Loneliness

A Meditation on a Book by Clark E. Moustakas

“Let there be loneliness, for where there is loneliness, there is also love, and where there is suffering, there is also joy.” – Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness

As regular readers of this column may know, I like to begin each edition with a story from my life that I hope encapsulates the theme of the book I am featuring. When I started thinking about writing a column on loneliness, I’d sit down in my reading chair at home to quiet my mind or I’d go for a walk in my pleasant neighborhood amidst the fresh spring air and budding trees and search my memory for times when I felt lonely. As I thought back through my life in search of times of loneliness, I found that I either had none or that I had many. That is, it seems that either I’ve never been lonely, or I’ve been lonely most of my life and, like a fish in water, never really knew it because I had nothing else with which to compare it.

I do know that I’ve never felt lonely when I’ve been alone at my house or in some natural setting, such as a beach, or when I’ve gone on solitary retreats to a remote Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, or when I’d spent a month holed up in a ramshackle, off-the grid cabin on the rugged and gloriously desolate northern coast of Maine, far from the madding crowd. If pressed to recall times when I may have felt lonelier than others, it would have to be when I’ve been among other people—eating alone in boisterous restaurants, sitting in a crowded park, even walking down the sidewalks of New York City. So, when the evil ones rolled out the COVID-19 psyop with the lockdowns that were intended to isolate and atomize each of us into individual silos of lonely self-abnegation, thinking we’d eventually hate ourselves enough to give up our individual sovereignty and well-being, I never felt compelled to comply with the jab mandates that followed so I could return to socializing again.

I enjoy my own company or the company of my girlfriend or of a few close friends more than large gatherings of any sort. I’ve always felt this way. The smaller the group the better; and even those occasions are quite rare for me. All during the most rabid phases of the COVID-19 psyop throughout 2020 and 2021, I never felt that I had to trade in my individual autonomy and jump on the jabfest bandwagon to feel a part of any cause or group that was more valuable and more important than what I already had—and what I’ve always had as long as I can remember: a sense of self-possession.

At the time when the government was trying to ban any sort of socializing, I met some new, lovely, like-minded friends, and we got together regularly at our homes—unflappable, unafraid, unjabbed. Living our lives. But not according to the “new normal,” that charade of social distancing that was trotted out to “stop the spread” but was actually just one more nail in the coffin of civilization. Not that. But the old normal. And not one of us ever got sick with what was supposedly going around like wildfire and killing scores of victims all around the world. I knew it was a lie and so did the rest of us. As for myself, no one was going to be able to push me around or twist my arm or hold out some paltry reward like a carrot on a stick for me to chase—such as free doughnuts—to give me something I never wanted in the first place, then or ever.

On top of that, I soon figured out what was really going on and it had nothing to do with a public health crisis. It was a military operation designed to control us. I smelled it like you can smell the rain before the storm. I’d once lived in China and twice visited the Soviet Union. I learned from firsthand experience something about how totalitarian governments operate. So perhaps I’d had a kind of head start in putting together what would turn out to be millions of pieces of this multi-dimensional puzzle—a puzzle whose purpose was to bamboozle and terrorize the credulous masses. What I saw in China and the U.S.S.R. I saw happening here in America in the March 2020 assault on our sacrosanct ways of life, saw the actual threat to our democracy—not the fake threat of the populist movement ballyhooed by the lamestream media the past several years—unfolding before my eyes. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And as I tried to warn others, I saw my social circle, already small, shrink.

In just a few lines from her hefty 1948 tome, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt highlights the essence of what I saw happening with the COVID-19 psyop:

“Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

This awareness has not made my life any easier from the spring of 2020 and right up to the present. I felt—and still feel—the pain of being shunned by many friends who’d allowed themselves to get caught up in the web of lies. I know others who, through their comments here on Substack or via personal emails, since I began writing about the COVID-19 psyop in the fall of 2021, were also shunned by others for not submitting to the diktats of the powers-that-should-not-be. What’s been particularly painful for them to experience—and for me to read about—is the shattering of familial bonds, which was also intended by the evil ones as a key component in their takedown of our culture. For instance, some of those who’ve contacted me are older parents who reluctantly submitted to the trickster jab crusade only because their children would not let them visit their grandchildren without their first getting inoculated. I find such ignorant cruelty utterly unfathomable.

While billions not only submitted to these heinous demands, for whatever their reasons, there are others who fully backed them. Many of us witnessed with helpless despair in our hearts people and organizations of considerable influence whip up angry, unhinged mobs coalescing around the jabfest at every turn—on television news, in newspapers, on TV talk shows, in governments at every level, and among the leaders of our nation’s corporations, schools, hospitals, and nonprofit organizations. You name it, the lies were everywhere. And hundreds of millions of people fell for them. By now, we’ve all heard the tired excuse: We didn’t know. I knew. As did so many others. Our pleas for sobriety fell on deaf ears just as they would a raging alcoholic deep in his cups.

What was driving this insanity? I think it was more than merely the fear of getting sick and dying. Stella Morabito, in a 2022 book of hers that I read around this time last year, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide and Conquer, has this to say:

“It comes from a sense of alienation within the psyche of the individual who wants desperately to be a part of something. He wants to be part of an in-group, often associated with the slogan of being ‘on the right side of history,’ the group that will cure the supposed malady of social injustice. It’s a combination of alienation and the yearning to belong that is the true malady that sparks mob members into action.”

That’s what I think drove the madness, or at the very least fanned its flames.

Back in 1964, when I was 11 years old and Barbra Streisand crooned in the popular song “People” that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” I remember thinking, no, they aren’t. Maybe the song was trying to sell something, to conjure up some beatific vision of dependency, allowing others to define us and bestow value to the self. Although I did not know that then, I was still having none of it. Or maybe my pre-pubescent, developing brain had indeed picked up what I now understand to be the song’s schmaltzy, sentimental, subliminal messaging: Those who don’t need people are the unluckiest people in the world and something must definitely be wrong with you.

Years later, I read Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden. It was there that I found something that did resonate with my soul. He writes, “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.” And I thought, yes, that’s it. These are the luckiest people in the world. And I’m happy that I can count myself among them. I’m not boasting. I’m not flattering myself. It’s merely the cloth out of which I am cut. Yet, I believe we can all learn how to savor solitude and find out why it’s important to deal with loneliness in a healthy manner.

Solitude and the sort of self-reliance and independent thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson writes about in his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance,” nurture one another. Emerson writes:

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Co-conspirators in breaking free from the suffocating Victorian conformity of their day, Thoreau and Emerson were chums. Just shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, Thoreau built himself a hut on the north shore of Walden Pond, a small (64.5 acres) and in a surprisingly deep (102 feet at its deepest) glacial “kettle hole” two miles south of Concord, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1845 on land that Emerson owned. Thoreau stayed there for two years. Emerson even paid Thoreau a visit from time to time. In the summer of 1847, a little more than two years after Thoreau first settled in at Walden Pond, Emerson invited him to stay with his wife and children, while Emerson himself went to Europe. Thoreau accepted the offer. In September 1847, he left his cabin and never returned. But he paid homage to his experience in a little gem of a book, which was published in 1854, whose popularity remains to this day. (Walden Pond is now a protected part of the Walden Pond State Reservation. There is a replica of Thoreau's cabin on the grounds. The original site of the cabin is marked by a pile of stones.)

Looking back through the years, I wonder if I came into the world unknowingly prepared for the COVID-19 psyop, as well as the myriad of social, political, media, military, and geoengineering ploys and exercises behind the structural decimation of Western civilization leading up to it, some of which I was aware of as they were happening, others of which I’ve only more recently learned about in hindsight, and some of which I’m still discovering. It’s not been a sudden baptism by fire for me; it’s been more like a slow burn, clearing away all the distractions that grow like weeds and have hidden the truth from all of us. No matter when or how these revelations have found me—or I have found them—in a mutual embrace, what I’ve seen I can no longer not see nor deny the unsettling conclusion that the material world is run by psychopaths.

Since one of the primary objectives of the COVID-19 psyop was to secure once and for all the isolation and atomization of each of us in order to compel us to submit to its evil diktats—the lockdowns, the closures, the masking, the jab mandates—to “stop the spread” so we could get back the life they took away from us, I was preternaturally immune to the real virus that was going around. And that virus is the fear of loneliness.

