Lost Connections, by Johann Hari
A book review
I learned of Hari in a Glenn Greenwald interview, went online to have a look at the titles Hari had authored, and Lost Connections caught my eye immediately. I finished this book in eight days; since reading is usually a bedtime/lights out activity for me, that’s a quick read. On goodreads there are about 35,000 reviews, 30,000 of them positive, i.e. 4 or 5 stars, with an overall average of 4.27 of 5 stars; I’d put my own at right about the average. Only twice was I in anything approaching “violent disagreement” with what he had to say.
The book is broken down into three parts, the first being a brief introduction if you will, to the “cracks” appearing in the wall of oversimplification surrounding the cause(s) of depression; the wall being the Big Pharma line that chemical imbalance in the brain causes depression and anxiety disorders, which of course leads to chemical “solutions” to brain “disorder.” Part two exposes seven “lack of social connection” causes to depression and anxiety, and part three covers seven opportunities to reconnect socially to guard against depression and anxiety.
Disconnection
In part two he writes of disconnection from “meaningful work,” “other people,” “meaningful values,” “childhood trauma,” “status and respect,” “the natural world,” and “a hopeful or secure future.” In general I think Hari does a good job in these chapters; the dis-connections are very apparent it seems to me, in the society we have created for ourselves. For the most part, humans have been made to be interchangeable parts in a machine. I played my part for more than three decades, and looking back I’d say that about 60% of the time I was in jobs that were in no way “fulfilling” on a personal level; I was just grinding it out and looking for the next opportunity. And, being “hypermobile,” having “moved house” as the British say more than twenty times, I wasn’t building new connections, and frankly, my fault entirely, I wasn’t maintaining much less strengthening old connections.
In my case, it all came crashing down on me when I was in my early-to-mid 40’s. And it took then a couple of decades to build a new life with Geri and a new community of brothers and sisters. I’ve wondered recently, if the disconnection from people, meaningful work, meaningful values, and purpose, has anything to do with the so-called “mid-life crisis” a lot of men address by buying some new toy(s). The answer I suspect is “yes,” and the toys do nothing to relieve the suffering long term.
Disconnection from People, Meaningful Work, and Purpose
Vets came to mind at one particular point, in the chapter on disconnection from other people.
Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people…it’s the sense that you are not sharing anything that matters with anyone else…To end loneliness you need to have a sense of “mutual aid and protection” … with at least one other person, and ideally many more.
— Lost Connections
Think about soldiers, sailors, or Marines at the pointy end of the spear; they are quite literally covering each others’ “6.” And upon returning anxiety often shows up as hyper-vigilance, because guess what…there’s no one there watching my 6! Literally. At the pointy end of the spear the team eats together, sleeps together, fights together, and dies together if necessary. Of course when they leave their team behind, leave their purpose behind, and return to a world of isolation, i.e. disconnection from all, despair, depression and anxiety are a predictable result.
We are social animals, it is literally in our DNA. The need for tribe, for community, for a purpose bigger than yourself, is real.
Disconnection From Nature
I got a good laugh at the outset; Hari is in a conversation with Isabel Behncke and says,
I don’t do nature. I like concrete walls, covered with bookshelves. I like skyscrapers. I like subway stations opening out onto taco trucks. I regard Central Park as excessively rural, and walk up Tenth Avenue to avoid it.
Ha!
When I worked at Caterpillar, I had an office dead center in a space under roof of over 40 acres. No windows. No sunlight. No night and day. No sounds of nature, and conversely, No silence. Nine years. It was a miserable environment. Hari would have loved it I suppose, but it was toxic to me.
At the end of this chapter there is this paragraph:
Isabel had seen captivity reduce bonobos to depression-like symptoms they could not have experienced in the wild. As humans, “I think we have many modern forms of captivity,” she told me. The lesson the depressed bonobos had taught her, she said, is: “Don’t be in captivity. Fuck captivity.”
— Lost Connections
I’m with Isabel. Fuck captivity.
A Hopeful or Secure Future
This is where I was in violent disagreement, with respect to both disconnection, and reconnection. First, some background. Hari describes himself as an atheist in the book; while I’m not sure there is such a thing. It seems to me that many ā-theists actual subscribe to the civil religion, with the President, or the Prime Minister (Hari is British, so perhaps the Queen, or King) as its godhead. But regardless of what I think, if you are an atheist, then by definition there is nothing beyond this world, and so the “future” we are talking about is limited to this world. The stoics had a saying, Memento mori, “remember that you have to die.” And, that could be tomorrow. Or, you could die now. I could die now! Of course, so could Hari. And there is nothing beyond death for the atheist. So how, as an atheist, do you create a “hopeful or secure future” inside that framework? The disconnection from a hopeful or secure future, it seems to me, is built into the belief system of the atheist.
But how then might the atheist get by that problem of no afterlife? First I suppose, you have to start with putting “Memento mori” out of your mind! Then what? It’s back to the godhead of the civil religion; apparently only government can provide for a “hopeful or secure future.” Which is all the more surprising since Hari knows that governments made a point of destroying connected cultures!
Like in the United States, successive Canadian governments had for many years resolved to destroy their culture by taking their children away from them and raising them in orphanages, banning them from speaking their own language, and preventing them from having any say over how they lived. This continued until a few decades ago. The result was that the people who had gone through all this — and their children — had the highest levels of suicide in the country.
I see this same cognitive dissonance on the environmental front. Government is the reason the Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf of California; we drain it bone dry. Government destroyed the Everglades. Government action gave rise to the Dust Bowl. Government allows, and yes even subsidizes, the Dead Zones in the Gulf of Mexico. But, with complete disregard of the facts, people still turn to government to protect the environment. It defies belief.
So, Hari’s solution to the disconnection from a “hopeful or secure future;” Universal Basic Income (UBI).
I have two problems with the “free money” approach. The first; it doesn’t work. Nothing, absolute nothing, could be more dis-connecting than perpetual welfare.
A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.
In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent.
We’ve been at this “War on Poverty” for 60 years, $22 trillion completely wasted, unless your desired outcome was to destroy the families of the poor; in which case it was money well spent. And we are still at it, which is proof that the “unintended consequence” is in fact, intended.
And the second; there is no such thing as “giving” from the government.
…So somebody had what seemed like an almost stupidly simple idea. Up to now, the welfare state had worked by trying to plug gaps — by catching up the people who fell below a certain level and nudging them back up. But if insecurity is about not having enough money to live on, they wondered, what would happen if we just gave everyone enough, with no strings attached? What if we simply mailed every single Canadian citizen — young, old, all of them — a check every year that was enough for them to live on?
Each of you will be unconditionally given the equivalent of $19,000 U.S. <in 2018 dollar> by the government.
— Lost Connections
It is not an “almost stupidly simple idea,” it is simply an absolutely stupid idea.
“Given…by the government.” The government has no money to give “every single Canadian citizen!” That it has not first stolen from some other Canadian citizen! It is nothing more than legalized theft, as Bastiat wrote about in 1850! Seriously, what could go wrong?!
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
― Margaret Thatcher
And we in the United States ran out of other people’s money long ago, which is why my children, and their children, and their children’s children, will be born as indentured servants of the state, and of their fellow citizens, not to mention as it turns out, non-citizens as well.
Having Said All That
I still recommend the book, giving it 4.27 stars. Connection, community, tribe, a purpose greater than yourself; all of these and more, are needs of the human being human.