SPEAKER 1: We're back.
We're going to do part
two of our conversation
with Sebastian.
We're going to talk about his
excellent book called "Tribe:
On Homecoming and Belonging."
So I wanted to
jump into it first.
What got you interested
in this topic?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: So I had
this interesting experience.
I spent a year off and on with
an American platoon in combat
in eastern Afghanistan,
very remote outpost,
a lot of combat, a lot of
hardship, a lot of danger,
a lot of deprivation.
Those guys couldn't wait
to get back to Italy,
where they were based.
They had planned a big old
party and imagined things
they had planned.
And they got back in after
the party sort of subsided,
I caught up with them in Italy.
And I was really intrigued
by the fact that most of them
did not want to come back
to the United States.
They said, if we
could, we'd go back
to Restrepo, this flea-ridden,
scorpion-ridden, hell hole.
No women, there
was no television,
there was no cooked food,
there was no running water,
there was no way to bathe.
I mean, circumstances were
brutal and they all missed it.
And it made me
think of something.
When I was young I had
a sort of uncle figure,
a sort of mentor in my
life named Ellis Settle.
And he was half Lakota
Sioux, half Apache.
He grew up during
the Depression,
born during the Depression,
grew up out West,
educated himself
incredibly well.
He read everything that
he could get his hands on.
Brilliant, beautiful person.
And I remember him telling
me, this is how he phrased it.
He said, throughout the
history of the United
States along the frontier, he
said, white people were always
running off to join the Indians
but the Indians never ran off
to join the white people.
He said, given a
choice, free people
will go towards the tribal,
towards the communal,
and away from the modern.
And that really
stuck in my mind,
and I wondered if was true.
And then I heard
the soldiers saying
basically the same
thing, we don't
want to go back to America.
And what Ellis told me
was that even people who
had been kidnapped by the
native tribes along the frontier
and taken back and adopted
into these societies
into these tribal communities,
when given the chance
to be repatriated
to their family,
to their native country,
they would often refuse,
they'd go into hiding.
The last thing they wanted to
do was come back to America.
And I just thought,
what's going on?
Something is wrong.
And then I started
to look into it.
And what I found,
to my surprise--
actually, it wasn't
to my surprise,
now that I think of it--
that as wealth goes up in
society, as modernity goes up,
the suicide rate goes up.
As things get easier, people are
more likely to kill themselves.
As things get easier, people
are more likely to be depressed.
As things get easier,
people are more anxious.
As things get easier, people are
way more likely to have PTSD.
The PTSD rate in modern
affluent societies
is way, way higher
than in poor societies.
The Kurdish Peshmerga,
the Afghan fighters,
the Iraqi fighters, they
don't even know what it is.
I mean, they really
are quite puzzled
by this phenomenon that
American soldiers talk about.
PTSD rates in Israel
are 1%; in our military,
it's about 15% to 20%.
Which is odd because
only 20% of our military
is engaged in any
combat whatsoever.
Something's going on.
And I developed this theory
that maybe a certain amount
of what we call PTSD, maybe a
certain amount of all of this
is due to the fact
that it's actually
quite stressful to live an
independent individual life.
We're a social species,
we're social primates.
We evolved over hundreds
of thousands of years
to live in tight knit groups
of 40, 50, 100, 150 people.
And the proximity
of others buffers us
from psychological stress.
If you traumatize a rat and
put it in a cage by itself,
a week later its trauma
symptoms will be unchanged.
If you traumatize a rat and put
it in a cage with other rats,
within a week its behavior
is indistinguishable
from the other rats.
So what seems to be
happening is that soldiers,
among others, are traumatized
in a group trauma-- usually,
it happens to groups of
people or often happens
in groups of people.
The shooting in Vegas,
that was a group of people
being traumatized.
It happened to them in a group.
The problem for those people
is that that group is not
a community.
That group is not the Lakota,
that group is not Second
Platoon battle company.
For that matter, that
group isn't even Google.
It's just a bunch of people
that got traumatized as a group
and they will now disperse and
try to recover on their own.
And on their own means in their
air conditioned apartment,
in an apartment building,
or a single family
home on a cul-de-sac in a suburb
where people may or may not
know their neighbors,
they definitely
don't depend on their
neighbors, they may not
like their neighbors, but
mostly their neighbors
don't matter one way
or another in terms
of how they're going to survive
another day, another year.
Now, for most of human history,
when you wake up in the morning
and you look around, the
people you see around you
are the people that you
depend on for survival.
That's no longer true.
That provides a great
liberation from the group,
but it also deprives of us
of our most powerful weapon
against psychological troubles.
And what I found was that when
you collapse modern society--
I mean, ironically
when you collapse it
with 9/11 or the Blitz
in London or a hurricane
or what have you--
when you collapse
modern society,
we very naturally
revert to that sort
of communal group commitment,
that communal group loyalty.
It happens very,
very naturally, even
in a modern American city like
Houston after the hurricane.
I live in New York City.
After the attacks of
9/11, the suicide rate
went down in New York--
not up, it went down.
Trauma is supposed
to lead to suicide.
What's going on?
It's a totally traumatized city.
It was traumatized city, but
because we were traumatized,
everyone knew that
they were needed,
that their people needed them.
And when you give
people a task, like you
know what, you can kill
yourself later but right now
we actually need
you, when you do
that, people are so grateful.
It makes them feel
so good to be needed,
to be necessary that
they actually enjoy
improved psychological health.
So during the Blitz in
London, the English government
was convinced that there would
be mass psychiatric casualties
when the German
Air Force started
bombing London flat every
night, killed 30,000 people.
What happened?
Admissions to psych wards
went down during the Blitz
and then back up when
the bombing stopped.
And one amazed
officials said, we
have the chronic neurotics of
peacetime driving ambulances.
You give people a
task, a job, and they
will forget their own troubles.
And therein lies a great
comfort for them, actually.
SPEAKER 1: You keep talking
about the effect of 9/11,
how it had an PTSD
rates for veterans
and also the murder
rate in the area.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah.
So in New York after 9/11,
the suicide rate went down,
but a lot of other
things went down.
The violent crime, the murder
rate went down in New York.
And Vietnam veterans
who suffered from
PTSD from Vietnam--
most people don't wind
up with long-term PTSD.
I mean, from car accidents
or violent attack.
I mean, it's not just
soldiers that get
traumatized by violence.
I mean, there's trauma
everywhere in society.
Only around 20% of people wind
up with a long-term problem.
Well, these Vietnam vets were
in that 20% and decades later
were still suffering from PTSD.
And they said that as
soon as 9/11 happened,
they stopped experiencing
their symptoms because boom,
they're back on the
battlefield, what a relief.
People need me, I can
ignore my own troubles
and help the group,
help other people.
And that feels incredibly good.
I mean, one of the sort of
sad ironies of modern society
is that we are so
affluent and so safe
that individually, none of us
are ever needed by the society.
I mean, the society
continues on fine without us.
Our country and our community
never ask anything from us
because they never need us.
We have a fire department,
we have a police department,
we have farmers
that grow our food,
we have people who drill
for oil and get killed
doing that, they've got
loggers cutting trees down,
we've got commercial
fishermen catching fish.
Everyone's dying.
I mean, people die
doing those jobs.
They're dangerous jobs.
They're more dangerous than most
of the units in the US military
except the really
forward front line units.
We don't have to
deal with any of it.
And because we've subcontracted
out all these things
that society needs, until
there's a crisis, until there's
an emergency, none of us
have to step up and actually
contribute our time, run
risks, contribute our resources
to helping other people.
Until there's a hurricane
that hits a city and all
of a sudden, people are
looking for any kind of boat
they can get their hands on
to go rescue other people.
The so-called Cajun
Navy that was motoring
through the streets of
Houston saving people,
they weren't making distinctions
of Republicans and Democrats.
They weren't just
saving Republicans.
They weren't making
distinctions of white
and black or rich and poor.
They were just saving people.
And there was an enormous
an incredible unity
that happened there
that maybe will linger
or maybe won't, I
don't know, but there
was an incredible unity
there and an egalitarianism.
I mean, the terrible sort of
class distinctions in England
collapsed during the Blitz.
Everyone was sleeping
shoulder to shoulder
in the tube stations.
There's no rich or poor there.
Bombs don't care if you're
rich or poor, they'll kill you,
they'll bury you in rubble.
And so that egalitarianism
is actually intoxicating.
And as a result, people
really miss those days
when everyone was equal.
And I studied one earthquake
in Italy, [INAUDIBLE],,
and one of the survivors said--
I mean, you understand
it in that area,
if I'm remembering correctly,
96% of the population
was killed instantly.
They were basically hit
by a nuclear weapon.
The people that survived
were on their own
for days until the
government got there.
And this survivor wrote about
it and said that the earthquake
had produced what the law
promises but cannot, in fact,
deliver, which is the equality
of all men, all people.
Then the government got
there, supplies got there,
and immediately the social
stratification resumed.
SPEAKER 1: I was going to
have you read that quote next.
Perfect timing.
Can you talk about the
beauty and tragedy of safety
and how we lose the rights
of passage because of it?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah.
So humans evolved for
hundreds of thousands of years
in a pretty dangerous
environment,
living in a small scale
society and small groups
where people knew each
other pretty well.
