Dear Friends,                                              Men are suffering a loneliness crisis!

“The man who now emerges must be the individual, egoistic bourgeois isolated artificially by capitalism and his consciousness, the source of his activity and knowledge, is an individual isolated consciousness à la Robinson Crusoe.”

                                                                                                      György Lukács

 !!! … Round up the usual suspects! I recommend to all of you that you read Amanda Marcotte’s article Don’t blame women for men’s loneliness. Blame capitalism. (Salon) For a guy like I, obviously, the title was enough before I even knew who wrote it. I’m embarrassed to say that I knew nothing of the “monetization of male loneliness” that she demonstrates. But it fits all too well into the inexorable process of the accumulation of capital from the beginning; so let’s look more closely at the fitting. (You do all know who the usual suspects are, right? begins with a w.)

The bourgeois individual, as an idea, goes back to the 17^th-century origins of modern philosophy. Locke has the best one liner: “Adam was created the perfect man.” Why’s he so perfect? Because from the moment of his creation he was complete, mature in body and mind. The rest of us? Not so much, we’re “all born infants, weak and helpless, without knowledge or understanding”, defective and imperfect.

So what’s to be done with us? We must be raised and educated to become as much like Adam as possible! Adam was not a family man – I won’t tie this to the somewhat dysfunctional character of his eventual family, plenty of family persons have had problems, though fratricide isn’t all that common – he was created alone, he had no family, no parents, no childhood. But he is the perfect man, we must all strive to be as like him as possible: we must all strive as much as possible to be as though we had no family, no parents, no childhood.

All of us, yes, but Locke is clear – and the logic is obvious – that “we” are boys and men: I mean to say, what would be the point for a daughter to try to act as though she had no mother when Locke assumes that she will become a mother herself.

Even before the full development of capitalism Locke provides its ideal agent: the single man, proudly alone, with “an individual isolated consciousness à la Robinson Crusoe”. He may have a family, but to be a capitalist is to leave family, friendship, civic duty behind as he enters the admonitory doors of his enterprise. And the force of law stands behind him in his fiduciary responsibility to the company, its shareholders and no one else (at least if the enterprise is corporate).

Is it possible that the principled aloneness of Locke’s individual and his descendant the capitalist might make the poor guy feel lonely sometimes? My newsfeed is always showing me articles on the top ten qualities that corporate recruiters are looking for in applicants. I don’t think that they mention this, but I suspect that anyone who let’s slip that they sometimes feel lonely isn’t going to make it.

The isolated individual, the individual alone, is the product of modern society and the capitalist mode of production. The root causes of modern misogyny and homophobia are the male fear that the desire for love, warmth, connection may be overwhelming; and its twin, the fear that any yielding to that desire shows lack of masculinity, incipient homosexuality.

If you want to be truly “successful”, you know, truly successful, in the world of capital loneliness comes with the territory. What Amanda Marcotte describes so well is a new twist, another turn of the screw, on what has been there all along.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby