Where loneliness can lead: Hannah Arendt enjoyed her solitude, but she believed that loneliness could make people susceptible to totalitarianism

Before reading, it's pretty important to mention what Arendt meant by 'loneliness', and why isolation is treated as a separate term in the sub-headline:

She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others. The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings.

In order to illustrate why loneliness is the essence of totalitarianism and the common ground of terror, Arendt distinguished isolation from loneliness, and loneliness from solitude. Isolation, she argued, is sometimes necessary for creative activity. Even the mere reading of a book, she says requires some degree of isolation. One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of solitude but, once alone, one is always able to turn back:

Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated – that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me – without being lonely; and I can be lonely – that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship – without being isolated.

When Arendt wrote to her husband: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five times a week – in other words, never get out of the public eye. I feel as if I have to go around looking for myself,’ she wasn’t vainly complaining about the limelight. The constant exposure to a public audience made it impossible for her to keep company with herself. She was unable to find the private, self-reflective space necessary for thinking. She was unable to people her solitude.

‘What makes loneliness so unbearable,’ she said ‘is the loss of one’s own self which can be realised in solitude …’

So no, this is not an op-ed on how 'getting a life'/making friends is the cure to political extremism. (Although I would totally read something like that just because it sounds really based/funny/memetic.) Her definition is more analogous to "the cubicle life" or "too busy to think about life" type of loneliness rather than being alone by yourself doing nothing or not being busy with the stuff I mentioned in my offhand comment.