Apparently, it’s “Loneliness Awareness Week,” thanks to a global campaign emanating from the United Kingdom.
On the surface, the idea of a “Loneliness Awareness Week” sounds as cozy as the founding organization’s name, Marmalade Trust. That group self-identifies as a “charity,” but it acts more like a nongovernmental organization (NGO) devoted to government and globalist involvement in shaping our social connections.
Marmalade Trust’s home page proudly announces that its mission to fight loneliness is “joined by organisations globally,” including 10 Downing Street, the U.K.’s National Health Service, the BBC, The Guardian, Public Health England, and various other globalist and media outlets. On another page, it boasts that Loneliness Awareness Week has had the involvement of “the Royal Family, the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London, NHS trusts, and all government departments. We have even had a special Royal Mail postage stamp!” The London transit authority is also partnering with the campaign by encouraging people to chat with strangers on public transit, seemingly to help overcome the loneliness epidemic.
Other such organizations go by names like Camerados and Strangers in the City. The lure of these groups is completely understandable given the brokenness and despair all around us.
But when the government gets into the act of “helping” us in our quest for a social life, there’s much room for skepticism. Government policies have long played a huge role in causing social isolation. Consider how policies that promote family breakdown, welfare dependency, urban blight, homelessness, deaths of despair, violent street crime, abortion, and the noxious effects of social media weaken human bonds.
Marmalade Trust says its global campaign is all about reaching out, having conversations, and building more social connections. That’s all very nice when people do it organically. But in a somewhat buried document that potential partners are invited to access via a post on X, the organization admits to being inherently political. For example, it explains on page four of that partnership guide that it hopes to bring “people together from businesses, community groups, and the government to take action,” and to shape the public understanding of loneliness by “shifting it from a personal problem to a political priority.”
On page six of that same “partnership pack,” you can read how working with Marmalade Trust in its loneliness awareness campaign helps support corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards, as well as “social value and inclusion” goals (i.e., diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI). It adds up to another woke attempt to control others’ lives in the name of helping them.
Other organizations around the world have glommed onto the campaign, claiming to fight loneliness. In Washington, D.C., for example, there is the lobbying group Foundation for Social Connection Action Network. Then there’s the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection (GILC). And, of course, the World Health Organization, which launched a Commission on Social Connection.
Exploitation for Political Agendas
So why would I give any publicity to a questionable campaign with not much of a social media following? Because any attempt to get the government involved in personal relationships is a dicey proposition. It’s too easy for governments to manipulate vulnerable people to push for collectivism, not true social connection. Even if local volunteers are sincere, they are easily hijacked by political actors.
Indeed, government and media agencies signing on to “Loneliness Awareness Week” have already done enormous damage to personal relationships, especially during the Covid era. They bullied and mandated people into injections, face masks, lockdowns, and the shunning of and snitching on anyone who didn’t comply.
It’s also laughable that the U.K. has a Ministry of Loneliness, given the country’s proclivity to jail people for expressing wrongthink, arrest them for silently praying, or handcuff a dying stabbing victim if the perpetrator falsely accuses him of racism. All of this suggests loneliness is actually enforced by the U.K. government.
The same goes for several other Western nations, including Canada, which has its own batch of organizations to “fight loneliness.” Canada doesn’t yet have a Ministry of Loneliness, but perhaps killing its lonely people under its “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) assisted suicide law is a perversely effective way of reducing Canadian loneliness.
These NGOs smell a bit like damage-control propaganda.
Weaponizing Loneliness
I started mulling over the loneliness issue a long time ago, well before I wrote my book The Weaponization of Loneliness. But what really caught my attention recently was how speciously political actors were using the loneliness epidemic to promote a collectivist agenda.
A case in point was the “loneliness advisory” that former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released during the Biden administration in 2023. The advisory is jam-packed with “solutions” that meddle in private life and thereby promote human atomization rather than ease it. For example, it calls for both the technology and health care sectors to track our social connections. It also advocates for systemic DEI and calls for building a federalized “social infrastructure” in the places people gather. On the heels of that advisory in 2023, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., sponsored a bill to create a “Social Connection Act” to do the same stuff.
All of this makes totalitarian sense. The whole point of the Covid-era crusade against so-called “disinformation” was to keep us from talking openly to one another. Censorship, surveillance, and tracking have always been the essence of social control. In none of these organizations will you find any admission of the government’s key role in promoting anti-family, anti-faith, and anti-speech policies that drive people into social isolation. But this shouldn’t surprise us. A recurring pattern of ruling elites is first to create the malady, then to offer a “cure.”
Astroturfed vs. Organic Solutions
Eminent sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote about the deep-seated tendency of governments to hijack the functions of the mediating institutions of family, faith, and community. When the government takes over those functions, we become powerless in the resulting isolation. Nisbet posed this rhetorical question: “What remains then, but to rescue the masses from their loneliness, their hopelessness, and despair, by leading them into the promised land of the absolute, redemptive State?” This should serve as a warning to us all.
So what’s the solution? Clearly, we need to try to rebuild a sense of community face-to-face. But it cannot be a government-approved astroturfed community. Of course, tech gurus think we just need more technology, such as screen time and robot companions, to ward off loneliness. Rather, we must build an organic sense of belonging in which people learn to care for their fellow man and mind their own business at the same time.
Building community must be done in the private sphere of life because that’s the only place where true social connections are built. That’s where intact families raise their children with a sense of virtue, institutions of faith give people a sense of order and purpose, and friends can confide in one another without meddlers eavesdropping. This private sphere cannot thrive when the government, in cahoots with supposed charities that claim to relieve loneliness, tracks our relationships.
We’re much better off building trusting relationships on our own in private life. Individuals who really care should focus locally and take initiative to offer companionship to isolated individuals without the heavy hand of Big Brother and his assistants. We should make a point of meeting our neighbors with goodwill and rejecting the pseudo-intimacy that our governments seem intent on foisting upon us.
