By Shekuva Alizada
Why are some people drawn to extreme ideologies? Hannah Arendt argued that the answer lies not in pathology but in loneliness — and what that means for social workers and others working in the field.
I will call him, Noah, a composite of several people I have encountered over the years. He was nineteen when we met through a community mentorship program. He had aged out of foster care the month before. He was intelligent, articulate when he chose to be, and possessed of a dry humour that surfaced unexpectedly. He was also, in a way I found difficult to name at first, profoundly alone. Not isolated in any simple sense; he had a phone, an internet connection, and a room in a shared house. But he carried with him the air of someone the world had set adrift, and who had come, gradually, to agree with its assessment.
Over several months, I watched Noah’s online life begin to consume his offline one. He had found a community, or rather, a community had found him. The forums he frequented offered him something I could not: a narrative that explained his suffering, named his enemies, and promised him significance. The ideology was familiar enough, a stew of grievance and conspiracy I had seen before. What struck me was not the content but the function. Noah did not seem to believe these ideas so much as need them. They gave him a place to stand. By the time our work together ended, he had not committed any act of violence, and I do not know if he ever did. But I recognized in him something that has troubled me since: the hunger of someone who has been told, in a thousand small ways, that he does not matter, and who has finally found a story that tells him he does.
‘Loneliness is the common ground of terror.’ Hannah Arendt wrote those words in The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, thinking of the mass movements that had devastated Europe. But the insight reaches further than she perhaps intended. It describes not only the terror of totalitarian governments but the psychic terror that can descend on an ordinary individual; the fog of fear and insignificance that makes the promise of a movement, any movement, begin to gleam.
Arendt was careful to distinguish loneliness from solitude. Philosophers have long observed that solitude, the state of being alone, can be generative, even necessary for reflection. In solitude, we have ourselves for company; we engage in an internal dialogue, weighing competing claims, imagining how things look from another’s perspective. This capacity for what Arendt called ‘two-in-one,’ the ability to think from multiple viewpoints, is the foundation of conscience. Loneliness is its opposite, where one loses access to that internal dialogue and trust in oneself as a partner in thought. In loneliness, we are cut off from the sense of human commonality that makes moral reasoning possible. We become, in Arendt’s haunting phrase, ‘superfluous’: people for whom the world has no meaningful place.
It is precisely this condition of superfluousness that makes extreme ideologies seductive. Totalitarian movements, Arendt argued, succeed not despite their absurdity but because of what they offer to the lonely: belonging, recognition, meaning. The movement provides a place in the world when all other places have been foreclosed. It offers identity when society has rendered one invisible. It supplies a narrative, however paranoid, however violent, that explains why one suffers and who is to blame. For someone drowning in insignificance, even a toxic lifeline is still a lifeline.
Adolf Eichmann was Arendt’s paradigm case. The SS officer who administered the deportation and extermination of Jews exhibited, she observed, ‘an almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.’ When questioned by a Jewish policeman in Israel, Eichmann defaulted to self-pitying complaints about his failure to rise higher in the SS ranks, never registering that his interviewer might not share his estimation of what constituted career success.
Eichmann was not a monster, not in any conventional sense. He was, Arendt famously argued, terrifyingly ordinary: a ‘joiner’ who feared ‘a leaderless and difficult individual life,’ who found in ideology a relief from the burden of independent thought. The evils he facilitated were enacted not by demons but by the thoughtless, people who had surrendered their capacity for two-sided thinking in exchange for the comfort of total commitment.
For decades, Arendt’s thesis remained influential but largely theoretical. Then, in 2025, two philosophers, Sanna Tirkkonen and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen, published an empirical investigation that tested her claims against contemporary cases of radicalization. They examined two populations: lone-actor terrorists, particularly those associated with right-wing and misogynistic movements, and Western women who affiliated with ISIS. Their findings largely vindicated Arendt’s intuition while adding crucial nuance. Among right-wing lone-actor terrorists, loneliness manifests as an overwhelming fear of extinction – individual and collective, the terror of being erased or replaced. Among Western women drawn to Islamist movements, experiences of discrimination and marginalization are central: the loneliness of never quite belonging to the society in which one lives, despite speaking the language, wearing the clothes and adopting the customs.
What unites these disparate cases is a common affective pathway. Tirkkonen and Tietjen found that loneliness, in the context of radicalization, generates a perceived existential threat and that this perception legitimizes violence as self-defence. When we are lonely and cast adrift, when we feel the world has no place for us, we begin to feel the world is actively hostile. With our backs against the wall and no one to help, we lash out. We answer the calls of those who name our suffering, even when those names are distortions. The researchers describe a mechanism of ressentiment: loneliness curdles into resentment, resentment into antagonism, antagonism into a willingness to harm. This is not inevitable. Most lonely people do not radicalize. But it is a pathway, and it is disturbingly well-worn.
The scale of loneliness in contemporary society makes this pathway all the more concerning. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a public health epidemic, with its effects comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The World Health Organization followed in 2025 with a global report revealing that one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness. In the United States, one in five adults reports serious feelings of loneliness; among those aged thirty to forty-four, nearly thirty percent say they are frequently or always lonely. Among young adults, the figures are starker still. We are not, as a society, producing the conditions for human flourishing. We are producing the conditions for drift.
I think about Noah when I read these statistics. I think about the way he described his childhood in foster care, moved seven times before he turned sixteen, as if recounting something that had happened to someone else. ‘Nobody picks you,’ he said once. ‘You just get placed.’ He was describing what it feels like to grow up knowing that your presence in any given household is contingent, temporary, a matter of administrative convenience rather than desire. The systems that were supposed to care for him had taught him, through years of practice, that he was not someone worth keeping. What the online communities offered him was the first sustained attention he had received since childhood. That it came wrapped in poison was, in some sense, beside the point.
Tirkkonen and Tietjen are careful to emphasize that loneliness is not merely an individual psychological condition. It is grounded in social and political structures. The narrative of meritocracy (the promise that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough) breeds particular resentment when it proves false. Economic precarity, patriarchal expectations, racial discrimination, housing instability: these shape who becomes lonely, how they experience that loneliness, and what narratives become available to explain it. The same structural conditions that produce loneliness often produce the ideologies that exploit it. Noah’s isolation was not an accident of personality but manufactured by systems that had failed him at every turn, and then blamed him for the failure.
Understanding what radicalization offers is essential to understanding why it appeals. Extremist movements provide what lonely people most desperately need: belonging, recognition, the sense that one matters. Online communities, from incel forums to jihadist networks, offer companionship to the isolated, purpose to the adrift, and enemies to blame for one’s suffering. ISIS’s English-language propaganda explicitly targeted what it called the ‘grey zone,’ the ambiguous space of compromise that immigrants inhabit between cultures. ‘They are living in the grey area,’ one supporter told the journalist Nabeelah Jaffer, ‘confused, hesitant.’ The movement’s appeal was not despite its absolutism but because of it. It offered a way out of ambiguity, a clear side to join, a war in which one could finally matter.
What is the right way to respond to lonely extremists? If Arendt is right, the structural causes of loneliness run deep, often too deep for a few personal connections to remedy. In my five years in this field, I remember trying to offer Noah and others like him what our profession calls “unconditional positive regard.” Yet, I was also aware that I was only one hour a week set against a lifetime of messages to the contrary. The forums were available to him every other hour of the day, asking nothing of him except his agreement. Arendt noted that even Eichmann’s personal relationships, including, allegedly, a Jewish mistress, made no dent in his ideology. He could distinguish between the collective group he feared and the individual member he professed to like. This is the grim logic of ‘some of my best friends are…’ It changes nothing, allowing the ideology to remain intact.
And yet I am not sure the answer is despair. If loneliness is produced by structures, then structures can be changed. The question is not only how to identify and surveil potential extremists – though that conversation dominates policy discourse – but how to build communities capacious enough to include those who feel excluded, how to create conditions in which people do not become superfluous in the first place. This is slow, unglamorous work, which looks like youth workers showing up consistently for young people who have learned to expect abandonment. It looks like a housing policy that does not scatter vulnerable populations to the margins. It looks like schools resourced enough to notice the student who is withdrawing before withdrawal becomes radicalization. It looks like asking, in every encounter, not ‘what is wrong with you?’ but ‘what happened to you?,’ and meaning it.
But the work of connection cannot be left to professionals alone. It requires something larger: a reorientation of what we value as a society. The writer and cultural critic bell hooks spent decades articulating what she called a ‘love ethic,’ a commitment to care, respect, responsibility, and justice as the foundations of all relationships, public and private. In All About Love (2000), she observed that ‘isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair. Yet they are the outcome of life in a culture where things matter more than people.’ For hooks, loneliness was not an individual failing but a predictable consequence of what she termed ‘dominator culture,’ a culture organized around competition, acquisition, and control rather than connection and mutual flourishing. ‘Cultures of domination,’ she wrote, ‘rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience.’ When we are afraid, whether of scarcity, of difference, or of vulnerability, we retreat from one another. We choose safety over risk, sameness over diversity. And in that retreat, we become lonely, and loneliness makes us susceptible to those who promise belonging through exclusion, identity through enmity.
hooks insisted that ‘there can be no love without justice,’ that genuine connection requires dismantling the structures that keep people isolated and afraid. This is not as much sentimental as it is political. A love ethic, she argued, ‘presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well.’ It demands that we ask not only how to help the lonely individual but why our society produces so much loneliness in the first place. The answer, for hooks, lay in systems that value profit over people, that treat human beings as competitors rather than kin, that starve communities of the resources they need to sustain meaningful connection. ‘To build community,’ she wrote in Teaching Community, ‘requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.’ This is everyone’s work. It is the work of neighbours and teachers and employers and policymakers. It is the work of choosing, again and again, to move against fear – against alienation and separation – and toward the difficult, uncertain, necessary practice of finding ourselves in one another.
Arendt wrote that the most fundamental political condition, what she called ‘the right to have rights’, requires being recognized as someone who belongs to a community capable of guaranteeing those rights. Loneliness is the experience of that recognition being withheld. It is not only unfortunate, but as she saw eighty years ago, dangerous: dangerous for the individual who suffers it and dangerous for the society that produces it. The answer to radicalization is not, in the end, better arguments or more effective surveillance but the work of ensuring that no one becomes superfluous – that everyone has a place in the world, a voice that is heard, a community that recognizes their existence as mattering.
I do not know what happened to Noah. Our work together ended when I left that job. But I hope he is alright. I hope he found, somewhere along the way, a community that did not require him to hate to belong. But I also know that hope is not a strategy, and that for every Noah I encountered, there were dozens I never met – young people drifting toward movements that would give them, at last, the significance they craved. As for how to interrupt that drift, those of us in social services know there is only one real answer: the critical work of connection – patient, structural, and unending. That is what the field knows, and it is what I know.
References
Arendt, H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Viking Press.
hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.
hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. Routledge.
Jaffer, N. (2015, June 24). The secret world of Isis brides: ‘U dnt hav 2 pay 4 ANYTHING if u r wife of a martyr’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/24/isis-brides-secret-world-jihad-western-women-syria
Office of the Surgeon General. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Tirkkonen, S., & Tietjen, R. R. (2025). Loneliness and radicalization. Philosophy and Social Criticism. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537251334550
World Health Organization Commission on Social Connection. (2025). From loneliness to social connection: Charting a path to healthier societies. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/978240112360
Jaffer, N. (2015, June 24). The secret world of Isis brides: ‘U dnt hav 2 pay 4 ANYTHING if u r wife of a martyr’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/24/isis-brides-secret-world-jihad-western-women-syria
