From the Lonely Crowd to the Cyber Mob: Fromm on the Social Consequences of Loneliness

In 1950, sociologist David Riesman published a best-selling book entitled The lonely crowd: A study of the changing American character. Famously, he described the ascendant “other directed” person as being haunted by an inner loneliness. This paper seeks to explain the current phenomenon of the cyber mob, an online crowd of peers gathered together to intimidate and “cancel” others, as a form of group behavior founded in profound aloneness and alienation brought about by neoliberal society. While the existence of online groups or mobs is overdetermined, the desire to belong, to feel a part of something larger than oneself, and to escape a haunting inner loneliness may be the twenty-first-century corollary of what Reisman described 73 years ago. With the rise of authoritarianism throughout the world, climate change, massive inequality, pandemic, and the breakdown of moral authority, people on both the Left and the Right cling to cyber mobs to escape aloneness, discharge fear and rage, and acquire affirmation and acceptance through “likes” and “retweets.” While they seem to provide bonding and empowerment, what cyber mobs offer in truth is greater ferocious tribalism and the further undoing of social bonds, fellow feeling, and the remnants of civil society.