Existential Loneliness and the Politics of Friendship

In 2023, Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, issued an advisory, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness,” which detailed a decline in social connection in U.S. society over the past 30 years, correlating the trend to rising rates of depression, anxiety, violence, and self-harm. Likewise, the incapacity to form meaningful connections and engage in collective, political action—existential loneliness—contributes to other social ills, including racism, sexism, and disregard for the environment. Western culture is on a historical trajectory towards loneliness, supported by technologies that provide a simulacrum of sociality, political ideologies that divorce us from a common experience of reality, and a capitalism that breeds rapacious consumption and competitiveness. While some theologians, economists, and political theorists describe existential loneliness as leading to a breakdown of democratic politics (e.g., Arendt, 1973; Connolly, 2008; Taylor, 2014; Stanley 2020), none have explored how loneliness is a common foundation for racism, sexism, and disregard for the environment. Without a clear understanding of how pervasive social ills like racism, sexism, and environmental indifference are symptoms of an underlying culture of loneliness, attempts to deal with these issues will miss the fundamental phenomenon that causes their persistence.

This paper explores the sources and consequences of existential loneliness in contemporary society, responding to the presidential theme of the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion on violence by showing loneliness as the common root of contemporary social, political, and environmental violence. This project addresses loneliness from the perspectives of philosophy and Christian theology to show that a politics of friendship—informed by Aristotle, Jacques Derrida, Pope Francis, and Friedrich Nietzsche—is a necessary foundation for a more just society. This research intervenes in the fields of social ethics and political theory by articulating paths of renewed encounter founded in agonistic pluralism and radical hospitality.

The experience of loneliness is a theme in modern philosophy and political theory, whereby political theorists have connected it to the loss of a thriving civil society and declining democratic values (Connolly, 2013; Mouffe, 2020; Stanley, 2022). As a result, existential loneliness has been described as a foundation for the emergence of authoritarian regimes during the last century (Arendt, 1973; Reich, 2022). Without invoking the rhetoric of loneliness, others have described related phenomena such as narcissism and economic competitiveness as components of a culture that rejects concern for other people and the natural environment (Berlant, 2022; Taylor, 2014). In a society where religion no longer provides a shared system of meaning and where social solidarity has withered, philosophers and economists have described problematic attempts to find meaning in the values of capitalism (Freidman, 2021; McCarraher, 2019; Tanner, 2019) and extreme political ideologies (Gorski & Perry, 2022; Stewart, 2022). My own work explores the technoscientific and capitalist supports of modern loneliness and proposes political friendship as a necessary foundation for social justice and environmental healing.

Works Cited

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Berlant, Lauren. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Duke University Press. Durham: 2022.

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Friedman, Benjamin. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Knopf. New York: 2021.

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McCarraher, Eugene. The Enchantments of Mammon. Harvard University Press. Cambridge: 2019.

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