You're Invisible Now, With No Direction Home
You used to laugh about,
Everybody that was hangin’ out,
Now you don’t talk so loud,
Now you don’t seem so proud,
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.— Bob Dylan (“Like a Rolling Stone,” 1965)
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A long time ago, a friend returned from a short vacation in a government camp. One of his stories of his time there was about an inmate who refused to leave on his release date. The guards had to chase this individual around. He tried to hide under his bed, but the guards quickly found him, and then put him out on the other side of the fence.
I can’t remember if I ever knew what he’d done, or how long he’d been in custody. The point is that institutionalization is a real phenomenon. It is a fact that most people will adapt to life in prison, and that this adaptation will usually make the eventual adjustment to life outside of the walls difficult, to a greater or lesser degree.
Although somewhat counter-intuitive, it is normal and natural to adapt to abnormal and unnatural conditions. Further, the dysfunction in the adaptation is not what is pathological. Instead, the dysfunction is the normal response to the pathological conditions. These conditions include a comprehensive panoply of dehumanizing indignities, including a deprivation of privacy and liberty, a harsh and rigid routine, and the stress of unpleasant, often pervasively violent, and sparse material conditions.
It almost goes without saying that the longer someone is incarcerated, the more significant the institutional transformation will be. Similarly, the effect tends to be more intense on the young, because there is less internal tension between the demands of the institution and the autonomy present in a mature adult.
It also almost goes without saying that the more extreme, harsh, dangerous, or psychologically-taxing, the nature of the confinement, the greater the percentage of people will suffer damage, and the deeper that damage will be.
The psychological mechanism involved is that prisoners suffer a painful adjustment in the relinquishment of their freedom and autonomy. In this process, they will suppress their self-reliance and independence. This will make them increasingly dependent upon the demands of the institution, which their natural instinct is to resist. Eventually, however, it is “normal” not to have control over day-to-day decisions, so that prisoners come to be dependent upon the prison administration to make their choices, and also to rely on the structure and schedule of prison life.
This process can even create extreme dependency. Inmates are forced to adapt to clear boundaries and limits with severe consequences for even minor infractions. This immersion in a deep network of rules, regulations, and highly visible systems of constraint can so thoroughly surround a prisoner that his internal controls will atrophy. Prisoners can lose the capacity to rely on themselves and their judgment, so that when the structure is removed, they are unable to take care of things on their own.
Coupled with this dependency, most prisoners learn to find safety in social invisibility — by becoming as inconspicuous and as disconnected from others as possible. This kind of social withdrawal and isolation typically means deeply retreating into themselves, trusting no one, and leading lives of quiet desperation. In the extreme cases, which are more common than not, this pattern will closely resemble clinical depression.
The point is not that life is difficult for prisoners, or to imply a moral value thereabout. The point is that the difficulties of life in prison, or more particularly, the adaptation to these difficulties, create habits of thinking and acting which can be dysfunctional in the adjustment to, and in, life after prison.
Compounding this problem is that while we know that the most negative, and potentially debilitating, consequences of institutionalization are internal chaos, disorganization, stress, and fear, institutionalization teaches people to conceal their internal stresses, and not to openly reveal intimate feelings or reactions. As a result, an outward appearance of normality and adjustment, or even just a flat affect, may mask a range of serious problems with adapting to the free world.
These dynamics of institutionalization can be particularly difficult for people who return to the free world without a network of close, personal contacts with people who know them well enough to sense that something may be wrong. For these people, when they are confronted with complicated problems or conflicts, especially in the form of unexpected events, the challenge(s) can become overwhelming.
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I mention this for two reasons.
First, the Surgeon General recently released a report entitled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” The upshot of this report is that loneliness and isolation is wide-spread in the United States, and the loneliness and isolation that many people in the United States are experiencing is a substantial health risk.
And just as the institutionalization-effect of life in prison affects the young most intensely, this “epidemic” of loneliness and isolation is most greatly affecting the young.
The Surgeon General doesn’t do a very good job in exploring why this “epidemic” exists. Instead, he glosses over this important question with conclusory comments that the circumstances and technological advances of the world as it is today have significantly reduced the social connections of most people. Since he is part of the government, it’s not a surprise that he fails to account for how the Covid-19 lockdown and economic and social oppressions may be contributing factors in this “epidemic.”
Had he given this latter issue some thought, he might have noticed that his prescription for mitigating or resolving the “epidemic” looks very much like the typical manual on how to get along in the world after leaving prison. Paraphrasing his report and these types of “after prison” manuals, the suggestions are to ease into the culture shock, learn how to use new technologies, adopt strategies to deal with frustration and depression, set small goals and think positively, and avoid negative influences and addictions.
To his credit, he acknowledges that more research is required:
As a next step, relevant stakeholders, including government, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers, should work together to establish a research agenda focused on addressing identified gaps in the evidence base, fund research at levels commensurate with the seriousness of the problem, and create a plan to increase research coordination.
My suggestion is that he make a candid assessment of the government’s horribly misguided response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which by every rational metric, has been a public policy failure of galactic proportion. He should do this in order to determine the degree to which that response is a contributing factor in the epidemic with which his report is concerned. Furthermore, since most of the Western world was forced into, or acceded to, an essentially totalitarian regime, which was at least akin to, if not the functional equivalent of, an open-air prison, he should look at how people adapt to prison pathologies. This is probably a valuable model or case study for insight into how the government’s actions were at least a partial cause of the epidemic of loneliness and isolation, and for guidance on how the government might provide resources to help the people who have been hurt.
Second, the richest few doubled their wealth during the Covid-19 hysteria.
I refuse to accept that this is a coincidence. Obviously, I can’t prove that this was the intention in the creation of a virus in a lab which is both highly infectious and highly toxic to human beings. However, considering the history of the world, I’m not able to discount this possibility without much more evidence. The complete lack of candor and contrition from the government certainly doesn’t help persuade me that any part of the economic disaster and human suffering now engulfing the world has a wholly innocent explanation.
The point being that given the Covid-19 “pandemic” was a roaring success for the people who own the government, and given that these people have no compunction about how they come by, or increase, their wealth, we’d be foolish not to heed the possibility that we will, sooner or later, see a repeat of what we were put through; perhaps not exactly the same, but almost certainly more extreme.
We know from prison studies, from studies on depression, and from the Surgeon General’s report, that the key to strong individuals and to strong societies is what the Surgeon General calls, “social connections.” This means fostering relationships with friends and family. If we all work at this, we’ll all, individually and together, be better off for it, and we’ll all, individually and socially, be better able to recognize and resist future oppression.
We also know from the Nazis’ studies on psychological warfare, as taught to the CIA after the war, the inverse of the Surgeon General’s recommendation. The Nazis instruct that the key to totalitarian control over a population is to isolate and frighten the people, and then to pound away at them across all media with a simple message, while suppressing dissent to that message.