Demons
People can become weird when they are isolated. They often become scared of other people in a deep way that others can pick up on. Still, self-isolation is a fundamental practice of many religious traditions, so it’s not obvious that this weirdness is the less desirable or at least less truthful state.
Speaking from experience after having spent a long time trying to isolate myself unsuccessfully (although with enough success to become weird and scared of people), I believe the benefit is obvious in retrospect. Isolation reveals the connections between us that are otherwise invisible. And what becomes scary about others is a result of them not seeing those connections.
Most people walk around with a completely unearned sense of confidence that their day and their life will work in a way they have come to expect. This has been made worse by our separation from many natural causes of death. The reason we need to treat each other well is because we rely on each other and don’t exist in isolation. It is one of the many things that sounds trite until something happens that makes it real. We don’t exist as individuals.
The fact is that there are still many things in this world, though many of them subtle, that can take our lives. Your boss can decide they don’t like your ideas that make them feel inferior and take away your income. Your wife can be brainwashed by emergent capitalist propaganda and forget how to be a mother to your children. A mentally ill man that has been in and out of prison dozens of times can choose to cut your throat on the subway. And any one of us could also be the perpetrator under the right circumstances.
To someone to whom those forces seem completely obvious and always present, people walking around like they have power or certainty look like demons. Only a demon with some authority granted by whatever dark forces rule this world could believe that their live-in maid deserves to live a materially worse life than them while they spend all their time together. Only a demon could believe that they could never be in the same place as the homeless person on the sidewalk. Only a demon could use their own or someone else’s sexuality to get what they want at the expense of others. Only a demon could exploit spiritual truths for their own benefit. Only a demon could tell someone they are going to hell with certainty.
Only a demon could treat someone like they don’t matter as much as themselves. The truth is that we all seem to do this at different times and for reasons that vary in their selfishness. On one end there is real malice. Somewhere in the middle is disinterested selfishness and identification with a clan group. And on the other end, there is attention triage that we are all forced into doing most of the time.
Unfortunately, all of the causes have a similar effect. We often go around appearing to ourselves and each other like we are possessed. The more you pay attention, the more you see it. Rising self-isolation in developed countries might be a rational subconscious response to spiritual decay and a method for increasing our collective awareness. In any case, the only thing we can do as individuals that want to behave morally is to remember that we can inhabit all sides of this dynamic in all of our interactions and practice grace and mercy for ourselves and others.