The Loneliness of Being WEIRD

How the West Won and Where It Got Us

The sad ending to a real-life Western. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich coined the acronym WEIRD to describe the peculiar psychology of individuals from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. “Individuals” is the key term here. Unlike the normies in other societies, “We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time.” We are highly individualistic, self-focused, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytically minded. The norm, globally and throughout history, is to be communal, relationship-focused, deferential to authority, conformist to the group, and holistically minded instead. A key consequence of our individualism is “impersonal prosociality.” We show relatively less favoritism toward family and friends, instead valuing “impartial fairness, probity, and cooperation with strangers, anonymous others, or even abstract institutions like the police or government.” Not surprisingly then, WEIRD countries tend to be less corrupt than those in which nepotism (or, less pejoratively, in-group loyalty) is considered a greater virtue.

In his 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Henrich traces the origin of WEIRD norms to what is essentially an accident of history. The Roman Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies—including the prohibition of cousin marriage and the promotion of monogamy and the nuclear family—led to the dissolution of kin-based institutions in Western Europe. Thus the Church “gradually released individuals from the responsibilities, obligations, and benefits of their clans and houses, creating both more opportunities and greater incentives for people to devote themselves to the Church and, later, to other voluntary organizations.” In the short term, the Church benefited, since by undermining kin-based institutions it “was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty and creating a revenue stream” via funneled inheritance. In the long run, however, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the decline of the Church itself were among the unintended consequences of the attendant social and psychological shift.

Although Henrich’s account is data-driven and descriptive, an undertone of triumphalism is unavoidable. In his cultural evolutionary framework, “social norms are put to the test when groups with different norms compete,” and those “that favor success in competition with other groups tend to survive and spread.” WEIRD norms (somewhat paradoxically) lead to group success, as individualistic countries tend to be the richest, most inventive, and most economically productive. As he notes, “sophisticated societies [eg, Japan, Turkey] responded to the evident economic and military power of European and European-descent societies . . . by voraciously copying their formal institutions, laws, and practices,” from democratic elections to the prohibition of polygynous marriage. WEIRD norms have succeeded in the intergroup competition of world history, and their at least partial adoption by other cultures (not to mention the flow of immigrants to WEIRD countries and the paucity of the reverse) further demonstrates their evolutionary “fitness."

Yet the irony of the Church setting in motion changes that led to its own displacement points to a WEIRD weakness. Henrich writes that “to construct and sustain complex chiefdoms and states, cultural evolution needed to somehow fashion imagined communities—broad networks of strangers connected by shared beliefs.” The Church is one such imagined community, and the combination of individualistic mentalities with a shared belief system led to the West’s success. But if shared beliefs no longer unite us, we can become atomized, existentially alone, without the comfort that a clan or tribe provides in other societies. Thoreau said that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” but perhaps it’s only the mass of Western men. When Henrich writes that kin-based institutions “create tight-knit and enduring social units by diffusing responsibility, criminal culpability, and shame,” I thought of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The criminal culpability of Kafka’s solitary protagonist is his alone, and when he is executed, the shame is that much greater: “‘Like a dog!' he said. It seemed as if his shame would live on after him.”

In Henrich’s narrative, the West’s rise was accelerated by individuals forming voluntary associations like charter cities, universities, guilds, and monastic orders, which competed for members and drove cultural evolution. But we are increasingly, in Robert Putnam’s famous phrase, “bowling alone” and not joining any voluntary associations at all. Henrich writes that impersonal markets “simultaneously reduce our interpersonal prosociality within our in-groups and increase our impersonal prosociality with acquaintances and strangers.” The result may be individuals who cooperate with strangers at work and in daily life, but who lack any in-group, any real friends or interpersonal network, to call their own. The statistics in the US are jarring: face-to-face socializing, close friendships, and group memberships are on the decline, while solitary screen time, feelings of loneliness, and youth mental illness rates are surging.¹ In 2023, the Surgeon General declared loneliness and isolation to be a public health epidemic, with a mortality impact similar to smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily. The upside of voluntary associations is that they aggregate shared interests and complementary talents in ways that lineage-based clans cannot; the downside is that individuals may choose not to volunteer.

A society of solitary individuals isn’t much of a society at all. In addition to its deleterious effects on a personal level, isolationism corrodes our willingness and ability to take collective action. As political philosopher Allan Bloom put it, “America is experienced not as a common project but as a framework within which people are only individuals, where they are left alone. To the extent that there is a project, it is to put those who are disadvantaged in a position to live as they please too.”² If America (or any Western country) is no longer seen as a common project, we are no longer capable of the greatness only achievable through individual sacrifice: the greatness that made our modern lives possible in the first place. Lacking a common project, we are no longer even capable of articulating a reason for national existence; other than, in Canadian novelist Yann Martel’s depressing words, to be “the greatest hotel on earth.” The rise of the West thus culminates in the acceptance of our decline. Individualism alone becomes reason enough to live: except that, because we are social creatures who hunger for meaning, the void in our souls tells us otherwise.

We cannot simply change our minds. Our WEIRD norms are a consequence of centuries of cultural evolution. As Henrich shows, “people’s psychology is influenced not only by the communities they grew up in but also by the ghosts of past institutions—by the worlds faced by our ancestors around which rich systems of beliefs, customs, rituals, and identities were built.” But we can draw on our inherited psychology to counteract its negative tendencies. As analytical thinkers, we can study the data and see where untempered individualism leads: to personal unhappiness and societal breakdown. We may then, as individualists, choose to devote ourselves to community, because it is we as individuals who ultimately benefit. As the history of the West shows, individuals who voluntarily unite can accomplish more than involuntary groups can together or solitary individuals can alone. And, as the modern state of the West shows, individuals who don’t unite with others fall prey to social, psychological, and physical ills against which communal life provides protection. Even the WEIRDest people in the world share a need to belong.

1. More broadly, Jonathan Haidt and colleagues have reported that “there is a mental health crisis in the least religious (and most individualistic) countries, which includes, especially, the historically Protestant [ie, most WEIRD] countries.” They attribute the crisis to smartphones and social media, but note that “Young people in more collectivistic and religious [ie, less WEIRD] communities and nations were somewhat more firmly rooted in real-world relationships and were therefore somewhat protected from the meaning-destroying elements of the change.”

2. From his 1987 jeremiad The Closing of the American Mind.