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WASHINGTON
If Senator Ben Sasse is right – he has not recently cheated on something important – the most controversial political problem in the country is entangled in the least understood public health problem. The political problem is furious partisanship. The public health problem is loneliness. Sasse's new book states that Americans are richer, more informed and "connected" than ever – and less happy, more isolated and less fulfilled.
In "Them: Why we hate each other – and how to heal ourselves", the subject of Sasse is "the evaporation of social capital" – the satisfactions of work and community. This reflects a perverse phenomenon: what ended up counting as connectivity displaces reality. And things could quickly get worse considerably.
Solitude in "epidemic proportions" produces a "literature on loneliness" containing sociological and medical conclusions about the effects of loneliness on the brain and body of individuals, as well as on communities. Sasse said "that there is a growing consensus" on the fact that loneliness – not obesity, cancer or heart disease – is the country's "number one health crisis". "Persistent loneliness" reduces the average longevity by more than two times that of heavy alcohol consumption and more than three times that of obesity, which is often a consequence of loneliness. Research shows that loneliness is as physically dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and contributes to cognitive decline, including faster progression of Alzheimer's disease. Sasse says: "We are literally dying of despair," of this failure "to fill the hole that millions of Americans feel in their lives".
Big and small symptoms are everywhere. Time passed, notes Sasse, to the Americans "filled their imagination with the same things": in the 1950s, 70% of televisions used were listening to "I Love Lucy". Today, when 93% of Americans have access to more than 500 channels, the most watched cable news program, "Hannity", represents about 1% of the US population. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the average number of times Americans had fun at home decreased by almost 50%. Americans are hyperconnected but disconnected, with "fewer non-virtual friends than ever before." According to the average US study (according to a Pew poll) a smartphone every 4.3 minutes, and with nearly 40% of 18 to 29 year olds connected almost every minute, we are "addicted to distraction" and "dressed for a true community ". Social media, these "tendrils of resentment" that Sasse calls the accelerators of political anger, create an "indignant loop" without nuances for "professional hawkers". And for those for whom the enemies have the psychic value of giving a coherence of life.
The work, which Sasse calls "arguably the most fundamental anchor of human identity," is at the beginning of a "staggering level of cultural upheaval" "faster and more radical than transformation. even from a rural and agricultural country to an urban and industrial country.Alcoholism, the origin of Prohibition, was one of the answers to social upheavals.Today, a reasons why the average lifespan of the United States has declined for three consecutive years is that many more people are dying each year from a drug overdose – one of the "diseases of despair" – to During the Vietnam War, people "need nothing," but analysts at McKinsey & Co. estimate that 50 percent of global paid jobs – jobs – could be automated using today's proven technologies. largest category of employment in the United States United States is that of "driver" and, with the arrival of autonomous vehicles, two thirds of these jobs could disappear within 10 years.
This future of accelerating flows exalts educated and socially agile people. It frightens those who, their erased job identities and their atomized communities, are not tempted by what Sasse calls "healthy local tribes" but by the political tribalism of grievances, or by chemical oblivion, or both. In today's bifurcated country, 2016 was the tenth consecutive year in which 40% of American children were born out of wedlock. America has "two almost totally different cultures," exemplified by this: marriage, compared to nearly 70% of births among women with high school graduation or less.
The repair of the American physical infrastructure, although expensive, is conceptually simple, involving steel and concrete. The collapse of the US social infrastructure (END ITAL) (BEG ITAL) poses a major challenge: we do not know how to develop what Sasse wants, "new habits of heart and mind … new practices of neighborhood. " We know that more government, which means more saturation of society with politics, is not a sufficient answer.
Sasse, a fifth-generation Nebraskan who dedicates his book to Kiwanis and Rotary clubs and other Fremont platoons in Nebraska (population of 26,000), wants to revive the "hometown feeling" on Friday night. But Americans can not go home to Fremont.
George Will is a columnist for the Washington Post. Readers can email him at [email protected].
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