“A silent and dangerous epidemic”: Samantha Rose Hill on the Personal and Political Aspects of Loneliness

“We’re facing an existential crisis in our lives, and loneliness often appears when people are hungry for meaning. When people talk about loneliness, they’re often actually talking about social isolation. But they’re not the same thing, and I think this is kind of a dangerous way to understand loneliness.” Speaking on NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, Professor Hill drew on Hannah Arendt’s 1951 On the Origins of Totalitarianism to describe a form of “organized loneliness” that, today, we see “not in totalitarianism but in tyrannical thinking. We see it in the emergence of populism from the left and the right. And we see it in the Republican Party, which is comfortable rejecting the facts of science in the face of a deadly pandemic, and where the president of the United States is unable to accept the reality of electoral defeat.”

Post Date: 04-13-2021