What if I told you to trust the feds to help you deal with your feelings of loneliness and social isolation? I hope you’d laugh in my face.
These are the same folks who demanded you self-isolate, hide your face, and stay in your house for years after saying Covid lockdowns would last only 15 days. They threatened our livelihoods and freedom to travel if we didn’t take their untested injections. They also urged us to shun and snitch on any loved ones who resisted the Covid propaganda. And now they are demanding we trust them to help us alleviate our loneliness epidemic?
So I hope you’re alarmed to learn that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been charged with curing the nation of its loneliness epidemic. Seriously.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Ct., recently introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act. Among other things, the bill would create a new bureaucracy: a federal “office of social connection policy” to advise the White House.
If you think it will end there, I have a lovely bridge in Wuhan to sell you. In fact, the urge to federally monitor human relationships looks like it’s becoming a trend. The United Kingdom created its Ministry of Loneliness in 2018. Japan followed suit in 2021.
The Other Shoe Has Dropped
Murphy’s legislation is the sound of the other shoe dropping after Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released in May an 81-page advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Social Isolation.” Here at The Federalist, I published a three–part series on the perils of the surgeon general’s advisory. It looks very much like a blueprint for a federal invasion of the private sphere of life in America. The pretext is that it is for our own good since social isolation adversely affects health.
The advisory outlines a six-pillared strategy that reads like a Big Brother plan to invade every nook and cranny of private life in America. It first calls for federal “infrastructure” to track and “strengthen” Americans’ social connections in every place people gather, including community organizations, transportation hubs, housing, schools, libraries, sports leagues, clubs, churches — you name it.
Murphy’s legislation is the first step to building that infrastructure and pushing forward the other pillars of the advisory. If it’s enacted, the second pillar kicks in. That means social connection will be included in all policies — on every level of government and in all our institutions — and will mandate a framework of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which divides people based on their physical characteristics and uses those divisions as justification for discrimination.
The health care sector would then monitor and track our social connections. Ditto for Big Tech. This will all be bolstered by a propaganda campaign to “raise public awareness.” To top it all off, we can expect the government to cultivate a “culture of connection” that compels Americans to adopt federally defined and federally approved values in their personal relationships.
Ironies Abound
Aside from the absurdity of enlisting the federal bureaucracy to solve a deeply spiritual problem, Murphy’s legislation is loaded with points that should irritate any reasonable person. Does he actually believe this stuff? What about the federal government’s role in creating the loneliness epidemic in the first place through such monstrosities as the welfare state? Has he thought that through and reconsidered policies that have caused so much misery?
Indeed, both the senator and the surgeon general have done the requisite “listening tours” to lend some credibility to their proposals. To hear them talk about loneliness as a public health crisis, you’d think they independently discovered a shocking new pandemic and are now sharing their proposed vaccines with the world.
The fact is that everybody already knows about the loneliness epidemic, and everybody already knows that the pain of loneliness is unhealthy. This has been documented for decades, even though we shouldn’t need scientific studies to prove what’s palpable. Obviously, mental health is adversely affected if we’re in a state of severe isolation. The stress of loneliness also affects our physical health — including risk of heart disease, stroke, early onset of dementia, and premature death.
And what everyone should know, but many won’t acknowledge, is the government’s role in unraveling our society. We can see it in the constant push — particularly by Democrat members of Congress like Murphy — for policies that tolerate and even promote family breakdown, urban blight, crime, addictions, and countless other alienating conditions in life.
As Nathanael Blake recently pointed out here at The Federalist, the sexual revolution has played a huge role in our epidemic of loneliness and social isolation, particularly in stimulating family breakdown. Yet Murphy and his Democrat colleagues continue to push for alienating agendas such as unlimited abortion and the transing of children. On top of this, left-wing efforts to suppress competing views are ramping up. Broken families, suppression of speech, living in fear — all these and more are central elements of isolation and loneliness. Yet those who promote such destabilizing policies show no intention of dialing them back.
Now — ironically? weirdly? — the feds want to fix your loneliness with yet another set of policies and bureaucracies while sustaining all the policies and bureaucracies that have contributed greatly to the growth of that very sense of isolation. So what gives? Why are they midwifing yet another federal department that promises more bloat and waste without accomplishing its stated mission?
Obviously, the unstated purpose is social engineering, as usual. If left to their own devices, the senator’s follow-up legislation to the surgeon general’s advisory will inevitably serve to regulate our personal relationships. That purpose fits perfectly into the long historical pattern of tyrannical attacks on the private sphere of life. And while they give lip service to promoting human connections, they are paving a road to more social atomization through more federal control of those connections. That’s the established pattern of budding tyrannies throughout modern history.
Family, faith, and community are the last institutions standing that have not yet been completely subverted by ruling elites. These mediating institutions serve as buffer zones between the lone individual and the mass state. They give us the inner strength to resist the designs of social engineers. If our rulers really cared about the problem of social isolation, they would get out of the way. They would encourage the flourishing of families, faith, and true community and friendship.
If you can’t believe that, then ask yourself why the advisory claims that those with higher levels of social connection (more family, faith communities, friends) enjoy more benefits (i.e., “unearned privileges”) in life than those with fewer. Ask yourself why DEI, which is steeped in identity politics, is baked into the surgeon general’s advisory as a non-negotiable part of the strategy.
Murphy’s National Strategy for Social Connection Act will not work. Neither is it meant to work as stated. Rather, it’s another federally proposed train wreck that will make our loneliness epidemic worse than ever before. It’s designed to erode our last outposts of freedom in the private sphere of life. We can’t let that happen.
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