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The Weaponization of Loneliness
The Weaponization of Loneliness offers the first deep dive into how power elites weaponize the fear of loneliness to enforce social conformity and wage war on the private sphere of life.
Do you keep your opinions to yourself because you’re afraid people will reject you? Do you sign on to a cause just because everyone around you acts like it’s the right thing to do?
Welcome to The Weaponization of Loneliness . Tyrants of all stripes want to tell you what to believe and how to live your life. They get away with it by using the most potent weapon at their disposal: your fear of ostracism.
This book explains how dictators—from the French Revolution to the Communist Party of China to today’s globalists—aim to atomize us in order to control us. We fall for it because our need to connect with others and our fear of social rejection are so hardwired that they trigger our conformity impulse. These dynamics can even cause us to comply with evil orders.
We all need a better understanding of how the merchants of loneliness—power elites in Big Tech, Big Media, Big Government, academia, Hollywood, and the corporate world— exploit our terror of social isolation. Their divide-and-conquer tactics include identity politics, political correctness, and mob agitation. Their media monopoly spawns the propaganda essential to demonization campaigns, censorship, cancel culture, snitch culture, struggle sessions, the criminalization of comedy, and the subversion of society’s most fundamental institutions. It all adds up to a machinery of loneliness. Ironically, people tend to comply with this machinery to avoid loneliness, but such compliance only isolates us further.
The Weaponization of Loneliness offers a message of hope. We can resist this psychological warfare if we have strong bonds in our families, faith communities, and friendships. Let’s resolve to talk to one another openly and often, especially about the consequences of giving in to social pressures and media hype. Indeed, totalitarians always seek to destroy private life because it is the very fount of freedom.
Do you keep your opinions to yourself because you’re afraid people will reject you? Do you sign on to a cause just because everyone around you acts like it’s the right thing to do?
Welcome to The Weaponization of Loneliness . Tyrants of all stripes want to tell you what to believe and how to live your life. They get away with it by using the most potent weapon at their disposal: your fear of ostracism.
This book explains how dictators—from the French Revolution to the Communist Party of China to today’s globalists—aim to atomize us in order to control us. We fall for it because our need to connect with others and our fear of social rejection are so hardwired that they trigger our conformity impulse. These dynamics can even cause us to comply with evil orders.
We all need a better understanding of how the merchants of loneliness—power elites in Big Tech, Big Media, Big Government, academia, Hollywood, and the corporate world— exploit our terror of social isolation. Their divide-and-conquer tactics include identity politics, political correctness, and mob agitation. Their media monopoly spawns the propaganda essential to demonization campaigns, censorship, cancel culture, snitch culture, struggle sessions, the criminalization of comedy, and the subversion of society’s most fundamental institutions. It all adds up to a machinery of loneliness. Ironically, people tend to comply with this machinery to avoid loneliness, but such compliance only isolates us further.
The Weaponization of Loneliness offers a message of hope. We can resist this psychological warfare if we have strong bonds in our families, faith communities, and friendships. Let’s resolve to talk to one another openly and often, especially about the consequences of giving in to social pressures and media hype. Indeed, totalitarians always seek to destroy private life because it is the very fount of freedom.
304 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2022
33 people are currently reading
177 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 22, 2025
I tend to pay attention when a former CIA analyst writes a nonfiction book about the weaponization of loneliness. Beyond the obvious worth of her sobering assessment, it's instructive to see how Stella Morabito keeps a dispassionate "Just the facts, ma'am" tone throughout. Joe Friday would be proud (Few people remember the old Dragnet TV series, but I'm all about cultural preservation, and I think Ms. Morabito would approve of citing that careworn LA detective in this context).
Thing one among my takeaways: The administrative state is not your friend, because the progressives who've encouraged its exponential growth want to control even formerly private interactions between people. Where control is not yet an option, they settle for influence. But they're clever ideologues, and the most dangerous among them deliberately push policies that segregate people by race, class, gender, religion, vaccine status, ethnicity, or whatever other metric might be turned into a social cudgel.
Thing two among my takeaways: Free speech is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition, so avoid self-censorship, ignore the "blame and shame" game to the best of your ability, and cultivate real rather than online relationships with people in your life, forming "parallel polises" (institutions) in response to the corruption wrought by what Morabito aptly calls "the machinery of loneliness."
Many more people should read this book than probably will. Those of us who do read it are grateful for Morabito's clear-eyed diagnosis. I expected solid theory -- and the book has that -- but it's practical, too. As per her subtitle, Morabito shows "How tyrants stoke our fear of isolation to silence, divide, and conquer." It's also worth noting that while totalitarianism is formidable, it's not unbeatable. We're in a war, Morabito asserts, but "all warfare is spiritual," and we're not defenseless.
Thing one among my takeaways: The administrative state is not your friend, because the progressives who've encouraged its exponential growth want to control even formerly private interactions between people. Where control is not yet an option, they settle for influence. But they're clever ideologues, and the most dangerous among them deliberately push policies that segregate people by race, class, gender, religion, vaccine status, ethnicity, or whatever other metric might be turned into a social cudgel.
