There are lots of hot takes and post mortems circulating about why the US vote went decisively to Trump on November 6. This episode of Kinward podcast is not trying to be another one.
But, as this season in politics got stranger and stranger—and more flattened and fragmented—I knew I wanted to have a nuanced conversation, after the election, regardless of the outcome, with someone I trusted to reach toward a bigger picture.
So I asked my brother John, whom I respect enormously for the wide variety of frames he’s cultivated to see the world through, if he’d sit down with me.
As we acknowledge in this episode, probably every one of the hot takes has some truth in it. And, we agree, most of those simple stories don’t come anywhere near to the deeper forces that are at play right now. Early in this episode, John compares the pundits’ hot takes to debates over which straw broke the camel’s back. Those straws are real, but that camel, poor struggling creature, was already loaded with boulders.
In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, WWII-era German-American philosopher Hanna Arendt uses the word verlassenheit (sometimes translated, inadequately, as “loneliness,” “left-behindness” or “abandonment”) to describe a pervasive social isolation among the body politic—a closed-off rigidity in the minds of the people which sets the stage, Arendt argues, for authoritarianism to arise.
In 2023, the US Surgeon General released an advisory warning that an “epidemic of loneliness”—developing for decades and supercharged by Covid—is now taking a public health toll comparable to heart disease or diabetes. A NYT Magazine think piece from earlier this year (2024) describes the mental and physiological impacts of loneliness (inflammation of the body, paralysis of the mind and spirit) and reminds us that on a very deep biological level, we are designed to “prioritize togetherness.” As one researcher in the article puts it, very simply: the feeling of loneliness is a “biological signal” that tells us that “something is wrong.”
Something is wrong in this country.
I think most of us, wherever we sit on the political spectrum, feel it: this pervasive sense that something is wrong. There’s an unease in our bodies and body politic. A stuckness in our physical and social ecosystems. The wrongness is not the symptoms the left rails against—not Trump, or disinformation, or even racism. The wrongness is not the bogeymen of the right—not wokeness, or immigrants, or inflation. I believe we’re dealing with something much more fundamental, more existential.
I believe and sense, as I’ve believed and sensed for years, that what’s wrong, maybe the deepest thing that’s wrong, is that we’re lonely.
Lonely for the close-knit communities we come into this world hard-wired to “expect, but which we did not receive.” Abandoned and misunderstood by the institutions that are supposed to keep us safe and the world stable. Displaced from the homelands that were stolen or developed or poisoned out from under us (all of our ancestors, at some point more or less recently in our multilayered lineages, identified ourselves with a place and its stories and patterns). Left behind, as a world of predictable seasons and familiar cohorts of other-than-human beings collapse into climate chaos and mass extinction.
The people in the loneliness studies explain that what they are grieving is a shortage of meaningful connections. So many of us, despite the virtual network that ostensibly connects us 24/7, have no felt sense of belonging in our communities, much less in the wider web of life.
Verlassenheit.
There’s a lot to explore about the color and flavor of that loneliness, its origins and impacts, the stories, structures, and feedback loops that trigger and maintain it. I’m not going to dive into all of that today; I have a lot of thoughts, but I think this is an old, old and multifaceted severance, and I don’t spend a lot of time expounding diagnoses these days, anyway. Instead, this body of work, Kinward, takes our loneliness as a given. It’s a modern condition. Here, we are always already searching for the ways we reclaim togetherness.
This post-election episode is about trust. And power, and the information environment, and vulnerability and the origins and ongoing practice of democracy, and staying grounded. And mostly trust—which may be the opposite of verlassenheit.
John de Villier is an aspiring naturalist turned climate and energy consultant who is frequently distracted by history and the classics. If the world was more ok he would probably be on his knees in the woods digging in the dirt and trying to figure out how the hell trees and mycorrhizae get along so well. His life project is collecting and sharing as many lenses as possible through which to view the world.
And he’s my brother. And he’s not on social media, as we discuss in this episode. Good for him. In a couple of weeks, my family and I will be feasting at his house.
In this episode, John and I sit with the bewilderment and biases of this post-election moment and try to steer toward each other, toward our fellow Americans, toward the other beings with whom we walk and breathe, with the baseline assumption that democracy—or any kind of functional community—can only survive when we attend to one another: speak and listen with that heart-mind that encounters, instead of object or soundbite or data point, fellow creature.
A so-called kinship worldview and the practices that maintain it—a frame and body of practice where we believe and behave as if we are all in this together—does a lot more than soothe us (and the soothing matters!). It orients us to responsibilities and consequences—to the deep future and the past. It distributes agency, safety, and learning beyond the individual, relieving the pressure we feel and actively countering our feelings of isolation. Its living web of relationships offers feedback beyond the narrow rewards and punishments of our increasingly obsolete institutions.
This is not my hot take. It’s a slow one, an ongoing and embodied one, a lot of work, a lot of learning and unlearning. And a lot to count on, too, and celebrate. A lot to trust, actually.
And that’s what we’re here for, now, I feel and believe.
Take care of yourselves and your friends, friends. If something in this sometimes-playful and often-earnest episode loosens your grip on a too-simple story of what is happening now, consider becoming a sustaining subscriber of Kinward podcast for $7 a month.
Thank you, and thanks so much to those who already contribute financially to support this work.
Other gratitudes for this episode include: to John, for always having a historical or biological anecdote, often a funny one (or a laugh-so-you-don’t-cry one), at hand to concretize his perspectives; to Oregon Humanities, for a compelling and very timely conversation about preserving democracy with Manu Meel, the Gen Z co-founder of BridgeUSA; to the earth beneath my feet in my morning sit spot, which has been palpably giving me foot-hugs as I’ve prayed to maintain my sense of spaciousness in these stressful last several weeks; to
for her excellent essay exploring the entangled origins of democracy and theatre in ancient Athens, which I reference in this episode; and to all of you, for listening.Be well, folks.
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