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 THE ATTACK ON LONELINESS

     To create a fulfilling emotional life and a sane psycho-sphere for the emerging civilization of tomorrow, we must recognize three basic requirements of any individual: the needs for community, structure, and meaning. Understanding how the collapse of Second Wave society undermines all three suggests how we might begin designing a healthier psychological environment for ourselves and our children in the future. 

     To begin with, any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.

     From Los Angeles to Leningrad, teen-agers, unhappy married couples, single parents, ordinary working people, and the elderly, all complain of social isolation. Parents confess that their children are too busy to see them or even to telephone. Lonely strangers in bars or launderettes offer what one sociologist calls "those infinitely sad confidences." Singles' clubs and discos serve as flesh markets for desperate divorcees. 

     Loneliness is even a neglected factor in the economy. Howmany upper-middle-class housewives, driven to distraction fjy the clanging emptiness of their affluent suburban homes, have gone into the job market to preserve their sanity? How many pets (and carloads of pet food) are bought to break the silence of an empty home? Loneliness supports much of our travel and entertainment business. It contributes to drug use, depression, and declining productivity. And it creates a lucrative "lonely-hearts" industry that purports to help the lonely locate and lasso Mr. or Ms. "Right." 

     The hurt of being alone is, of course, hardly new. But loneli- ness is now so wideZj read it has become, paradoxically, a shared experience. 

     Community demands more than emotionally satisfying bonds between individuals, however. It also requires strong ties of loyalty between individuals and their organizations. Just as they miss the companionship of other individuals, millions today feel equally cut off from the institutions of which they are a part. They hunger for institutions worthy of their respect, affection, and loyalty. 

     The corporation offers a case in point. 

     As companies have grown larger and more impersonal and have diversified into many disparate activities, employees have been left with little sense of shared mission. The feeling of community is absent. The very term "corporate loyalty" has an archaic ring to it. Indeed, loyalty to a company is considered by many a betrayal of self. In The Bottom Line, Fletcher Knebel's popidar novel about big business, the heroine snaps to her executive husband: "Company loyalty! It makes me want to vomit."

     Except in Japan, where the lifetime employment system and corporate paternalism still exist (though for a shrinking percentage of the labor force), work relationships are increasingly transient and emotionally imsatisfying. Even when companies make an effort to provide a social dimension to employment—an annual picnic, a company-sponsored bowling team, an office Christmas party—most on-the-job relationships are no more than skin-deep.

For such reasons, few today have any sense of belonging to something bigger and better than themselves. This warm participatory feeling emerges spontaneously from time to time during crisis, stress, disaster, or mass uprising. The great student strikes of the sixties, for example, produced a glow of communal feeling. The antinuclear demonstrations today do the same. But both the move- ments and the feelings they arouse are fleeting. Community is in short supply. 

     One clue to the plague of loneliness lies in our rising level of social diversity. By de-massifying society, by accentuating differences rather than similarities, we help people individualize themselves. W^e make it possible for each of us more nearly to fulfill his or her potential. But we also make human contact more difficult. For the more individualized we are, the more difficult it becomes to find a mate or a lover who has precisely matching interests, values, schedules, or tastes. Friends are also harder to come by. We become choosier in our social ties. But so do others. The result is a great many ill-matched relationships. Or no relationships at all. 

     The breakup of mass society, therefore, while holding out the promise of much greater individual self-fulfillment, is at least for the present spreading the pain of isolation. If the emergent Third Wave society is not to be icily metallic, with a vacuum for a heart, it must attack this problem frontally. It must restore community.

     How might we begin to do this? Once we recognize that loneliness is no longer an individual matter but a public problem created by the disintegration of Second Wave institutions, there are plenty of things we can do about it. We can begin where community usually begins—in the family, by ex- panding its shrunken functions. 