***

Loneliness, by Clark E. Moustakas, is a small book on a big subject published in 1961. Much has been written about loneliness over the years, especially in the past 70 years as the post-war, Western world entered a phase of rapid modernization and, some would say, alienation. These days, the topic of loneliness is making headlines like never before in our hyper-connected world that has, ironically—and distressingly—only contributed to the problem of loneliness. Even the U.S. Surgeon General went so far as to issue in 2023 a report called “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.” The report states:

“Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity. And the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished.”

All of this attention bemoans the plight of the lonely in a post-scamdemic world, while overlooking, of course, the fact that governments here in America and around the world, along with their heinous handmaidens in the legacy mass media, fomented this dire situation by spreading rampant, unfounded fear of some monstrous contagion that could only be stopped by having us stay apart from one another.

Social media has contributed to the problem of loneliness because too many of our interactions are happening virtually, not face-to-face—which is something we all inherently crave (some more than others, true), and is an inexorable foundation of universal human contentment. Additionally, the prevalence of social media in our lives has exacerbated the tendencies of many of us to seek the acceptance and approval of others, which never fully measures up to the unrealistic level of acceptance and approval we desire. Too many lonely, vulnerable souls, particularly the young with their burgeoning, fragile egos, seek out this acceptance and approval rather than focusing on the inviolable fortress of resilient self-confidence and self-respect. It’s there, forged from within often while coping with loneliness, that we find our human star, the cynosure, of the true self.

Of the many books I could have chosen to write about on the subject of loneliness, I chose Moustakas’s book for two key reasons. First, it is not a sociological or statistical study of our predicament. Rather, it focuses on personal experience—both the author’s and that of many others. Second, out of his explorations, he discovered the true source of loneliness, a conclusion with which I agree.

Loneliness, he found, is not the problem. Rather, it’s the fear of loneliness. It’s what we do to avoid feeling lonely that haunts us—constantly getting together with others; talking on the phone; compulsive shopping; endlessly scrolling Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to see who’s doing what; drinking and drugging ourselves into oblivion. And the more we attempt to outrun our loneliness, the larger it looms in our lives and the more threatening it becomes to our sanity.

In his book, Moustakas writes forcefully about the scourge of our fear of loneliness, which leads to what he calls “loneliness anxiety.” He writes:

“Much of the loneliness anxiety in our society is not the psychiatric loneliness which results from rejection or abandonment in childhood. It is possible to live too much in the world, to try to escape loneliness by constant talk, by surrounding one’s self with others, by modeling one’s life from people in authority or with high status…. Many of these individuals love truth, yet their lives are predicated on appearances and false ties; they do not concentrate their energies enough to be able to become in fact what are in inspiration…. They often go to great lengths to escape or overcome the fear of loneliness, to avoid any direct or genuine facing of their own inner experience. What is it that drives man to surround himself with the same external double-talk, the same surface interests and activities during his evenings at home as during his days at work? It is the terror of loneliness, not loneliness itself but loneliness anxiety, the fear of being left alone, of being left out…. The escape from loneliness is actually an escape from facing the fear of loneliness.”

How can we be alone without feeling lonely? Moustakas clearly states his premise in the opening lines of his book:

“The basic message in this book is that loneliness is a condition of human life, an experience of being human which enables the individual to sustain, extend, and deepen his humanity. Man is ultimately and forever lonely whether his loneliness is the exquisite pain of the individual living in isolation or illness, the sense of absence cause by a loved one’s death, or the piercing joy experienced in triumphant creation. I believe it is necessary for every person to recognize his loneliness, to become intensely aware that, ultimately, in every fibre [sic] of his being, man is alone—terribly, utterly alone. Efforts to overcome or escape the existential experience of loneliness can result only in self-alienation. When man is removed from a fundamental truth of life, when he successfully evades and denies the terrible loneliness of individual existence, he shuts himself off from one significant avenue of his own self-growth.”

Moustakas is saying that we should not flee or fear loneliness; rather, we should sit with it to become more attuned to not only the depths of ourselves but also to the depths of others. To embrace being alone. The only way out of our loneliness is in. As the poet Marianne Moore once wrote: “The cure for loneliness is solitude.”

***

Solitude is not the same as loneliness. In solitude we are at home with ourselves and not longing for the company of others—in person or online through social media outlets. One of the best descriptions I’ve read contrasting solitude and loneliness comes from the renowned 20th-century German theologian, Paul Tillich. He writes in his 1963 book, The Eternal Now:

“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.”

