Society of Strangers: Community and Meaning in an Age of Loneliness

Modern society, with its emphasis on individual liberty, is eroding the community and leaving people unable to find true connection with others.

By Ioannis Angelos Karanasios

We live in a society that is sick of itself; guilty and ashamed of its pride and joys yet fearful and resentful of change and of recognizing its vices and unfulfilled potential. The strain of the disease is particularly acute and tragic when one ponders the state of interpersonal relationships and human connections in the modern world. The individual is suffocated with emptiness. Distractions become the mundane spectre haunting our everyday life.

Gather your courage and venture to meet and reach out to your fellow humans. Look into a person’s eyes and see how often and how fast they turn away with a sense of deep existential fear. Brandish a smile and see how those same dull and lifeless eyes try to beat you by straining to paint a fake smile-job in a most bizarre and soul-disparaging competition or how they instead turn to a grimace of disapproval and disgusted unease, seeking to condemn your joy as beyond limits, an illegal immigrant in the sacred privacy of the public space.

There is a spectre haunting Oxford, and the world. A spectre of loneliness and alienation. A spectre of despairing individualism. An ever-present fear haunts our social interaction, a fear you cannot see, a fear that subjects every moment of pure joy to criticism and denigration if it manifests itself before the eyes of the ‘wrong’ people.

The eyes, ever the reliable guide to the human soul, are testament to the madness. Focus your mind and delve with intent into the shadowy light behind your fellow man’s eyes. The glint grows nervous and uncertain as it jumps infected with a sense of fear and disgust towards the ‘other’ that lies in front of it. But break through the barrier of perception and you will witness those same eyes inflamed by a desperate need for connection, suppressed by an awkward guilt.

We live in an age of loneliness. In this “globalized” world, where we will come into contact with more people than ever before, moments and bonds of true friendship and brotherhood are rare and fleeting.

What a peculiar, meaningless puppet-theatre we submit ourselves to every day in the thought that we are being social, that we somehow truly devote our time to discover, energize and honour ourselves by meeting the measure of our fellow man. These cruel strings can pull and sting even in moments of great happiness and joy when a smile and hearty laughter is whimperingly extinguished into an empty dormant grimace when they meet with the alien face of a stranger.

This loneliness is emblematic and can be traced to the cultural and social paralysis of modern society. There is a lack of real positive ideals which one can unreservedly and unquestionably embrace and have faith in by virtue of their pure and inherent value. In the face of the lack of the absence of such wonder, people have forgotten how to appreciate what truly matters. Questions of status and price have overtaken those of beauty and value. And so it is that in a way we are all pushed to become ‘hacks’, pretending to gather social capital, hacking away our time desperate for some shiny crumb of gold. How can we then achieve a true connection with the essence of the other when we are both performing a role that has been unnaturally cast upon us, within the watchful eyes of an uncaring marketplace?

Outflanked by the circulation of restrictive social expectations, the individual becomes trapped within the limits of a lonely and toxic individualism. A dichotomy is set up between the self and the world, the other. This ideology manifested consciously or unconsciously cuts up to the world into little pieces and trains the individual to stay within his own little box and steer clear from borders. “The other” is distant and cold, a space unsuited to honest moral intervention. True interaction becomes improper, unnatural, artificial and awkward as the individual must always cross, adapt and balance on a mental and social border. This negative expression of “liberal individualism” desecrates the will of the spirit and leaves the individual starved of community and positive meaning.

To fight against the allergy to reality which contaminates society is one of the great challenges of our era. If we choose to claim and act under the title of “conservatives” then the crucial choice is to conserve either the innate human desire for community and meaning or the material and cultural conditions that have denied and betrayed it. This entails becoming open and embracing change in material and cultural conditions which do not correspond to the flexible and dynamic human appetite for meaning and social connection.

The clarion call of history is the creation of a true community for people to coalesce around which will provide real meaning in their lives and interactions. The antidote to social corruption is the construction of an ideal which inspires pure unreserved and absolute faith, which will require no external justification and be able to stand on its own two feet, self-assured in its inherent beauty.

Ultimately, we will only be able to escape out of the quagmire of loneliness and experience true union when our social interactions are regulated by and represent the pure exercise of an honest and self-fulfilling will.

Ioannis Angelos Karanasios is a first-year undergraduate reading Jurisprudence (with European Law) at Pembroke College.