The setting was Madison Square Garden, 2023. Roger Waters, the former bassist and vocalist of Pink Floyd, and the primary conceptual architect of their groundbreaking 1979 double-album The Wall, was on stage. He wore a militaristic black leather duster, aviator sunglasses, and a bright red armband with an insignia of two crossed hammers, the same imagery that draped the stage behind him. He carried a mock machine gun. The fascist imagery was intentional , and was familiar to anyone, like myself, who had seen him many times and many years before. But this time, for me, it was more than just rock and roll theater. By 2023 I am old enough to know that this was not the first time fascist banners had adorned the stage of the world’s most famous arena. And by 2023, I am old enough to know that fascism isn’t a chapter from a schoolbook, a grainy black and white snapshot of history. This time, I know that fascism, as Umberto Eco once wrote, is an eternal possibility. It was all just a little too close for comfort. I’m certain that was Roger’s point.
The Wall is the story of “Pink,” a character loosely based on Waters’ own personal and professional experiences. The title refers to a psychological wall, a barrier that Pink slowly builds to protect himself from the pain and risk of emotional engagement with the world. Pink’s mother, his teachers, his wife—all just bricks in the wall--contribute to his desire for perfect isolation. But perfect isolation results in more than just a numb comfort. From isolation, loss of sanity predictably follows. About three-quarters through the double-album, the fascist anthem that had been foreshadowed at the outset returns, and Pink imagines himself a fascist dictator. He fantasizes about fascist rallies, fascist raids, fascist terror. He revels in the chaos, the domination, the cruelty. Musically, artistically, thematically--it all works. But why?
By 2023, I am a professor of political philosophy. And, like most professors in my field , I have read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. By 2023, I know that Waters understood, perhaps intuitively, what Arendt said directly: loneliness and isolation are the breeding ground for fascism.
“Totalitarian domination,” she wrote in 1951, “bases itself on loneliness . . . which is amongst the most radical and desperate experiences of man. What prepares men for totalitarian domination,” Arendt wrote “is the fact that loneliness has become an everyday experience of the ever growing masses of our century.” In that same chapter she writes, “The ideal subject . . . is people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction . . . and the distinction between true and false . . . no longer exist.”
2023 was also the year that US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. One in two Americans reported experiencing loneliness, feelings of being “isolated, invisible and insignificant.” He warns that if this problem is not addressed “we will further retreat into our corners—angry, sick and alone.’ I wondered if he had been too optimistic.
If Roger Waters and Hannah Arendt are correct, loneliness and isolation create the sort of problems—feelings of superfluousness, doubt and powerlessness--that fascism is particularly well-suited to solve. If they are correct, American society has become a near perfect breeding ground for someone who is willing to offer a quick fix for these symptoms, someone who would offer a cheap certainty in place of real, existential doubt, a thin sense of belonging and purpose in place of loneliness and superfluousness. Someone who would channel and mold the pain, the anger, the rage of impotence. Someone who would not, in fact, build a wall, but someone who would exploit the all misery that our walls have created.