Loneliness is a consequence not only of finding ourselves alone; loneliness infiltrates our being at a deeper level, creating a hole that can be hard to dig ourselves out of because we ourselves allow it to happen. Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, observes:

“Solitude can become loneliness; this happens when all by myself I am deserted by my own self.

“What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude…. In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time.”

By allowing ourselves to feel lonely we learn how be alone. Stick with it long enough and we discover within ourselves Tillich’s “glory of being alone.” I’m convinced this would solve many of our national troubles and cure so many of our individual psychological ailments. Those who have tread this road before have left in writing lessons for us to learn and take to heart. The French philosopher, Blase Pascal (1623-1662), sums up this wisdom in his book, Pensées, where he writes that “the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

Sitting alone in a room is not only conducive to solving humanity’s problems. Moustakas writes of the necessity of loneliness to lead an enriched life. Indeed, the goal of being alone and enduring our loneliness is not to become a misanthrope or a hermit. The point is to endure our lonely times to deepen our connection to ourselves and to others so we can more fully contribute to the common weal. Moustakas writes:

“Loneliness enables one to return to a life with others with renewed hope and vitality, with a fuller dedication, with a deeper desire to come to a healthy resolution of problems and issues involving others, with possibility and hope for a rich, true life with others.

“Loneliness keeps open the doors to an expanding life. In utter loneliness, one can find answers to living, one can find new values to live by, one can see a new path or direction. Something totally new is revealed….

“At first, the experience of loneliness may be frightening, even terrifying, but as one submits to the pain and suffering and solitude, one actually reaches himself, listens to the inner voice and experiences a strange new confidence. The individual is restored to himself and life again becomes meaningful and worthwhile.”

***

In the first chapter of his book, Moustakas shares what led him to what he came to believe was the loneliest time in his life. It happened when he and his wife were faced with a life-and-death decision about their five-year-old daughter. She had been diagnosed with a “significant perforation and enlargement of her heart,” he writes. The doctors recommended surgery. If he agreed to the surgery, she might not survive the operation. If he decided against it, she might die young. He writes:

“Visions of my daughter were constantly before me. I roamed the streets at night searching for some means, some resource in the universe which would guide me to take the right step. It was during these desperate days and nights that I first began to think seriously of the inevitable loneliness of life. I was overcome with the pain of having to make a decision, as a parent, which had potentially devastating consequences either way…. This awful feeling, this overwhelming sense of responsibility, I could not share with anyone. I felt utterly alone, entirely lost, and frightened; my existence was absorbed in this crisis. No one fully understood my terror or how this terror gave impetus to deep feelings of loneliness and isolation which had lain dormant within me. There at the center of my being, loneliness aroused to a self-awareness I had never known before.”

Those of us who refused to be coerced into getting the jabs were wide awake perhaps as never before to the terror of being rejected by compliant family members and colleagues and friends, and challenged as never before to stand our ground, all of which gave impetus to each our own deep fears of becoming lonely. We knew what we were giving up. Yet, we also knew what we were maintaining and even achieving.

We were maintaining, as best we could, our physical well-being and individual sovereignty over and against the individual and social engineering schemes set forth by an elite cabal that thinks of us as farm animals. We were achieving a clearer vision of the true nature of reality of life on earth, as well as of our ideals of how we want to live and of who we truly are. And it has not been an easy journey.

Moustakas writes:

“To see is to be lonely—to hear, feel, touch—every vital, solitary experience of the senses is a lonely one. Anyone who senses with a wide range of delicate feelings and meanings experiences loneliness. To be open to life in an authentic sense is to be lonely, for in such openness one hears and feels and senses beyond the ordinary. Through loneliness we are refined and sensitized and open to life’s lofty ideals and influences. We are enabled to grow in awareness, in understanding, in aesthetic capabilities, in human relations….

“In the dark, despairing hours, sometimes only through loneliness can the individual bear to return to confront the ugly faces and listen to criticism, and experience hurts inflicted by those one loves most….

“The lonely sufferer helps himself to a fuller realization of self, not by reducing his sense of pain and isolation, but by bringing its full extent and magnitude to consciousness. Great loneliness and suffering are met creatively, as potential growth experiences, only by surrendering to them, fully and completely. Salvation, self-growth, lies in giving full assent to loneliness and suffering, accepting what is, not fighting or resisting, not rationalizing or appealing to external helps, not demanding to know why one has been singled out for so much pain, but submitting one’s self to the experience of total surrender. Whoever is able to bear loneliness grows to the stature of his experience.”

