Without the power of kindness, our society will fall apart | George Monbiot

If there is an irrepressible human trait it’s the determination, against all odds, to reconnect. Though governments seek to atomise and rule, we will keep finding ways to come together. Our social brains forbid any other outcome. They urge us to reach out, even when the world seems hostile.

This is the conclusion I draw from touring England over the past few weeks, talking about loneliness and mental health. Everywhere I have been so far, I’ve come across the same, double-sided story: stark failures of government offset in part by the extraordinary force of human kindness.

First the bad news: reminders of the shocking state of our mental health services. I met people who had waited a year for treatment, only to be given the wrong therapy. I heard how the thresholds for treatment are repeatedly being raised, to ration services. I met one practitioner who had been told, as a result of the cuts, to recommend computerised cognitive behaviour therapy to her patients. In other words, instead of working with a therapist, people must sit at a screen, using a programme to try to address disorders likely to have been caused or exacerbated by social isolation. Why not just write these patients a prescription instructing them to bog off and die?At least then they wouldn’t have to wait a year to be told to consult their laptops. I heard of children profoundly damaged by abuse and neglect being sent to secure accommodation – imprisoned in other words – not for their own safety, or other people’s, but because there is nowhere else for them to go.

These are not isolated cases. It is a systemic problem. There has been no child and adolescent mental health survey in this country since 2004 (though one is now planned). Snapshot studies suggest something is going badly wrong: figures published last week, for example, suggest a near quadrupling in the past 10 years of girls admitted to hospital after cutting themselves. But there are no comprehensive figures. Imagine the outcry if the government had published no national figures on childhood cancer for 12 years, and was unable to tell you whether it was rising or falling.

Of children referred for treatment for mental health disorders, 60% do not receive it. The Guardian recently published a mother’s account of how her child had been treated. Despite a severe mental health disorder, it was only after the child attempted suicide that she received the care she needed. The treatment consisted of sending her to the other end of the country: the only available bed was 300 miles from home. You don’t need to be a psychotherapist to imagine what that might do to a distressed and vulnerable child. But when the beds don’t exist, the health service has no choice. Embarrassed into a semblance of action, the coalition government promised another £250m a year for children’s mental health. It will scarcely touch the sides.

But amid the rubble of a collapsing state, I kept stumbling into something wonderful. Performing with the musician Ewan McLennan, using music and the spoken word to explore these subjects, has brought me into contact with groups that restore my faith in the human spirit.

In Leeds we ate in a cafe run by the Real Junk Food Project, whose meals are made from waste or donated food. Seeing people of all ages, from all stations of life, who had never come together before, yakking away over dinner like old friends, I realised that the project is addressing not only the waste of food but also the waste of social opportunity. Breaking bread together: this is still the best and simplest way of reconnecting.

In Sheffield I met a man creating safe spaces for people experiencing manic or psychotic episodes: using woods, allotments and – if his project gets planning permission – cobb houses like hobbit holes to create a place of comfort for those whose minds are reeling. In Durham I saw how people whose poor mental health and isolation exclude them from work are being gently introduced to the social skills and creativity that might allow them to re-engage. In Bristol I met someone from the Happy City initiative, which is finding ways to measure wellbeing and discovering the best means of enhancing it.

Across the country, groups such as the Campaign to End Loneliness, Age UK, Independent Age, Community Network, Young Minds, the Transition Network, the Network of Wellbeing and the forthcoming Jo Cox Commisssion on Loneliness are trying to provide a coherent response to the troubled times that lead to troubled minds. Everywhere I look, I see the kind of enterprise and innovation with which business is credited, but which seems to be found most often in the voluntary sector.

But what has struck me with greatest force is this. At the end of every gig, we ask people in the audience to turn to someone they don’t know and say hello. I tell them they needn’t do any more than that, but they can keep talking if they wish. On the first night I made the mistake of mentioning the idea before we had wrapped up the show. That was all it took – the conversation flared up immediately, and it was a long time before I could direct people’s attention back to the stage. After every concert the talking has continued long into the night, in the venue’s bar or the nearest pub. It’s as if people have simply been waiting for permission to speak to the strangers who surround them.

Britain, according to government figures, is the loneliness capital of Europe, but even – or perhaps especially – here, the urge to connect is overwhelming. This reattachment, I believe, holds the key to both our psychological and political transformation. Connected, engaged and happy people do not allow themselves to be trampled into the dirt. It is when we are estranged both from each other and from our political environment that we are easiest to manipulate, as the rise of demagoguery in Europe and the US seems to attest.

Neither state provision nor community action is a substitute for the other: we need both. But the more effective community groups and voluntary initiatives become, the harder it is for governments to disregard their duties. By talking together, we find our voice.

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Without the power of kindness, our society will fall apart | George Monbiot

Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. That’s what’s wrenching society apart | George Monbiot

What greater indictment of a system could there be than an epidemic of mental illness? Yet plagues of anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating disorders, self-harm and loneliness now strike people down all over the world. The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis.

There are plenty of secondary reasons for this distress, but it seems to me that the underlying cause is everywhere the same: human beings, the ultrasocial mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other people, are being peeled apart. Economic and technological change play a major role, but so does ideology. Though our wellbeing is inextricably linked to the lives of others, everywhere we are told that we will prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.

In Britain, men who have spent their entire lives in quadrangles – at school, at college, at the bar, in parliament – instruct us to stand on our own two feet. The education system becomes more brutally competitive by the year. Employment is a fight to the near-death with a multitude of other desperate people chasing ever fewer jobs. The modern overseers of the poor ascribe individual blame to economic circumstance. Endless competitions on television feed impossible aspirations as real opportunities contract.

Consumerism fills the social void. But far from curing the disease of isolation, it intensifies social comparison to the point at which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing, and to see that other people have more friends and followers than we do.

As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett has brilliantly documented, girls and young women routinely alter the photos they post to make themselves look smoother and slimmer. Some phones, using their “beauty” settings, do it for you without asking; now you can become your own thinspiration. Welcome to the post-Hobbesian dystopia: a war of everyone against themselves.

Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing

Is it any wonder, in these lonely inner worlds, in which touching has been replaced by retouching, that young women are drowning in mental distress? A recent survey in England suggests that one in four women between 16 and 24 have harmed themselves, and one in eight now suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety, depression, phobias or obsessive compulsive disorder affect 26% of women in this age group. This is what a public health crisis looks like.

If social rupture is not treated as seriously as broken limbs, it is because we cannot see it. But neuroscientists can. A series of fascinating papers suggest that social pain and physical pain are processed by the same neural circuits. This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to describe the impact of breaking social bonds without the words we use to denote physical pain and injury. In both humans and other social mammals, social contact reduces physical pain. This is why we hug our children when they hurt themselves: affection is a powerful analgesic. Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress of separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation and drug addiction.

Experiments summarised in the journal Physiology & Behaviour last month suggest that, given a choice of physical pain or isolation, social mammals will choose the former. Capuchin monkeys starved of both food and contact for 22 hours will rejoin their companions before eating. Children who experience emotional neglect, according to some findings, suffer worse mental health consequences than children suffering both emotional neglect and physical abuse: hideous as it is, violence involves attention and contact. Self-harm is often used as an attempt to alleviate distress: another indication that physical pain is not as bad as emotional pain. As the prison system knows only too well, one of the most effective forms of torture is solitary confinement.

It is not hard to see what the evolutionary reasons for social pain might be. Survival among social mammals is greatly enhanced when they are strongly bonded with the rest of the pack. It is the isolated and marginalised animals that are most likely to be picked off by predators, or to starve. Just as physical pain protects us from physical injury, emotional pain protects us from social injury. It drives us to reconnect. But many people find this almost impossible.

It’s unsurprising that social isolation is strongly associated with depression, suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat. It’s more surprising to discover the range of physical illnesses it causes or exacerbates. Dementia, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, lowered resistance to viruses, even accidents are more common among chronically lonely people. Loneliness has a comparable impact on physical health to smoking 15 cigarettes a day: it appears to raise the risk of early death by 26%. This is partly because it enhances production of the stress hormone cortisol, which suppresses the immune system.

Studies in both animals and humans suggest a reason for comfort eating: isolation reduces impulse control, leading to obesity. As those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are the most likely to suffer from loneliness, might this provide one of the explanations for the strong link between low economic status and obesity?

Anyone can see that something far more important than most of the issues we fret about has gone wrong. So why are we engaging in this world-eating, self-consuming frenzy of environmental destruction and social dislocation, if all it produces is unbearable pain? Should this question not burn the lips of everyone in public life?

There are some wonderful charities doing what they can to fight this tide, some of which I am going to be working with as part of my loneliness project. But for every person they reach, several others are swept past.

This does not require a policy response. It requires something much bigger: the reappraisal of an entire worldview. Of all the fantasies human beings entertain, the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd and perhaps the most dangerous. We stand together or we fall apart.

Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. That’s what’s wrenching society apart | George Monbiot

This is thrilling life-extension news for dictators and the ultra-rich | George Monbiot

‘It’s not not possible to see how a thousand-year life could lead to a thousand-12 months reich.’ Illustration by Daniel Pudles

Once it was a myth. Now it’s a dream. And soon it will be an expectation. Suddenly the science of existence extension is generating exceptional outcomes. New papers hint at the possibility of treatment options that could radically enhance human longevity.

So much is taking place that it truly is tough to know in which to start. But I will select just two of the gathering developments. The very first considerations a class of enzymes named sirtuins. This month’s Trends in Genetics states that the question of whether these enzymes could enhance longevity in mammals “has now been settled decidedly in the affirmative”.

Final month a new paper in the journal Aging Cell showed how synthetic small molecules (in other words, likely medication) can stimulate the manufacturing of sirtuins in mice, extending their existence span and bettering their health. The outcomes demonstrate, the paper says, that it is “achievable to design a tiny molecule that can slow aging and delay several age-relevant diseases in mammals, supporting the therapeutic prospective … in humans”.

The 2nd development I’ve plucked from the tumult of extraordinary new science concerns an external hormone (a pheromone) secreted by nematode worms, referred to as daumone. A new paper reviews that when daumone is fed to elderly mice, it reduced the risk of death by 48% across 5 months. “Daumone could be produced as an anti-aging compound.”

There are even now loads of missing measures, not least clinical trials and drug improvement, but there is a powerful sense that we stand at an extraordinary minute. Who would not want this – to cheat the gods and mock the reaper? The positive aspects are so apparent that 1 current report insists that political leaders who fail to give adequate funding for existence-extension science should be charged with manslaughter. It’s thrilling, dazzling, awe-inspiring. And rather alarming.

The most visible champion of lifestyle-extension science, Aubrey de Grey, contends that “a great deal of men and women alive nowadays are going to live to one,000 or far more”. He lists 4 frequent considerations, that he rejects as “unbelievable excuses … for aging”, “ridiculous” and “entirely crazy, when you truly bear in mind your sense of proportion.” On the 1st count – “wouldn’t it be crushingly boring?” – he’s proper. Existence, if you have a degree of financial selection, is as thrilling as we pick to make it. If it gets to be also dull, nicely, you can just quit taking your medicine.

The other worries are not so easily dismissed. “How would we pay the pensions?” is the second question he ridicules. I would rephrase it: “How would the really old assistance themselves without having crushing the young?” Even these days there are major distributional troubles in nations like Britain. Wealthy elderly individuals, enjoying the compound curiosity from investments accumulated across decades, preside more than a rentier economic system that is devastating to the young and poor, as residence prices and rents turn into unaffordable. The inequality and the prospective for exploitation that would emerge if folks lived twice, not to mention ten occasions, as long can only be boggled at.

This takes us to one more concern he dismisses: “Dictators would rule for ever.” Is this proposition (if not taken virtually) ridiculous? They hang on prolonged sufficient previously, with the help of the very best healthcare their stolen billions can purchase. Match the political power longevity offers with the economic electrical power, and it really is not unattainable to see how a thousand-year existence could lead to a thousand-12 months reich.

De Grey’s mockery turns into most offensive at his fourth rhetorical query: “What about starving Africans?” Yes, what about them? What if, beyond a certain stage, longevity gets to be a zero-sum game? What if each year of daily life extension for people who can afford the treatment gets to be a year or far more of existence reduction for these who can not?

Previously, on this planet of finite sources, wealthy and poor are locked into unacknowledged conflict, as hyperconsumption lowers the planet’s capability to sustain existence. Grain is used to create meat rather than feed people directly the secure operating room for humanity is narrowed by greenhouse gases, industrial pollutants, freshwater depletion and soil erosion. It is hard, after a whilst, to see how this could create any outcome other than a direct competition for the signifies of existence, which some should win and other individuals should shed. Perhaps the wealthy should die so that the poor can dwell.

It truly is true that the value of feasible longevity remedies, which will be astronomical at first, would soon start to plummet. But this is a world in which several cannot afford even antiseptic ointment a planet in which, even in the wealthy nations, universal accessibility to healthcare is becoming gradually throttled by a selfish elite in which a new era of personalised medication coincides, by unhappy accident, with a new era of crushing inequality. The thought that every person would soon have accessibility to these therapies seems to be unfeasible. It is achievable, as an post in Aeon magazine speculates, that two courses of men and women – the treated and the untreated – could pull inexorably apart, the very first residing ever longer, the second dying even younger than they do nowadays.

I don’t know the solutions to these questions, and I’m far from being capable to propose solutions. It really is all unknown from now on. But I do know that it is foolish to dismiss them.

Lifestyle-extension science could invoke a sunlit, miraculous planet of freedom from dread and long-term thinking. Or a gerontocratic tyranny. If it really is the latter, I hope I never reside long adequate to see it.

Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A entirely referenced version of this article can be discovered at Monbiot.com

This is thrilling life-extension news for dictators and the ultra-rich | George Monbiot

Cold reality: humans aren"t as resilient as Exmoor ponies | George Monbiot

‘I believed of Exmoor ponies and the way they stand with their backs to the rain until it passes. If they could do it, so could I.’ Photograph: Alamy

It was a gorgeous morning, a Saturday in October, and I was obtaining tea with my subsequent-door neighbour. We started speaking – for this was almost 20 many years ago – about the street the government meant to create all around the town of Newbury, some thirty miles away. When the machinery moved in we planned to join the protests. Men and women had been presently starting up to create platforms in the trees. “Let us go down and consider a search.”

A train was due to depart in half an hour. We threw sleeping bags and warm outfits into our pannier bags, jumped on our bikes and sprinted to the station. We arrived just as the train was leaving. “Why do not we just cycle there?”

We had missed our breakfast and had no foods or water, but there have been bound to be stores or pubs along the way. We would maintain off the roads as considerably as attainable, following bridleways and footpaths.

At initial we sailed along, feeling buoyant and free of charge. It was one of those autumn days in which the sky appeared cleaner and brighter than at any time for the duration of the summer season. Then the paths started cutting across fields which had recently been ploughed, and our urban bikes grew to become snarled up with mud. A pregnant grey cloud blotted out the sun and hail started pelting down. This was the stage at which my pal discovered that his raincoat, which had been clipped to the prime of his bike rack, had fallen off. He went back to search for it. I made the decision to wait in the discipline.

The hail soon turned to rain. I was even now steamed up, so it felt refreshing as it soaked into my T-shirt. Soon after a while I began to come to feel a tiny cold. But – and this is the nail of idiocy on which the story hangs – I imagined of Exmoor ponies and the way they stand with their backs to the rain until it passes. If they could do it, so could I.

By the time my friend returned I was shivering. But I was reluctant to alter my outfits, as I knew we would quickly get sizzling again crossing the fields. The rain had ceased, but now our bikes slithered across the moist path. By the time we hit firmer ground I was extremely hungry. I was stunned to discover that I was nevertheless shivering.

We rode more than the downs to a village in which, we have been sure, there would be a shop. There wasn’t. The pub was shut. No matter, we would eat in Newbury. By the time we reached a prolonged slope major up to the Ridgeway – the neolithic path that traverses southern England – I had ceased to really feel both cold or hungry. Thoughts over matter, I informed myself I had triumphed more than discomfort.

But there was something incorrect with my bicycle. The wheels would not go round. I turned the bike in excess of and identified to my surprise that they spun freely. I started out pushing it up the hill, but once more it seemed to be snagged. My friend gallantly provided to swap. But there was anything incorrect with his bicycle as well. It felt absurdly hefty, and the wheels also seemed to be jammed.

We remounted when we reached the Ridgeway. Even on the level track I could scarcely force the pedals round. We reached the metalled street, and I sat like a pudding as we freewheeled down a shallow slope. Then I gradually toppled off the bike. I stumbled backwards into the hedge beside the road, where I lay spreadeagled.

“Are you all right?” “I’ve in no way felt far better. But I cannot truly move,” I stated. I felt as if I were lying in a warm bath. I could move my mouth and eyes but little else. I had never experienced this kind of deep peace.

“Um, I believe we need to get some help,” my good friend ventured. “No actually, I am fine.” My friend, who is not renowned for his assertiveness, stood by the street, half raising a hand to the passing site visitors: “Um, excuse me … Would you mind …” I watched with amusement as the cars whizzed previous. Then a big black point stopped and a blond giant stepped out. He was dressed in black, he had a crewcut and muscle tissue everywhere. He brushed past my pal and seized me by the shoulders.

“What is your name?” “George.” “What is your name?” “I just informed you – George.” “What is your title?!” Who was this rude guy, I wondered, and why could not he just depart me alone? He turned to my pal. “What have you got in your bags?” “Um, sleeping bags, coats.” “You happen to be carrying sleeping bags and he’s – fuck, I have witnessed it all now.”

He pulled out a sleeping bag, lifted me up as if I had been a cat and dropped me into it. “What’s your name?” “I just advised you.” “Shut up! What’s your identify?” He walked into the street, his great hands raised to the visitors. The first auto stopped. “Chocolate, sweets, what ever you’ve acquired.” Terrified, the girl in the car scrabbled in her bag, then handed him a bar of chocolate.

He returned to me. “This is very variety of you, but I am really all proper actually.” “Shut up! What is your title?” He started feeding me the chocolate. It was plainly safer to obey than to resist this madman, so I ate it. He named the ambulance. “Truly, there is no need to have …” He stopped far more autos, forcing them to disgorge a pile of sweets and chocolates. “I never have a lot of a sweet tooth to be honest…” “Shut up! What is your identify?”

The ambulance arrived. They wrapped me in a room blanket and took my temperature. They appeared to be creating a terrible fuss about practically nothing. The black vehicle drove away. They place the sirens on and stored making use of the thermometer: my temperature had fallen, I was later on told, to half a degree above the level at which they would have misplaced me.

In hospital the nurse told me I would need to have “the total treatment method”. “No. What?” “Sizzling chocolate and toast and honey.” Half an hour following I had arrived, I sat up and swung my legs off the bed: out of the blue fit and well and buzzing with sugar. It took me a number of hours to realise that the blond giant (we guessed he was an army paramedic) had saved my lifestyle.

Cold reality: humans aren"t as resilient as Exmoor ponies | George Monbiot