Sixteen Volts

Loneliness equals low social market value

Allow me to tell you again how people are mistaken.

Loneliness is conceived to be a psychological phenomenon. Either it is an emotion that is caused or not caused by being separated from others or being together with others. Everybody should certainly by now be able to understand the necessary clarifications. Another interpretation is that there exists some more or less special emotional-social bond whose existence determines whether a person is lonely or not. A third interpretation is that loneliness is a philosophical problem, something that cannot be reduced to simply being social or asocial, and whose solution may be different for each person.

I claim that loneliness is a purely social phenomenon. To be specific, it is not a property of an individual, but it describes the way that the individual is treated by his immediate social environment.

We can say that social interaction is pure when it doesn't involve exchange of zero-sum resources (other than time). Such a situation is defined by rather different laws that I am not discussing here. Even so, two essential resources are being distributed here: information and (other) free goods. As an example of the latter kind, suppose that somebody purchases a summer cottage but doesn't want to be there alone. He invites his friends to join him at the cottage, so they get to enjoy this cottage for free even though the owner had to pay money for it, but even the owner doesn't lose anything in this arrangement but rather benefits.

Loneliness simply means that the community doesn't give a particular individual information about or access to the freely distributed resources of the community. Loneliness usually indicates that the lonely person has nothing to offer that the other members of the community would consider worthwhile. Often it is also a punishment for violating the norms of the community, or perhaps in some cases the outcast is shunned because the others are scared of him competing with them or because of an internal struggle for power within the community.

Loneliness cannot be measured by the choices of the particular individual but from the reactions of the immediate (or otherwise relevant) community towards him. A person who has been shut in his apartment for months is not lonely if he is reasonably certain (regardless of what he says, since usually most people put up a modest face in public) that when he comes out he will be able to access the resources of his community, or at least will be able to find another community that accepts him.

It is in the interests of the community to make the individual believe that his loneliness is only something that is inside his head. The most efficient way to do this is to have the invisible hand of the market (which all this is again ultimately about, since freedom always leads to markets except perhaps in environments of extreme abundance) teach all or most of its members to sincerely believe this. Belief has little effect on how the community works.

Addition: you can feel lonely even if you belong to a community, if you believe that you could get into a better one. Most people who complain about their loneliness belong to this group, which is why these people are punished. They indicate that they don't accept the people who are currently around them.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, August 28, 2006 at 10:35 AM