     The family, since the industrial revolution, has been progressively relieved of the burden of its elderly. If we stripped this responsibility from the family, perhaps the time has come to restore it partially. Only a nostalgic fool would favor dismantling public and private pension systems, or making old people completely dependent on their families as they once were. But why not offer tax and other incentives for families—including non-nuclear and un- conventional families—who look after their own elderly instead of farming them out to impersonal old-age "homes." Why not reward, rather than economically punish, those who maintain and solidify family bonds across generational lines? 

     The same principle can be extended to other functions of the family as well. Families should be encouraged to take a larger—not smaller—role in the education of the young. Parents willing to teach their own children at home should be aided by the schools, not regarded as freaks or lawbreakers. And parents should have more, not less, influence on the schools.

     At the same time much could be done by the schools themselves to create a sense of belonging. Instead of grading students purely on individual performance, some part of each student's grade could be made dependent on the performance of the class as a whole or some team within it. This would give early and overt support to the idea that each of us has responsibility for others. Witha bit of encouragement, imaginative educators could come up with many other, better ways to promote a sense of community. 

     Corporations, too, could do much to begin building humanties afresh. Third Wave production makes possible decentralization and smaller, more personal work units. Innovative companies might build morale and a sense of belonging by asking groups of workers to organize themselves into mini-companies or cooperatives and contracting directly with these group, to get specific jobs done. 

     This breakup of huge corporations into small, self-managed units could not merely unleash enormous new productive energies but build community at the same time. 

     Norman Macrae, deputy editor of The Economist, has suggested that "Semi-autonomous teams of perhaps six to 17 people, who choose to work together as friends, should be told by market forces what module of output will be paid for at what pay rates per unit of output, and then should increasingly be allowed to produce it in their own way."

     it in their own way." Indeed, continues Macrae, "those who devise successful group friendship cooperatives will do a lot of social good, and perhaps will deserve some subsidies or tax advantages." (What is particularly interesting about such arrangements is that one could create co- operatives within a profit-making corporation or, for that matter, profit-making companies within the framework of a socialist production enterprise.) 

     Corporations could also look hard at their retirement practices. Ejecting an elderly worker all at once not only deprives the individual of a regular, full-size paycheck, and takes away what society regards as a productive role, but also truncates many social ties. Why not more partial retirement plans, and programs that assign semi-retired people to work for understaffed community ser- vices on a volunteer or part-pay basis? 

     Another community-building device might draw retired people into fresh contact with the young, and vice versa. Older people in every community could be appointed "adjunct teachers" or "mentors," invited to teach some of their skills in local schools on a parttime or volunteer basis or to have one student, let's say, regularly visit them for instruction. Under school supervision, retired photographers could teach photography, car mechanics how to repair a recalcitrant engine, bookkeepers how to keep books, and so on. In many cases a healthy bond would grow up between mentor and "mentee ' that would go beyond instruction.

     It is not a sin to be lonely and, in a society whose structures are fast disintegrating, it should not be a disgrace. Thus a letter writer to the Jewish Chronicle in London asks: "Why does it seem not quite nice' to go to groups where it is perfectly obvious that the reason that everyone is there is to meet people of the opposite sex?" The same question would apply to singles' bars, discos, and holiday resorts.

     The letter points out that in the shtetls of Eastern Europe the institution of shadchan or matchmaker served a useful purpose in bringing marriageable people together, and that dating bureaus, marriage services, and similar agencies are just as necessary today. "We should be able to admit openly that we need help, human contact and a social life." 

     We need many new services—both traditional and innovative— to help bring lonely people together in a dignified way. Some people now rely on "lonely-hearts" ads in the magazines to help them locate a companion or mate. Before long we can be sure local or neighborhood cable television services w^ll be running video ads so prospective partners can actually see each other before dating. (Such programs, one suspects, will have enormously high ratings.) 

     But should dating services be limited to providing romantic contacts? Why not services—or places—where people might come simply to meet and make a friend, as distinct from a lover or potential mate? Society needs such services and, so long as they are honest and decent, we should not be embarrassed to invent and use them.