***

Throughout the COVID-19 psyop many of us were challenged by relentless baiting, ridicule, threats, ostracizing, and gaslighting in the battle to remain true to ourselves—and true to our God. I often called to mind two timeless examples of one man’s struggle through his loneliest hours. Both of them are about Jesus, which we can read about in the gospels.

The first example is about Jesus being alone in the Judean Desert for 40 days and 40 nights, as it appears in the Book of Matthew 4:1-11:

4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. 3 The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written,

‘One does not live by bread alone,

but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, 6 saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written,

‘He will command his angels concerning you,’

and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,

so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”

7 Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; 9 and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,

‘Worship the Lord your God,

and serve only him.’”

11 Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

Here, we see Jesus confronting the devil and his earthly temptations, as if any of that would satisfy him and make him a happy man. No, even at the point of starvation, Jesus fought the devil with indefatigable wit and sound wisdom that could not be denied. And then the angels came to help him.

I remember the devil’s temptation offered by New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul, telling a group of apostate Christians who submitted to the lies and got the jabs that God wants us to get vaccinated. And that she wants us to be her “apostles” to encourage others to get vaccinated so we can “come back to normal.” The vaccine “is from God to us,” she said. “There are people out there who aren’t listening to God and what God wants,” she said.

These are her words, although they might have come from the fetid mouth of the devil himself. As I rewatched the video of this witch giving her speech I kept wishing someone had tossed a bucket of cold water on her to see if she’d melt into a shrinking plume of smoke. Rarely—if ever—have I heard such depraved, divisive vitriol spewed in the name of God. Those people who weren’t listening, as Hochul smugly put it when she gave this talk in September of 2021, were myself and many others who, because we were listening to God, knew what God wanted us to do and not what a mere mortal—and an evil mortal at that—told us God wanted us to do.

After Jesus’ one-on-one confrontation with the devil, he begins his public ministry with the Sermon on the Mount. And, so it is with us. We are not many. But we are mighty. Those of us who stood our ground and refused to subject ourselves to be guinea pigs and allow an experimental so-called medical product to be injected into us are the ones God has called to honor our divinity and be an example for others to do the same. This has been our ministry. And we are blessed even as the mournful, the hungry, and the persecuted in Jesus’ time were blessed. Even if we only maintain our sovereignty quietly and in our hearts. It’s enough for each of us to know that God knows we have struggled against the merciless mob to preserve our priceless, sacred connection to the boundlessness of creation itself, from whence we came and to which our souls—if untainted by the dark machinations of man calculated to entrap us in a soulless netherworld—are bound to return.

The other example I want to mention happens when we find Jesus alone (again) in the Garden of Gethsemane, as told in the Book of Matthew 26:36-46:

36 Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” 37 He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and agitated. 38 Then he said to them, “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.” 39 And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.” 40 Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, “So, could you not stay awake with me one hour? 41 Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” 42 Again he went away for the second time and prayed, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.” 43 Again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. 44 So leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words. 45 Then he came to the disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. 46 Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”

Here, Jesus is nearing the end of his ministry and he finds himself alone just as he was at the beginning. In his solitary if not lonely encounter with the devil, he shows us how to live. Now, encountering God, he shows us how to die. This decision is clearly the most important decision Jesus has had to face during his three years of ministry. He can run away. He can give up his cause. He can return to being a carpenter. Abandoned by his apostles, here alone in the garden, Jesus communes directly with God and realizes he was put on earth for one reason: to fearlessly do what God has sent him to do. And that is to offer himself up as a sacrifice for all the sins and sinners of the world, to put a stop to the carnage we inflict upon each other, and to show us the way to the still waters of eternal life from whence we came.

Jesus set the ultimate example for all those who, over the ensuing centuries, would die at the hands of their persecutors rather than renounce their faith. Among Jesus’ 11 remaining apostles (after Judas hanged himself because of the guilt he felt for betraying his teacher), only one—John—who died on the Greek Island of Patmos where he’d been exiled, is thought to have died a natural death. All the others were crucified, beheaded, stoned, stabbed to death, or burned alive, and all for refusing to abandon their faith. The catalog of horrors faced by devout Christians all over the world continues to this day.

