How loneliness lures men towards right-wing radicals

Helen Coffey, The Independent

Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man, the Greek philosopher Aristotle famously once said. He meant that those formative years are the most important — that the way we raise children when they’re young lays the foundations for the adults they will become. For a 2,300-year-old theory, it’s aged remarkably well. Pretty much all modern psychotherapy is predicated on the premise that what happens in infancy and the relationship we have with our primary caregiver/s is fundamental to what we’re like (and the issues we’ll struggle with) later in life. And, arguably, his words could be just as relevant when it comes to what has been dubbed the “male loneliness epidemic”. The way we bring up boys seems to create lonely men; the negative consequences of this are being felt throughout society.

The fact that loneliness has been on the rise in recent years is well documented. In 2023, the World Health Organisation (WHO) went so far as to declare loneliness a “global health threat”. The US surgeon general, Dr Vivek Murthy, intentionally picked the term “epidemic” to hammer home the perceived health risks: research shows that loneliness is as bad for you as smoking a dozen cigarettes a day. Age-wise, research has shown a “horseshoe effect”, with the oldest and youngest most at risk. One in four older people feel lonely, regardless of where they are in the world, while between 5 and 15 per cent of adolescents are lonely. “There is evidence that loneliness has increased over time in places like the United Kingdom and Australia, with a notable rise during the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions,” says Marlee Bower, a research fellow at the University of Sydney, who co-wrote a paper entitled Predictors of male loneliness across life stages. While she thinks calling loneliness an “epidemic” can be slightly misleading — “since loneliness doesn’t spread like a contagious disease” — she agrees that the term “does capture the urgency of the issue” and the need to address it “at a societal level”.

Loneliness is, clearly, not unique to the male half of the population (and in fact men tend to underreport loneliness compared to women). Yet its effects can be more extreme in men. Rates of suicide in England and Wales, for example, are more than three times higher in men than women. According to a study from King’s College London, men who identified as lonely drank significantly more alcohol than their non-lonely counterparts. Lonely women, by contrast, drank less. Certainly a lack of friendships, particularly intimate ones, is much more common to men. Research conducted in 2021 found that 15 per cent of men claimed to have no close friends, a whopping 12 per cent higher than 30 years ago. According to the King’s College study, older men rated their friendships as lower quality than women.

More poignantly still, a 2023 study from non-profit Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice found that the majority of men agreed with the statement, “No one really knows me well”. Young men were by far the most likely to agree, totalling two thirds of those aged 18-23 years old. “Think about that: two out of three men coming out of boyhood are in a state where they believe no one really knows who they are or understands what they’re feeling,” says Dr Michael Reichert, founding director of the Centre for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania and author of How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men. These numbers show that it’s not about an individual pathology, he tells me — it’s systemic and structural. There is something inherent in the way we raise boys that leads them to “live behind a mask” and feel isolated, not only from their peers, but from their parents and families too.

While a “boys will be boys” narrative attempts to pin unhealthy “masculine” behaviours on nature rather than nurture, the research paints a picture in which boys feel forced to retreat from intimate relationships. Much-cited research from Stanford lecturer Judy Chu in her book When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships and Masculinity found something disturbing starts happening from the age of four. She observed a group of a children over the course of two years; at first, the boys connected with each other physically and emotionally and engaged in tender displays of affection.