The stereotypical motive of the recluse is social failure. An unattractive personality and psychological issues may make a person incapable of normal interrelations or difficult to get along with. Few people want to deal with the emotional problems of others when these problems are subjective in the sense that they originate in upbringing or personality. These are fair delineations of the “recluse” but not of the solitary.
The solitary is normal, as far as social functionality. Introversion, reticence, or self-sufficiency should not preclude the ability to function socially, to go about work or the necessities of daily life uneventfully but capably. The solitary — who is such voluntarily — can be said to embrace solitude when he or she reaches a certain point of confidence in self.
Solitude is the core of self, though we have been told by society that social personality is the core. We should not confuse socialization with social personality. The solitary is not a “wild child.” Everyone is socialized as children, young adults, and to varying degrees thereafter by circumstances. The solitary may simply reject over-socialization or bad socialization.
The disengagement from over-stimulus parallels the way the body works (as does nature) where over-stimulus can create a toxic environment for the cell. Balance (homeostasis) is not just a goal of nature, as if nature had a teleology. (That is a separate issue.) But it should be a goal of the conscious human self, and we can learn in part how to achieve this by paying attention to nature and even to the body, which, after all, is part of nature.
Self-corrections by nature are often labeled disasters by human society (floods, earthquakes, tornadoes) but there are clear if not predictable causes. In a cosmic sense, these are not disasters but events. Self-corrections in society are the true disasters, as they are spasms reacting to contrived material conditions and unsustainable behaviors. The expressions are violence, war, destruction, famine, and impoverishment. They are labeled revolutionary, or should be, even when carried out by the state. They may take a long time to work themselves around to their causes. These spasms to achieve balance are to be considered disastrous in consequence but they follow logically from the radical absence of balance in the society itself. While no one wishes these disasters, few are paying attention to the contrived situations from which they arise.
Back to the solitary: It is the perspective of almost every solitary that society has not only gone wrong but seems to lack a mechanism for achieving homeostasis, balance. Is this inevitable? The solitary may want to affirm solitude for him or her self, not wanting to judge others, their institutions and situations, but inevitably sages condemn the world, and by extension, the artificial and contrived entity we call society.
What would a world without society be? A world of solitaries? No, a world without society is not possible. Solitude is only the extension of the wise or intuitive soul perceiving the pain and suffering that comes from embracing a life containerized by society.
Natural disasters are balancing events in nature. Destruction and violence is an artificial balancing act between the powerful and elite on the one hand and the suppressed or reactive on the other, in short the sad interplay of forces in the human psyche, though it never stays at that level but descends into physical pain and suffering. Only solitude and the solitary is a balancing “event” in the world of human consciousness.