There's No Such Thing As Society
The economic engineering of loneliness
The United States is lonely. Everyone knows it, but few know it the way I know it.
All over the United States now, to quote the great James Baldwin, “there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.” I watch this from afar, living a life opposite in both custom and geography to the one I once lived, halfway across the globe, in a working-class pocket of inner-city Vietnam.
I wake to roosters and street vendors calling to anyone within earshot, heading out my front door and into bustling streets, friendly faces riding bicycles smiling beneath unmistakably-Vietnamese cone-shaped nón lá hats. The neighbors across greet me, the usual morning wave before I head to my haunts. No fewer than three people stop to make chit-chat, listening intently as I bumble in haltingly bad Vietnamese. Here, community isn’t a backdrop to your individual life—it reaches out and swallows you whole, if you let it, absorbing you into the wider fabric of shared living that characterizes one of the least individualistic societies on earth.
When you leave the United States, you look back and notice things. Not only the differences—that’s to be expected. You notice the things you believed were universal are actually quite provincial, the limits of local customs you mistook for the limits of the whole world. This is doubly jarring when the country you leave is the most individualistic society on earth.
Much fuss has been made of the loneliness crisis in the West, a steady stream of research and hand-wringing seeking to diagnose the problem. Jonathan Haidt blames screens. Others blame video games, the dwindling church, the slow-motion murder of the third place. Each diagnosis contains a grain of truth, accurate appraisals of symptoms that miss the disease entirely. Each an accelerant, not the origin. The house was already burning, burning for centuries, but burning slowly enough that each generation inherited more of the smoke it believed was air.
I was always skeptical of the crisis framing. I wanted to see data, always more data, always postponing judgment. Then I left, and my mind changed once I drew my first full breath and realized you can’t see the smoke from inside the fire. 1
When an airplane crashes, it’s seldom one thing that went wrong. It’s usually a cascade of failures that aligned to cause catastrophe. Similarly, Western loneliness didn’t happen overnight. Your loneliness has a history and that history is much longer, more deliberate than people realize. And it begins, like most Western pathologies, with property.
John Locke, writing in the 17th century, laid the philosophical groundwork: “Every man has a property in his own person.” Locke viewed the self as an owned-thing—bounded, enclosed, belonging first and finally to itself. This selfishness feels quaint now. But it was a radical act of philosophical surgery in its day, the severance of the individual from the web of mutual obligation, kinship, from the communal claim that had always structured human life. Locke gave the West a new language of selfhood, and the West has been speaking it ever since.
Economist Adam Smith followed and the surgery cut deeper. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” he wrote, “but from their regard to their own interest.” Self-interest was formally enthroned as economics, no longer a regrettable fact of human nature to be managed and tempered. Selfishness was recast as an engine of “civilization” itself, the “invisible hand” supposedly harmonizing private greed and public good. Adam Smith gave the West permission to stop pretending human beings owe each other anything beyond a transaction. The United States took that permission and built a religion out of it.
Alexis de Tocqueville saw that religion budding in the 1830s, traveling through the young American Republic and watching its citizens with the wide eyes. “Individualism,” he wrote, “disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.” He couldn’t have better described a place more opposite than where I now live.
Property and rampant individualism go hand-in-hand, something I think about whenever a Vietnamese stranger stops me to ask what I’m doing, where I’m going—and, crucially—if I’ve eaten yet. Far from cheap fluff, that last question is the Vietnamese way of life condensed into four words that say, “Your body’s needs are my concern.”
It’s the polar opposite of the Western lifestyle that converts every human need into a source of potential profit. I had no mental framework for this, no idea it was possible. This isn’t starry-eyed optimism or willful blindness to complexity. Utopias are fictions.
But it’s impossible to stand in these breathing streets, surrounded by this density of human warmth, and not ask the obvious question—how is this possible? What must a culture believe at its deepest level, about what a human being is—about what we owe each other, as people—to produce this? The answer, I think, is simple. Vietnam never let economists measure the value of human life.
By the 20th century, the gloves had come off, as new economists picked up where Adam Smith left off.
Economist Gary Becker reduced the entire complexity of human existence to a single axiom: “All human behavior can be viewed as involving participants who maximize their utility.“ Wholly absent from this is anything about love, sacrifice, grief, solidarity, kinship—any feeling of collectivity. This is what happens when you let someone who’s never watched a mother sit up all night with a sick child pretend they know the incontrovertible secrets of “human nature.”
Economist James Buchanan was more nakedly ideological: “Romantic and illusory notions of the public interest,” he declared, “must be replaced by a realistic understanding of individuals pursuing their own ends.” The public interest—romantic, illusory, the kind of thing children believe before they’ve learned economics.
Economist Milton Friedman injected the moral force of revelation. “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself,” he wrote. This sentence performs a sickening sleight of hand, collapsing all conceptions of freedom into a single economic one, so any challenge to market logic becomes, by definition, a challenge to liberty. More revealing: “The kind of organization that could effectively protect individual freedom would be a free market…where each man can pursue his own interest.” Each man. His own interest.
But none of these men were quite as blunt as the lady of the list.
Margaret Thatcher, inspired by the aforementioned economists, said the quiet part aloud: “There is no such thing as society.” “Just individuals and their families,” she continued, as though the sentence needed finishing. It didn’t. The demolition was complete in those seven words. But it’s her other statement that haunts me more, the one that reveals the true ambition of the project: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul.” 2
And change the soul they did. The social contract was torn up, the commons enclosed, the neighbor reframed as a competitor.
I think back to my Vietnamese neighbors, the ones who greet me with waves and smiles every single morning without fail. Two laundromats, right next door to one another. I haven’t asked them if they’re worried about competing for business because I already know the answer. They’d laugh at me for asking the most ridiculous question they’ve ever heard, before explaining that they don’t see themselves as competitors but neighbors and friends who regularly help one another. 3
What I’ve described above is a lineage, each thinker handing the next a sharper instrument for the same surgery, the slow excision of the communal self from Western life. What they built was a theory of what a human being fundamentally is. A sovereign unit, self-contained, self-maximizing, owing nothing to anyone that wasn’t contractually agreed upon in advance. Every institution that once held people together—church, family, union, village—was dismantled, defunded, or shamed until it withered. They torched the commons. Now we breathe only smoke.
Is it any wonder the West is having a crisis of loneliness when its entire philosophical history is one seeking to separate the individual from the relational structures of society, some going so far as to say, across generations, that there is no such thing as society, that the communal notions are romantic and illusory?
Now, this will be the hard part…but I can’t lie to you. The most sadistic aspect of all this is that, over time, we came to believe it. We unknowingly absorbed this foul doctrine so completely that we began enforcing it on ourselves, policing our own need for connection, calling our loneliness independence, our isolation self-sufficiency, our hunger for community a sort of weakness. We came to believe, like I once believed, exactly what they wanted us to believe—that loneliness is natural and universal, not the result of a system designed to produce it.
“What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers—because you believe the same things they do.”
—James Baldwin
This is one of my favorite Baldwin lines. With it, he exposed the mechanism of domination at its most complete, the moment when external control becomes internal voice. Once that happens, they can fire the guards. We’ve learned to imprison ourselves.
But consider what that actually required: Locke, Smith, Tocqueville’s little warning ignored, then Becker, Friedman, Thatcher, generation after generation of philosophers, economists, and politicians all pulling in the same direction across centuries, just to get us here. What they built is not a description of human nature—it’s a hostile war against it. The monumental effort required to make us lonely proves human loneliness isn’t the default state. Which means it can be undone.
Perhaps not quickly, and not without the kind of reckoning the West has historically preferred to avoid. But the template exists, I walk its streets every day, stumbling through its language, being stopped by strangers who want to know if I’ve eaten. The relational self isn’t some utopian fantasy cooked up by Hollywood, it’s the default life that billions of people live daily. What the West built is the aberration, and what the West built can be razed if enough people stop believing in it.
Paltry consolation, once again, I know. How do you even begin to change the entirety of a culture? I have no idea, honestly. I fought vigorously against these ugliest aspects of U.S. culture when I lived there and know firsthand it ain’t easy. I’ve watched the best of people—warm, generous, looking for connection—slowly fold themselves into the shape the culture demanded. It wasn’t their fault and wasn’t because they wanted to, but because the pressure is so relentless and alternatives feel abstract—even nonexistent. You can know the cage is a cage and still not know how to leave it. I left, and I’m still carrying the scars of having once been inside it. 4
But I do know this. Nothing will change until enough of us reject the idea that unabashed self-interest is the path to happiness, or even compatible with community. Loving connection can’t be built on a foundation of armored selfishness.
O, lonely brethren, sisters of long and solitary evenings—your toils and lonesomenesses are not yours. They hath been forced unto you by the hand and mouth that called them “freedom.” Now, the time is come to give them back.
Thanks for reading. This is a follow-up essay to Everyone I Know in America is Miserable. It’s worth checking out if you have time.
Everyone I Know in America is Miserable
America is in crisis. Everyone knows it, but few know it the way I know it.
Many of you reading this feel it now, that gnawing, monstrous solitude. I’ve choked through it myself. I know what it’s like to inhale the smoke for so long you forgot there’s air outside. I remember being haunted by the idea that life could be more, that life should be more. You want connection but it feels impossible, like having to relearn how to speak all over again. I know it well, and there’s a bittersweet irony in that, isn’t there?
If you’re lonely, you’re not alone.
You’re not alone and it’s not your fault. Your loneliness is neither character deficiency nor some private wound you haven’t healed. It’s the intended output of a system designed, over centuries to produce exactly this.
Yes, lonely brethren, sisters of long evenings in solitude—I see you. When none in the world see you, I see you. I behold the weariness that hath settled into your bones like gravity, the days that fall upon you without memory, as rain upon stone, leaving no mark but the slow erosion of hope. Blessed are ye in your toils and lonesomenesses. They belong not to you, for they were forced upon you by the hand and mouth that called them “freedom.”
Much has been made of Stalin’s line that “poets are the engineers of the human soul.” But does nobody else besides me find it creepy that Thatcher wanted to use economics to change the human soul? I’d take poetry over economics.
This is true. Someone I know asked this very question when he saw someone with a “competing” business move in next door. “Looks like you’ve got a new competitor?” The response he got: “No. I have a new friend.”
It’s taken a full year to realize, in my body, that I’m no longer in the United States, and still I sometimes relapse. The small things that would’ve been big deals back home, things that are nothings here, sometimes bring back the physical memories of living in a place so patently anti-social and destructive to human life.