Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
On a recent episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast,” former CIA analyst Stella Morabito explained how the powerful have used the fear of loneliness as a tool to gain and maintain authority and people can resist by refusing self-censorship and connecting with others.
Morabito, author of “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer,” pointed to Dr. Anthony Fauci as someone in a position of power who weaponized the fear of loneliness.
Morabito, a senior contributor at The Federalist, told host Virginia Allen that connecting with others is a fundamental aspect of human nature. “We are hardwired to connect with other people … We cannot survive in isolation,” she said.
That’s why “instilling fear of ostracism,” has been a powerful tool for totalitarian leaders, societies and cults — like Hitler’s Nazi Germany or Jim Jones’ Jonestown.
Today, Morabito said, figures like Fauci and the billionaire leaders at the World Economic Forum use the fear of loneliness to maintain their own power.
The COVID-19 lockdowns, Morabito said, were literally, “the enforcement of our isolation.” And smear terms like “conspiracy theory” are intentionally used “to shut people up and make them even lie about what they believe,” she said.
People comply out of fear, she said, which may give them temporary relief from isolation. But the effect is that we “isolate ourselves even further as we develop this spiral of silence and all of society ends up falling in the grip of this weaponization of loneliness.”
Allen asked Morabito who the key players weaponizing fear of loneliness are in the U.S. today.
“Fauci symbolizes all of that. More than symbolizes it, I mean, he directed so much of it.”
But he is just one part of what Morabito called a “hydra-headed beast” that includes Big Tech, Big Media, the corporate world and anyone who pushes the “propagandistic narrative” by marginalizing dissent.
“How intentional do you think it is?” Allen asked. Are Fauci and others asking themselves, “How can I weaponize this tool, loneliness, to control people?”
Morabito said she doesn’t think it is necessarily so explicit.
“I don’t know the extent to which they would intentionally ‘weaponize loneliness.’ I think much of it is instinctive, not conscious …
“I think a lot of these folks really do think that they know best and the rest of us schlubs don’t really understand how the world ‘should work.’”
Allen asked what steps people could take in their own lives to fight this weaponization.
Morabito said people need to build a culture that resists practices of self-censorship.
“Much of our power comes from within just daily life, just from one-on-one conversations” where people share their thoughts honestly, she said, adding:
“The voice of one person can make a huge difference.
“And if you don’t believe that, just think about what all of these people pushing censorship are doing. They don’t even want one person going against the narrative. So that should tell you everything you need to know.”
“If we follow the lead of people who are speaking truth and listen,” and “develop parallel institutions that can take the place of these corrupted institutions — all of these things work together to rebuild civil society,” said Morabito.
Listen here:
