It is not yet April Fool's Day, so I took reports that British Prime Minister Theresa May has decided to appoint a "minister of loneliness" seriously.
The background to the story is sad: Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered a year and a half ago by a radical right-winger, had devoted a lot of time to the issue of loneliness in the modern era. The Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness recently submitted its report and conclusions, and recommended that the government establish a ministry to address the issue of loneliness and social isolation.
May took the recommendation and said that in a poll on the issue, 9 million Britons described themselves as "lonely." May called loneliness the hidden disease of our time and decided to put the country's former undersecretary for sport, Tracey Crouch, in charge of the issue of loneliness.
There are regimes that establish mood ministries – for national morale, for example. But Britain, even after the Brexit vote, isn't one of them. There is something Orwellian about the establishment of a "ministry of loneliness." If the lonely become happy, the country could found ministries of frustration, sadness, or indignation. Government institutions will address all these phenomena and suggest solutions so that the people of the nation will be happy and conduct themselves like disciplined, satisfied citizens. Chilling.
Loneliness cannot be measured like a disability, loss of the ability to work, weight gain, or mental illness. It is a feeling, and it is not restricted to people who live on their own. Some people rise to the top of the systems in which they are active (politics, the military, law, media) and complain about the loneliness of being at the top. People with small families and people with large families feel loneliness. Sometimes a person who is surrounded by loved ones and appears to have every reason in the world to be happy will speak of being lonely. What can a government ministry do for them?
I'm not suggesting that we ignore the problem, and certainly not trying to play it down, but I am convinced that this is exactly why we have the civil sector. If governments want to fund the activity of organizations in this sector to combat loneliness, that might be the right thing to do. The civil sector knows how to handle problems that government doesn't, and that's why it exists. Before the "ministry of loneliness" sets up divisions for loneliness among the young, the elderly, the sick, and the healthy, and before people are appointed who will then do everything in their power to justify their positions, and before people forget why the ministry was established in the first place and whoever is in charge has to fight to increase or maintain its budget, the May administration should think about a more effective way of honoring the murdered MP Jo Cox, to whom the battle against loneliness was so important.