***

In our own loneliest hours, we too are confronted with grave decisions. Decisions that affect not only our own earthly existence but also the existence of others, like the decision Moustakas had to make about his daughter. We are also confronted with having to make spiritual decisions about who we are, about what sort of example we want to be for others, about the purpose of our lives, and, most of all, about what God wants from us—as we read here about Jesus—no matter what price we have to pay, no matter how heavy and painful the cross is that we to have to bear and be crucified upon. In reading about the life of Jesus in the gospels we see in him—and through him, ourselves—drawn toward, if not returning to, the quintessential meaning of life and the source of our being. The connection to which is our key to life and the loss of which is our sentence to death—spiritually if not physically.

***

“The great trauma of American culture is whether to conform or to go it alone.”

So begins Richard Sennet in his introduction to the 2020 reprint of the David Riesman’s classic 1961 study of loneliness, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Further, Sennet writes, our individual capacity to cope with solitude and loneliness is determined in part by our inherent psychological makeup and social character. Riesman famously spoke of people as either being “inner-directed” or “other-directed.” Sennett explains:

“An inner-directed person is guided by an ‘inner gyroscope,’ by firm values installed by his or her elders which he or she pursues throughout life; whereas an other-directed person is guided by ‘social radar’—that is, by peer pressure, ‘sensitized to the expectations and preferences of others.’ However, there is no one in the control tower saying firmly what is true or false, good or bad. Such firm guidance belongs in the realm of inner direction.”

Riesman himself proposes that over time we have become more and more prone to being other-directed rather than inner-directed. In fact, this seismic shift has been long in the making and he elucidates his claim by tracing the arc of human development in terms of two main revolutions. He writes:

“The first of these revolutions has in the past four hundred years cut us off pretty decisively from the family- and clan-oriented traditional ways of life on which mankind has existed throughout most of history; this revolution includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and the political revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. This revolution is, of course, still in process, but in the most advanced countries of the world, and particularly America, it is giving way to another sort of revolution—whole range of social developments associated with a shift from an age of production to an age of consumption.”

The second revolution, the transition from an age of production to an age of consumption, which was just beginning when Riesman published his book in 1961 has, over the past 65 years, become fully established. And, as a result, we have moved from being an inner-directed society into a society that relies on other-direction. It would appear that consumption and conformity are intricately linked. In the inner-directed world we want what we want. In the other-directed world we want what others want. He writes: “It is a craving for the satisfactions others appear to attain, an objectless craving.”

Over the past few decades, many of us have had our individuality trained out of ourselves and, as Riesman observes, this process has turned adults into children. Consider how long this conditioning has been going on and it’s little wonder that we’ve found ourselves in the mess we’re in. Many of us have experienced ourselves as children—and have witnessed the experiences of our children—being drawn into the relentless television and, now, social media advertising and propaganda and brainwashing. Gone are the days when one of the major differences between a child and an adult was one’s ability to think critically. Even back in 1961, Riesman laments: “Today there is no fast line that separates these consumption patterns of the adult world from those of the child, except for the objects of consumption themselves.”

To me, it is not much a stretch of the imagination to conclude that the entire COVID-19 pandemonium and jab crusade were nothing other than a mass advertising campaign to make us want what others want, to pressure us into becoming childish consumers of a so-called medical product that never had any real value in light of what it had been touted to do—keep us, and others, from getting sick. It did—and does—neither. It did—and does—the exact opposite. I cannot think of a more clever yet diabolical bait-and-switch scheme that has ever been played upon humanity on such a massively destructive scale.

***

Clark E. Moustakas was born May 26, 1923. He was an American psychologist and was one of the leading experts on humanistic psychology, a movement he cofounded in the late 1950s with other pioneers in American psychology, including Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.

Humanistic psychology is an approach that focuses on individual potential and personal growth. It emphasizes free will, self-actualization, and the importance of a supportive environment for psychological well-being. This movement, recognized as the “third force” in psychology after psychoanalysis and behaviorism, had a significant impact in the 1960s and 1970s.

Having received his Ed.D., Ph.D. in Educational and Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, he went on to become a cofounder and president of the Michigan School of Psychology, where he focused on the integration of philosophy, research, and psychology in the education and training of humanistic clinical psychologists.

He wrote 40 books and numerous articles on psychology, philosophy, education, and human science research. In addition to Loneliness, his books include: The Self; Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology, and Applications; Creativity and Love: Awakening Meanings in Life; Phenomenological Research Methods; Existential Psychotherapy and The Interpretation of Dreams; Being-In, Being-For, Being-With; and Relationship Play Therapy.

In the obituary of Moustakas on the National Library of Medicine website we read:

“He embraced solitude as a time of reflection and did not enjoy notoriety. While he inhabited many roles—professor, scholar, clinician, and author—engagement with others in the moment was always the most essential element in his life. He was a gentle man, full of energy and spirit, exuding warmth and focused attention. In his company, one was immediately struck by his earnestness and caring. People from all over the world respected his expertise and sought his advice.”

A former student wrote:

“If one were to attempt to describe Clark Moustakas, one would utilize words that illustrate a phenomenon. He was a man of polarities. He was at once relaxed and energetic, still, yet intense activity waited to be summoned. Exceptionally academic yet delightfully playful. Composed, even-tempered, but with emotions so accessible that his face easily darkened, and his eyes would fill with tears when experiencing distress. In his company, one had the impression of time standing still, moving at top speed, in slow motion, or something in between. His presence was profound and inspiring.”

Moustakas died October 10, 2012 at his home in Farmington Hills, Michigan, at the age of 89.

In Loneliness, Moustakas writes:

“It takes creative courage to accept the inevitable, existential loneliness of life, to face one’s essential loneliness openly and honestly. It requires inner fortitude to not be afraid or overwhelmed with the fear of being and the fear of being alone.”

---

Note to Readers

I’m beginning to write a book on solitude and loneliness. Tentatively titled A Field Guide to Solitude, it is a book about how to be alone without feeling lonely.

Never before in the history of the world have we been more connected to one another. Yet, never before in the history of the world have so many of us felt so lonely. If this was true before the so-called pandemic, it is even more true now, especially for those of us who saw through the lies and fear-mongering and refused to be injected with an experimental so-called medical product and bristled at the mandates, and as a result lost much of our community of friends and colleagues and family members to one of the darkest, most vile, most widespread scourges in human history.

If this happened to you, rest assured you are in good company. It happened to millions of us, including myself. I often think, and sometimes still get angry about, how it didn’t have to be this way if only people had kept their wits about them. And turned off their televisions. But that’s not what happened and here we are in a world traumatized and torn asunder.

I’m looking for people who are willing to share their experiences of what happened to them and how they coped after being shunned by friends, family members, work colleagues, and others as you held your ground and refused to be jabbed by what was—and still is—being touted as a vaccine against COVID-19. Were you fired from your job for refusing the jab? If so, what did you do? We’re you unable to visit your children or grandchildren or parents or grandparents or siblings on account of the choices you made? What were some of the things people said to you? What did you say to them? And if you did get jabbed against your will or better judgment, did you suffer any side effects? If so, what were (are) they?

Please email me: jimkullander@gmail.com

If I use all or part of what you send me, I will get back in touch with you. I can either use your real name or make something up to protect your identity. Take your time; this is going to be a long-term project that I’ll be working on over the next several months.

Thank you so much.

Selected Bibliography

Scripture quotations unless otherwise noted are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible. Meeks, Wayne A., et al. eds. The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. New York, New York. HarperCollins, Publishers, Inc. 1993.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited and with an Introduction by Brooks Atkinson. New York, N.Y. Random House, Inc. 1940.

Morabito, Stella. The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer. New York, N.Y. Bombardier Books, 2022.

Moustakas, Clark E. Loneliness. New York, N.Y. Prentice Hall Press, 1961, 1989.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated and with an Introduction by A.J. Krailsheimer. London. Penguin Books, 1966, 1995.

Riesman, David; Glazer, Nathan; Denney, Reuel. With an Introduction by Richard Sennett. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven, Conn. Yale University Press, 2020. First abridged edition 1961.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. With an Introduction by Kristen Case. New York, N.Y. Penguin Books, 2017.

Don’t want to subscribe? You can leave a one-time tip for as little as $5. Every little bit helps me pay the bills so I can continue to offer you thoughtful insights into today’s world combined with the written wisdom of those who have come before us and who have helped guide us on our search for truth, freedom, and beauty. I would love to hear from you. Feel free to email me at jimkullander@gmail.com