to Catholics and became a censor for the Commonwealth government. Mill thought liberty should be denied to the “barbarians” who could not handle such responsibility – people like the Indians it was his responsibility to manage as an Examiner for the East India Company. I don’t think we are safe just attributing this and other such failings to the prejudices of individual thinkers; the fear of autonomy is real, and can be mitigated if we continue to refer to ourselves as members of a group which has definable privileges over others. Loneliness, liberal autonomy, and the alienations of life inherent in living in a capitalist economy are interlocked components not easily decoupled, and in attempting to do so we often end up in places worse than where we began. In the aftermath of the current crisis – assuming we survive it – the solutions we look for must not be mere matters of policy. Perhaps a change of living ought to be at hand, and we ought to look at the paths we tend to build from autonomous individuals to communities, and how we can ensure these paths don’t end up in the muck.

None of this is not to say that toxic individualism doesn’t exist, or that it doesn’t have its own very prominent modes of representation in our current public discourse. Psychopathic narcissism is hardly without its political dangers. But, outside of the regrettable occasions when such a narcissist attains real power, the more everyday jerks are probably a danger only the people who know them directly; by nature, they cannot form a mass movement. But if you could combine the absolute worst elements of individualism and collectivism – somehow convince the incurably selfish to agitate against the very core of individualist autonomy – then, you’d really be onto something. The motto of MAGA might as well be “I can do whatever I want, you will do exactly what I tell you to.” The movement idolizes those like Elon Musk and Donald Trump whose wealth and the prostration of the American legal system have given them near complete freedom from responsibility and the consequences of their actions. Trump may ape the authoritarians of the past by occasionally referring to himself as the avatar some greater unifying force, like God and Country, but most often he appears patently as precisely what he is: in it for himself. At the same time, MAGA understands itself as an in-group to which the actions of all out-groups must answer, usually under the pretense of some ludicrous exigence such as “protecting the children.” Want to have a drag show at your local library, where sexual education books are available to the teens who might need them? You may not. Want to exercise your Constitutional rights to tell an ICE officer to fuck off or dress up in an inflatable penis costume at a No Kings rally? You’ll be arrested. The ascendence of a libertarianism that is somehow perfectly comfortable with authoritarianism (those of us who are not John Galt are bound to do what he wants us to in order for him to achieve great things, after all) and a theocratic dominionism that emphasizes the right, even the duty, to be selfish, have congealed into something that makes me wonder if the problem lies, not just with these awful manifestations of them, but in the very essence of our political bifurcations.

It’s quite possible I’m somewhat romanticising and idealising Knight, which are terrible things to do to another human being. Knight is, for the record, still alive and, from what I can tell, living in Maine, and I have no idea what, if any, his political opinions are, or how or if he votes. I do know that I have envisioned him on a summer night, floating face up in the pond near his camp, looking at the great upturned basin filled with stars above him and feeling like the only conscious being in the world. I’ve experienced such moments on occasion, and they are filled with ecstatic joy and, soon after, creeping horror. I need others to exist, and yet I often find the consequences of their existence exhausting. Total isolation is not an option, but the modes of our finding our way into the lives of others are due, I think, for a little re-examination.

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