Being lonely is very bad for your health. Multiple studies have demonstrated this over the years. More depression, cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes… From an individual point of view, “social disconnection” eats away at a person’s state of health like consuming 15 cigarettes a day, recalled in 2023 the American doctor Vivek H. Murthy, national public health administrator in the United States.
What is less said is the extent to which the social isolation of individuals ends up affecting the entire democratic society. “Democracy doesn’t guarantee social connectivity, that’s true,” says sociologist passionate about issues of loneliness and social isolation Kim Samuel. “But a lack of social connections undermines democracy. »
But before talking about totalitarianism, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt and the “dark side” of the need to belong, Kim Samuel prefers to talk… about British postal workers.
“Have you heard about the Postal Service scandal?” Here, it shocks everyone,” says this native of Ontario who travels between McGill and Oxford universities, whom we joined by videoconference at the end of January in her London apartment.
The “British Post Office Scandal”, therefore, dates back to 1999. That year, a new IT inventory management system, called Horizon, began to be implemented in the network of postal counters in the country. These are managed by merchants who obtain a concession from The Post Office, the state company which coordinates the mail distribution network.
The Horizon system was malfunctioning. Soon, postal workers complained that Horizon detected an inconsistent imbalance between revenues and expenses. But managers at The Post Office ignored postal workers’ complaints. Worse: between 1999 and 2015, the company prosecuted at least 700 postal workers for fraud and theft based on erroneous information provided by Horizon. That’s more than one postal worker accused per week… for 16 years.
Read the article “Alone against the system”
In this whole saga, which is still making headlines in the United Kingdom 25 years later, Kim Samuel was struck by one element in particular.
When postal workers reported problems with Horizon, each of them was told they were the only person claiming the system was wrong. The only ! For me, that’s the most terrible thing.
Kim Samuel, sociologist and associate professor at Green Templeton College
It was no coincidence. Public inquiries showed that call center agents responsible for helping postal workers were instructed to tell them that no one else had reported an error. As a result, the credibility of the postman’s complaint was undermined. “I felt stupid to learn that I was the only person who had problems,” postal worker Margery Lorraine Williams testified at her 2021 hearing.
The consequences of this isolation were devastating.
Unable to dispute the apparently irrefutable proof provided by Horizon, postal workers dipped into their savings to cover the shortfall. Many have lost their business, their reputation. Some went to prison. Cases of suicide attempts and suicides have been reported.
“Since there was no mention anywhere that other postal workers had experienced the same thing as me, [ma situation] seemed completely hopeless to me,” another postal worker, Hughie Noel Thomas, testified about the moment he was sentenced to nine months in prison. After serving his sentence, he kept silent about these events for three years. “I felt terribly alone, believe me. »
It was only from 2008 that testimonies began to emerge and doubts were publicly raised about Horizon’s reliability. “And people realized it wasn’t just about them. They were able to come together. They were no longer alone,” says Kim Samuel.
And there it is, the link with the German philosopher Hannah Arendt.
Discreet totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt fled Nazi Germany in 1933, then returned at the end of the war to try to understand what had been going on in the minds of her compatriots. In his work The origins of totalitarianism “, published in 1951, Hannah Arendt observes that this system is based on the feeling of solitude, which she describes as an “experience of absolute non-belonging to the world, which is one of the most radical and most despair of man.
“Despots rely on disconnection,” recalls Professor Samuel.
Basically, isolated people have more difficulty organizing, participating in public discourse, and questioning government representatives. When we are disconnected from meaningful relationships with other people in our communities, it is virtually impossible to take collective action against injustice.
Sociologist Kim Samuel
Of course, the threat of the establishment of a totalitarian political regime in countries like the United Kingdom or Canada may be low.
“But what happened with the postal workers at The Post Office shows you how easily things can go wrong if there isn’t a place where people can connect with each other. »