Loneliness ...

... in the Darkest of Times

3rd Blog, January 2022

Loneliness is a painful affair: rejection, solitude, exile. Irrespective of being personal, social or political, loneliness is a journey reminding us of Dante’s awaking in a dark wood. And although his ‘Comedy’ has a happy-ending, in real life loneliness rarely does. 

Growing up under colonial rule in Mozambique, in a relatively closed social universe, was a lonesome business. And – to make things worst – I was a shy, forsaken, restless child, living in a particularly closed and segregated ‘Overseas’ society, 11 400 km away from its imperial capital.  

In my first trip to Lisbon in the mid 60’s I was sad to see many beggars along its streets, and a degree of human misery unknow to me at home. This episode made me wonder how this tiny, off-centered ruler of widespread territories could have more to do with me beyond the language I spoke.  

From high school onwards, by virtue of a generous book allowance from my parents, I was able to buy a trove of forbidden literature that Senhor Machado (at ‘Salema & Carvalho’) and 'The Daughters of St. Paul' (at Paulistas Bookshop) regularly concealed for me. In the meantime, colonial war erupted in 1964 in Northern Mozambique, which, oddly enough, did not stop a decade of remarkable economic progress in the so-called 'Portuguese Province'. These events lead many of us to hope for the miracle which would liberate us from colonial isolation and backwardness under Salazar’s dictatorship. 

In hindsight, as part of a generation unfamiliar to democratic rule of law, we seemingly longed for freedom as a romantic, Hollywood-inspired, ‘Promised Land’: the miracle of non-racial, egalitarian self-determination, without an ‘Exodus’. As one of the few ‘Afro-Europeans’ who in 1974 saluted a ‘socialist’ independence controled by a single party, I missed the fact that the ideology we were embarking on would lead us to totalitarian terror.

The fact is, that in all naivety, we didn’t imagine that ‘freedom’ could possibly bring new forms of political oppression, beyond the worst of colonial times: arbitrary capital punishment, forced deportation, autocratic nationalisation of private property, the arrogant ‘winning’ despot (Frelimo party) recreating fear as the new rule of action.

We candidly ignored history, the long record of 20th century human misery following the imperial, colonial and totalitarian regimes, all incompatible with the modernity we longed for. Today I regret that my library ignored, among my ‘revolutionary’ literature, two critical authors: Hannah Arendt and Nadezhda Mandelstam. The first reminding us that we must at all times ‘to think what we are doing[1], and the latter –in ‘one of the great human documents of the century’ [2] – painfully detailing their tragic life under Stalin (1924-1953). [3]

Another one of Arendt’ lessons, most relevant today, reminds us of the collapse between the public and private spheres of life, the privatisation of politics, which has opened the door from totalitarianism to neoliberal wonderland: businessmen leaving their private lives to join the public realm in order to grow rich, taking over the functions of the state, their newly owned market: ‘Businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen’[4].

In the new political order –post-colonial states very much included (e.g., Mozambique)– we are now witnessing how openly, unrestrained, private interests steer nations, demolishing recognizable political institutions along the way. In such societies isolated citizens are powerless: corruption and totalitarianism rules. The reader is surely able to name a few of such phony ‘politicians’ operating in ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries alike.

When back to reflecting on my own solitude, as well as much of the social and political seclusion of my generation, I am struck by Arendt’s final pages of 'The Origins of Totalitarianism', namely when warning us that loneliness is the underlying cause of all the totalitarian-based movements: 'What prepares men for totalitarian domination (...) is the fact that loneliness (...) has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century"[5] .

The above is a stark reminder that individually we must learn to think and act in a new way. But how can we, collectively, abstain from evil-doing and have the the will and courage to positively change our common future? How will we battle against the ‘modern worldly alienation’, the tension between the lonely escape from the world into the self, or, collectively, Mankind's attempt to brake away from Earth into the Universe?[6]

Can we look into evolutionary theory for solace and trust? In line with state-of-the-art sociobiology, cooperation is what makes our species distinctive: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups” [7]. Totalitarianism vs Survival of the Unselfish, in a nutshell? 

Above all, what strikes me in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s powerful narrative is the fact that –no matter how much persecuted and cruelly handled under Stalin's dictatorship– she and her husband invariably met with individual goodness. Only this allowed one of them to survive their hideous fate. Only Unselfishness and Love would ultimately save Osip Mandelstam’s artistic creation from oblivion, thanks to his wife's heroic faithfulness. Could there be a higher tale of hardship and hope?


[1] ’The Human Condition’, The University of Chicago Press 2018 ed. (1st publ.1958) pp. Xii and 5; and, particularly, her groundbreaking ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, Penguin 2017 (orig. publ. 1951)

[2] H. Arendt’s words, p. 359, see Baehr, Peter. (2015). Hannah Arendt on Stalinism in Retrospect. History and Theory https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281976590_Hannah_Arendt_on_Stalinism_in_Retrospect

[3] Nadezhda Mandelstam ‘Hope against Hope’, Harvill Press 1999 (1stpubl. 1970, by Atheneum) and ‘Hope Abandoned’, Harvill 2011 (originally publ.1972). 1 036 pages of detailed accounts of their inferno in times of Stalinist evil criminality, particularly the persecution of the poet Osip Mandelstam during 2 decades leading to his death on the way to the Gulag in 1938; and how only thanks to his wife ‘s courage could his poetic legacy be rescued. 

[4] H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin 2017: 179 (orig.publ.1951)

[5] H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism: 627

[6] H. Arendt, On Revolution (NY 1963): 275

[7] https://nautil.us/issue/112/inspiration/eo-wilson-saw-the-world-in-a-wholly-new-way

Photo: 'Epiphany', Archipelago at Fiskebäckskil, Swedish West Coast, 9 August 2019 (João de Morais)


Written by João de Morais

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