Like a lot of political solutions, creating a government office to combat loneliness assumes human beings are less like God and more like problems to be solved. If we can just get the technique right, by setting up the right system at scale, we can “reboot” all these lonely humans back to their factory settings so they’ll stop making so much trouble. Of course, because that’s not what humans are, no government program will ever be able to regenerate the fallen human heart. 

Recently Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, proposed The National Strategy for Social Connection Act. The bill has three parts. Part one would create a White House Office of Social Connection Policy to advise the president on the epidemic of loneliness and develop strategies to improve social connection. Part two would mandate the federal government to develop an official, national Anti-Loneliness strategy across all federal agencies. Part three would send more funding to the CDC for the study of the mental and physical effects of loneliness.  

The bill itself exemplifies the clunkiness and inefficiency that characterizes the work of the government: a new office will be formed, then an office will be placed inside that office, and that office will advise and send money to yet another office. 

To be fair to Senator Murphy, America is facing a very dangerous loneliness epidemic that is quickly becoming a public health crisis. Rates of suicide, homicide, depression, self-harm, crime, and social isolation are at all-time highs. These trends are correlated with loneliness, which researchers have found can be twice as detrimental to our physical health as obesity.  

Even if well-intentioned, there are two fundamental problems with Senator Murphy’s legislation. First, no program, government or otherwise, that does not first understand what it means to be human can hope to combat the growing pandemic of loneliness. Second, there are some problems that the government with its clunkiness simply cannot address.  

It is a very modern belief, as Jacques Ellul so clearly described in his writing on the rise of “technocratism,” that all problems can be solved through the proper application of technique and the effective use of technology. This illusion only contributes to the expansion of state power. After all, who else can be trusted to properly apply the technologies that promise to solve our problems? 

Under this illusion, there is less and less room to look to God for help.

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