The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer The first deep dive into how power elites weaponize the fear of loneliness to enforce social conformity and wage war on the private sphere of life...
Stella Morabito, author of The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer Do you keep your opinions to yourself because you’re afraid people will reject you? Do you sign on to a cause just because everyone around you acts like it’s the right thing to do?
Welcome to The Weaponization of Loneliness. Tyrants of all stripes want to tell you what to believe and how to live your life. They get away with it by using the most potent weapon at their disposal: your fear of ostracism. This book explains how dictators—from the French Revolution to the Communist Party of China to today’s globalists—aim to atomize us in order to control us. We fall for it because our need to connect with others and our fear of social rejection are so hardwired that they trigger our conformity impulse. These dynamics can even cause us to comply with evil orders. We all need a better understanding of how the merchants of loneliness—power elites in Big Tech, Big Media, Big Government, academia, Hollywood, and the corporate world— exploit our terror of social isolation. Their divide-and-conquer tactics include identity politics, political correctness, and mob agitation. Their media monopoly spawns the propaganda essential to demonization campaigns, censorship, cancel culture, snitch culture, struggle sessions, the criminalization of comedy, and the subversion of society’s most fundamental institutions. It all adds up to a machinery of loneliness. Ironically, people tend to comply with this machinery to avoid loneliness, but such compliance only isolates us further.
The Weaponization of Loneliness offers a message of hope. We can resist this psychological warfare if we have strong bonds in our families, faith communities, and friendships. Let’s resolve to talk to one another openly and often, especially about the consequences of giving in to social pressures and media hype. Indeed, totalitarians always seek to destroy private life because it is the very fount of freedom.
BIO: Stella Morabito has been a senior contributor to The Federalist since 2014, where she has published numerous articles that focus on the social fallout of propaganda, mob psychology, and the cult mindset. Her essays have appeared in various other publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Public Discourse, Townhall, and the Human Life Review. Stella served for a decade as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency where she focused on communist media, propaganda, and disinformation. She has a master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history from the University of Southern California.