Thing two among my takeaways: Free speech is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition, so avoid self-censorship, ignore the "blame and shame" game to the best of your ability, and cultivate real rather than online relationships with people in your life, forming "parallel polises" (institutions) in response to the corruption wrought by what Morabito aptly calls "the machinery of loneliness."
Many more people should read this book than probably will. Those of us who do read it are grateful for Morabito's clear-eyed diagnosis. I expected solid theory -- and the book has that -- but it's practical, too. As per her subtitle, Morabito shows "How tyrants stoke our fear of isolation to silence, divide, and conquer." It's also worth noting that while totalitarianism is formidable, it's not unbeatable. We're in a war, Morabito asserts, but "all warfare is spiritual," and we're not defenseless.
March 10, 2023
Review to follow
July 14, 2025
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Karen Hart
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Book Review of The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer by Stella Morabito.
Karen Hart
Karen Hart
4 min read
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Mar 21, 2023
195
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You need to read this book!
The Weaponization of Loneliness is an important but deeply flawed book. It tackles a formidable subject — the power of the state against an individual and their traditional sources of power, which are family, friends, and religion.
One flaw is that the author, Stella Morabito, is a former CIA agent and that she does not come out and denounce her former employers and the depths of their corruption and depravity.
She also categorizes the Black Lives Movement as purely identity politics and does not acknowledge the terrible racism that causes the deaths of Black Americans through police violence, poor health care, and racist economic structures.
Another flaw is that she, while briefly acknowledging the achievements of the protests of the Civil Rights Era, calls almost all other protests mobs. When discussing the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution she justifiably points out their barbarity but does not acknowledge the decades, indeed centuries, of injustice that had preceded them. The rigid class structures that had subjugated 9/10ths of these populations were not easily shed.
Nonetheless, this is a book you need to read.
I love the title, The Weaponization of Loneliness, because it brings to the forefront what has been the hidden pressure against people on the wrong side of government for decades. They aim to separate you from family, community and religion. This can be as brutal as the Soviet crackdowns against the Orthodox Church or the Chinese Government against the Falun Gong or under the guise of a “benevolent government” as in the unprecedented closings of houses of worship during Covid. Or it can be the mockery and memes of religion shown in mainstream and social media. It can be family and friends on social media not just disagreeing with your post but blocking you and unfriending. People are encouraged to drop family members with differing political opinions. These are practices of cultists.
And these techniques which used to be reserved for revolutionaries and dissidents are now being unleashed against ordinary Americans just expressing their opinions.
You used to have to be a Tupac Shakur, an outspoken rapper promoting social change with a target on his back since birth (son of poet and activist Afeni Shakur), or Gary Webb, a journalist exposing the CIA running crack into Black neighborhoods or even before that, civil rights leaders like Malcolm X or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. . Now you can become a target by being a parent speaking in front of a school board or a Catholic who likes to attend the traditional Latin Mass. Or, sadly, a scientist who expresses some measure of doubt about the safety of the Covid vaccine. They increasingly try to “cancel” you for differing from the “mainstream”. Their aim is to silence any outliers. (I found this out myself when the Boston Globe took away my right to comment during Covid because I was asking the “wrong” questions.)
Morabito shows how important it is to stay true to what you believe and how even one voice can make a difference. We all have an impulse towards conformity, to go along with the group no matter what. She describes psychological experiments when a subject was surrounded by people giving the blatantly wrong answer, 75% of the subjects would also give the wrong answer. “But whenever that unanimity is punctured– even by just one voice — the power of the group starts to collapse.” (Morabito 40).
She reminds us that the best way to be able to withstand these deliberate, public pressures is to have a strong private life. “But if you have a strong private life — a stable home, friendships, faith — you have a built-in escape hatch from the burdens of social pressures. You can then survive a nasty school, a toxic workplace, or an oppressive government.”
Her tips for Reviving Civil Society are these:
Reviving comedy
Filling gaps in general knowledge
Investing in the local community
Support the revival of beauty in the public square
Tips for the War on Tyranny:
The ultimate weapon against isolation is the private sphere of life
Free speech is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition
Radical Utopians only offer the illusion of safety
Totalitarianism contains the seeds of its own destruction
Live “as if” you are free
The vast majority of people want truth, order, and freedom
Support victims of cancel culture
Take the lead wherever you can
She develops each more fully and I recommend you look at them, on pages 210–216, but the one I took most to heart was Live “as if” you are free, (and to some in America this advice is more dangerous than others). She writes, “ ‘As if’ was the strategy of Polish freedom fighters who lived under Soviet communism. They concluded that to be free, they must always live as if they were free. As soon as they started to act free, they spoke freely and boldly published their ideas through the underground ‘samizdat’ press. Yes, the consequences involved goon squad confrontations, confiscations, and arrests. However, in those spheres of activity led by strong individuals the ‘as if’ rippled outward, illuminating the truth to others in society. The alternative is slavery.” (Morabito 214)
June 27, 2024
Love that a former CIA analyst took the time to expose the calculated agenda of tyranny in this country and provided actionable steps to remedy the madness. This was an excellent and very well-researched book.
January 13, 2023
This a timely and thought provoking book. As we see around us a frantic campaign to control what we read and hear, what we say, and ultimately how we act, this book reveals the forces behind it and how we can recover our freedom from those intent on creating their idea of a “perfect world” for us to live in.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews