Solipsism, Organized Loneliness & the Simple Technology to Fight Them

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Solipsism is the belief that one’s own mind is the only thing that can truly be known to exist. Others are merely characters which serve to support or interfere with one’s personal reality.

Group solipsism is the counterintuitive phenomenon of individual solipsists working together to support each other’s realities despite the conviction that they themselves are all that matters. The result is a kind of Marvel Universe, a solipsistic cartel, where each person in the group has an assigned domain in which to rule—and agrees, mostly, not to interfere in others’ alternate worlds.

The Trump regime and its enablers create a form of mass solipsism in which a number of completely different realities intersect around one thing—the shared acquisition of power at all costs. Every individual has, with notable conflicts at the boundaries, a reality to defend and to ensure stays aligned with the overall project.

• Trump: dominance, humiliation, and personal loyalty

• Thiel: eschatology, Antichrist fantasy, techno-fascism

• Musk: white supremacy, eugenic futurism, space fantasy, technocracy

• Miller: white rage, siege, racial purification

• Christian nationalists: spiritual warfare, divine providence

• Accelerationist billionaires: collapse as opportunity, hypercapitalism

• Republican Congress and SCOTUS: submission to the ordained power structure

What they all have in common is, to varying degrees, adoption of the belief that other people aren’t actually real. To the modern solipsist, most humans are what they sometimes call “NPCs“ or “non-player characters.”

Elon Musk@elonmusk

Arguing with NPCs is pointless

Corey J. Mahler @CoreyJMahler

Never forget: When you are arguing with a Leftist or a Boomer, you are actually arguing with the TV — and the TV cannot hear you and it does not care.

5:40 AM · Jul 16, 2026 · 4.17M Views

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2.89K Replies · 5.88K Reposts · 50.1K Likes

When Musk says “arguing with NPCs is pointless” he means it literally. Unless people conform to his personal reality and to the overall cartel’s project of collecting power regardless of the consequences, they simply don’t exist except as a resource to extract or a barrier to break down.

This is what Hannah Arendt meant when she described how “ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality” in the same way terror ruins relationships between people.

Just as terror… ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality… The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

But how do the solipsist, the tyrant, and the totalitarian expand their universe into the minds of their victims? Arendt described it as a kind of political technology she referred to as “organized loneliness.”

Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction… Nevertheless, organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous than the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by the tyrannical and arbitrary will of a single man. Its danger is that it threatens to ravage the world as we know it—a world which everywhere seems to have come to an end-before a new beginning rising from this end has had time to assert itself.

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

Loneliness is not the same thing as solitude, which is often a healthy state of being with oneself. If you are thinking, and believe yourself to be a reliable narrator, you may be alone—but you are not lonely. Loneliness is different. Under the right social and psychological conditions, you may find yourself in a crowded party and feel lonelier than ever before. You have not just lost connection with others; you have lost connection with yourself.

This is the goal of the totalitarian. This is the goal of the Trump regime and the solipsistic oligarchy that supports it. They don’t just want to drain us of access to each other; they want to drain us of our ability to form our own reality—so they can fill our loneliness with their own ideology.

As I’ve written before, in complexity theory, there are two orthogonal (90-degree) continuums: simple vs. complex; and order vs. chaos. The goal of the totalitarian is simple order. They want to reduce complexity at all costs because they see it as inefficient and unprofitable. A functional democratic republic is a form of complex order and the way to break it down is through simple chaos—or as Arendt called it terror.

This is why there are roving bands of ICE agents terrorizing Americans with simple chaos. This is why a majority of Republicans actually believe that vandals destroyed the Reflecting Pool. It is totalitarianism applied to both relationships between people, and to every individual’s relationship to reality.

The simple technology for pushing back on organized loneliness is empathy. The purpose of reducing complexity through terror and destruction of common reality is that it becomes far easier for the totalitarian to extract what they want. If you are not just alone, but lonely, you will be desperate to find connection almost anywhere—which is where the tyrant comes in.

Empathy represents one’s internal psychological connection to other humans. If that can be stripped away by the totalitarian, the solipsism quickly turns to barbarism.

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