Lone wolves

Wolves are social and hierarchical animals, and lone wolves don’t exist, only as transitory anomalies. The human imagination has fashioned this extraordinary concept to describe a remarkable phenomenon observed among some of our fellow humans who choose solitude over the company of others.

Any form of social life is uncompromising towards rebellious individuals. Neuroscientist Antonio Damásio goes so far as to say that “when bacteria detect ‘deserters’ in their group, such as members who don’t work together enough in the group’s defence, they avoid them. In other words, they look down on traitors who don’t cooperate“.

No one is born with a predisposition to loneliness. In a social species such as Homo sapiens, any gene with a tendency to loneliness would lead its owners to extinction. Human loneliness is a social construct which can be traced back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, where we spent 90% of our existence as an independent species and whose social brains we have fully inherited. We’re the descendants of uncompromising hunter-gatherer mobs who couldn’t cope with betrayal and lived in perpetual vigilance of all against all.  When we became sedentary and farmers, we still had a brain, which, according to biologist Robert Sapolsky was designed to solve problems that almost no one has today. In today’s large communities, we often are less watchful of one another and tend to judge unfamiliar people with feelings of hate. In this environment, acting publicly may be seen as a sign of loneliness, and reacting emotionally is often considered shameful. Thomas Matthew Crooks, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman, Einstein, Beethoven, and Yves Saint Laurent have something important in common in their biographies: all six were tormented in their childhood and adolescence by hatred from their social context due to a strange identity trait that their peers perceived. They were all lonely children and teenagers.

The six people mentioned above are famous and well-known. We can perfectly apply the idea that Viktor Frankl learned from the Jews in Auschwitz, which is that free will is an essential element in human nature. Human beings are never fully subjected to external conditions and can always define their existence in the following moments.

Were the attack on Donald Trump, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the assassination of John Lennon, The Theory of Relativity, The Ninth Symphony, or the first tuxedo adapted to the female body all exercises of the power of human self-determination defended by Viktor Frankl? Or on the contrary, as Robert Sapolsky maintains, all of us, including the six people mentioned above, are “nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control”, and that there is no free will because there is no “neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behaviour is independent of the sum of its biological past”.

For SOCIOLOGISTS WITHOUT BORDERS, the unit of analysis of human behavior is the interaction between subjects. In it, we all try to convey a good appearance to others, and this behaviour is strategic. Following this logic, the acts of Thomas Matthew, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman, Einstein, Beethoven and Yves Saint Laurent were only trying to gain the social acceptance that society had so far denied them. With an important difference, though, as the three who opted for murder were looking for tribal applause from their own tribes, while Albert Einstein, Beethoven and Yves Saint Laurent were looking for universal applause.

Legions of biologists think that many human beings are born, grow up, work, fight and die with no real purpose other than to stay alive.  However, SOCIOLOGISTS WITHOUT BORDERS need to draw attention, once again, to the behaviours of these LONE WOLVES, who prefer solitude to coexistence because, in many cases, this way of life conceals an extreme individualism. And although we recognize that the Scientific Revolutions defined by Thomas S. Kuhn, fostered by the Western ideology of I’M RIGHT/YOU’RE WRONG, are the ones that have made us achieve this dream technological civilization. It’s also true that the vast majority of human beings who are born, grow up, work, fight and die with no real purpose other than to stay alive deserve consideration.