Federal advisory proposes regulating private life to combat loneliness.
The Loneliness Epidemic: A Threat to Our Freedom?
Loneliness is a growing problem, and it seems like everyone is talking about it. Google recently reported that more people than ever are searching for ways to make friends and connect with others. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has also issued a special advisory on America’s loneliness epidemic, which has been making headlines in podcasts, medical journals, and news outlets.
Don’t be taken in by that hype. This advisory and the strategy it proposes are fraught with threats to freedom.
The Surgeon General’s report, titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” proposes a strategy to address the problem. However, this strategy is not without its dangers. In fact, it could lead to an unprecedented invasion of our private spaces by the federal government, placing them in control of our local communities and social associations. It could also dictate what we can say, what values we should have, and what associations are acceptable. This kind of control is a threat to our most fundamental freedoms.
The Root Causes of the Loneliness Epidemic
The Surgeon General’s report offers no analysis of the root causes of the loneliness epidemic. However, government policies have long played a huge role in causing social isolation. Policies that promote fatherlessness, welfare dependency, urban blight, homelessness, deaths of despair, and abortion weaken human bonds. The current administration’s commitment to identity politics also divides people and creates resentment.
- Loneliness increases the risk of depression, mental illness, and suicide.
- Loneliness is linked to an increased risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, early onset of dementia, and premature death.
The government is also doubling down on policies that weaponize loneliness, cooperating with Big Tech and Big Media to punish wrongthink and attacking due process and basic self-defense. Covid lockdowns and mandates enforced our isolation from one another, separating the dying from their loved ones and demonizing the un-injected and unmasked.
The Threat to Our Freedom
The Surgeon General’s report comes from the censorship-industrial complex, and we can’t expect any action by the current regime to reverse its policies. Rather, they remain committed to controlling our conversations and enforcing our isolation. We must be vigilant and protect our fundamental freedoms from this threat.
The same surgeon general who told Big Tech to cancel those with different opinions about Covid.
The Definition of Insanity
Are you ready for the government to prescribe your “cure” for loneliness? The current administration is poised to expand its power and influence in our private lives under the guise of promoting social connection. But the hypocrisy of this proposed strategy is breathtaking. And yet, we are expected to trust it without question.
The advisory’s first strategy is to build a vast “infrastructure” to promote social connection among people. This includes federal dominance over all departments of government, service organizations, sports clubs, religious organizations, and recreational and special interest clubs. The government will even have a say in local physical infrastructure to ensure that every place people might interact promotes the government’s instructions on how to build social connection.
But that’s not all. The project also calls for mass compliance with leftist agenda items embedded within the report. The government has a responsibility to monitor and mitigate the public health harm caused by policies, products, and services that drive social disconnection. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility are critical components of any such strategy. This can only result in the perpetuation of social hostilities and coercion inherent in DEI policies.
The report also notes that people with strong families and social networks gain all kinds of benefits — economic, material, educational, emotional, health — that are not accessible to those who are socially disconnected for various reasons, including race, sex, “historical inequities,” and poverty. But how do statists plan to spread the wealth of social connection? We can only presume they’ll try in ever more dystopian ways that will end up imposing social isolation on the noncompliant.
Government Tracking of Kindness and Friendliness
The report also calls for a culture of “kindness,” “respect,” and “responsibility.” Sounds great, right? But the current administration does not interpret those words to reflect traditional virtues. Rather, their Orwellian definitions have taken over. They echo the social and emotional learning curriculum (SEL) that currently imparts woke values to school children and tells them how they must relate to others.
The advisory also calls for “stakeholders” in all institutions — with special attention given to sectors of health care, education, and technology — to track and monitor the social connection and social disconnection of individuals. This portends bias response teams as well as government-mandated surveillance and training in all institutions regarding how people should and shouldn’t connect socially.
Finally, according to Murthy’s report, too much social connection can be dangerous because it can lead to “extremism” and “polarization” if you are connected with too many like-minded people. We therefore need to “bridge” our connections to let “outsiders” into our social circles, with government oversight to prevent the harm and violence that comes with certain kinds of (unnamed) social connections.
Meddling with Private Life Defines Tyranny
Will this advisory really lead to federal regulation of the private sphere of life? If we leave it to its own devices, that’s where we’re headed. Infiltrating private life is the default pattern in the history of all unchecked bureaucracies and tyrannies. It always happens in the name of a greater good. The surgeon general’s advisory is in line with this pattern since it sets America up for the vast expansion of government control in an area where it has never been firmly in control before: the private sphere of life.
This project also builds on disturbing trends of censorship, surveillance, and suppression of traditional values and constitutional protections. History has warned us that such trends lead to the end of freedom.
Push back against this advisory by remembering President Ronald Reagan’s warning that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
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