To be human is to exist in a state of perfect and inviolable isolation.
I realised this some years ago when I was in a crowd of more than 55000, and felt as though I must be the loneliest and most detached person present.
Crowds gather because of their shared love of the same idea - music, protest, art, film - but I was painfully aware that I didn't have anything in common with any of them. Any pleasure I took from the event was a private, personal relief.
Loneliness is inevitable: it is a bleak thesis from which there is no escape. We infer the emotions of others by indirect methods - if we did not, then lying would be impossible. Do you love me? Of course, I reply, with eyes as flat and unmoved as a calm sea.
One day, it may be the case that lying will no longer be feasible. Reading the excitation patterns of my brain might result in the answer: of course he doesn't love you. I envisage that very expensive excitation-state machines will see their price bottom out as the technology becomes more widespread. Everyone will have them, little hand-held devices capable of reading thoughts.
Part of what humans have always taken for granted - the potential to conceal things - will no longer be an option. Is it the case, though, that the ability (or imperative?) to share someone else's thoughts also brings an end to loneliness? If someone else can reveal my private, internal monologue, what stone is left unturned? Is such a surgical laying-out of thoughts, one by one, like stamps or car number plates, enough to banish the lonely forever?
If the answer is no, then loneliness is not the simple sharing of thoughts or opinions. It is a feeling, a certainty, that this is how the world is supposed to be experienced; each event undertaken singly. The excitation-machine does not remove the conviction that this is the case, even as it exposes thoughts in all their nudity.
If we accept that we are alone, even in a crowd of 55000, even when inviting another person to crawl underneath our skin and sleep there, then there is truly no escape. Society becomes a weird convention, invented by others long ago to subdue the inclination to act alone; a mark of shame against those who propagate it. Solipsism is rejected because of its feeble convenience.
No, isolation is truly the lot of humankind. We are creatures of conviction, for even impossibly sophisticated tools are insufficient to tease out the hard-wired skein which states: if I cannot be another, as opposed to inferring them, then I am forever alone.