And in that natural
world, I mean,
understand that humans are
very vulnerable, anatomically
vulnerable.
We don't have long, sharp claws;
we don't have sharp teeth;
we can't run very fast; we
can't climb trees worth a damn.
I mean, we are really
vulnerable in the natural world,
except that we coordinate and
collaborate very, very well.
We know how to make weapons.
We can speak to each
other, we can coordinate,
we can strategize,
we can act in unison,
and we a loyalty
to each other that
will get us to even sacrifice
our lives to help other people.
Other animals don't do this.
We're the only species where an
individual will risk their life
or sacrifice their life
to help a same-sex peer.
I don't mean their spouse,
I don't mean their kids,
I mean another
male, for example,
that you're not related to and
you throw yourself on the hand
grenade and that guy survives
and that guy has kids
and you don't and in Darwinian
terms, you're a failure.
But humans do that.
No other animal species-- even
chimpanzees don't do that.
That makes us very, very potent.
I mean, it's sort
of tactically potent
when you have a
group of people that
are all willing to do that.
You can really defend
yourselves well,
and so that's what
human beings are.
I mean, most of the
hunting and fighting
was done by young
males, sort of organized
by older, experienced males--
just like the US military,
just about like every military.
But if you're going
to go into combat
and you're going to risk
your life to help that guy,
how do you know that he's going
to risk his life to help you?
What you need is a
very, very deep loyalty
to the idea of that
group so that even
if I know you hate my
guts or I don't like you,
that has nothing to do with my
willingness or your willingness
to protect each other.
And that group affiliation that
overrides our personal feelings
is absolutely essential to the
sort of small group dynamics
that combat and
hunting depend on.
So how do you figure
that out before the test,
before the first firefight?
You need to know this before
the first shots ring out,
before the first arrows fly,
before the tiger charges
the group.
You need to know this.
The way you find out is
through initiation rites.
And if you're not
willing to go through
whatever tortures and
humiliations and whatever
else I can devise to test,
to challenge your identity
as an autonomous person--
I'm going to break your
idea of individuality.
I'm going to make it clear
that you belong to this group
and that you will go through
anything for this group.
And if you're not
willing to do that,
I don't want you in the group.
I can't trust you.
Because when the
chips are down, you
might make a decisions
that's just to save yourself
at the expense of others.
So in that case,
fine, go in peace
but you're a danger
to this group.
So initiation rites are
very, very important
for bringing young males
into this sort of group that
will be doing something
extremely dangerous where
everyone is in a lot
more danger if there's
any weak link in the chain where
you can't rely on that person.
And it's not done
in a formal way,
but part of sort of boot
camp and all that stuff
is a sort of process of weeding
out the people who are just not
committed to doing absolutely
anything that's asked
of them on behalf of the group.
SPEAKER 1: When you were talking
about training and initiation,
it reminded me of
watching a History Channel
video on BUD/S training, you
guys have probably seen it.
And there's the hell
week scene, and it
shows this guy who they're
trying to get in these rafts
and put them against
the current and then
take them down and whatnot.
And there's this one
guy who has a broken leg
and he's crawling trying
to get back with this team.
He's literally crawling
on a broken leg
so he can get to
where he needs to go.
He's just that
unbelievably committed
like the whole entire group.
It was almost like a
beautiful thing to see.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah.
Absolutely.
I mean, that's like very
ancient human behavior.
And it's not like everyone
has to be like that,
but that the people who are
in the fighting group that's
defending this society,
they need to be like that.
They absolutely have
to be like that.
I mean, my friend, Brendan,
from Second Platoon
said to me at one point,
we were on an ambush,
we were sort of sitting
on this hillside
and we were pretty bored
and he was towards the end
of the deployment.
He was sort of musing about
this whole weird experience he'd
just had.
He said, it's really
strange, there's
guys in the platoon who
straight up hate each other,
but we'd all die for each other.
And then he thought
about it and he said,
so how much do you
really hate each other?
SPEAKER 1: Yeah.
When you're talking
to the hurricanes,
I remember since the election,
every other story in the news
is about how politically
divided we are in this country.
But then I remember seeing
a picture of a human chain,
and it was people holding hands,
like old young, black, white,
Trump supporters, Trump
haters or whatnot,
and they're all
reaching out to an SUV
to save someone
who was in the car.
I wonder are there
possible ways for us
to bring about those
feelings without having
to go through that strife,
or is strife necessary for us
to get into those situations?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, yeah.
I mean, the problem is
the two political parties
are very much invested in
not having that happen.
I mean, their most
reliable political strategy
is to trigger the loyalty
and vehemence of their base.
I mean, it works, right?
I mean, when you energize
your base, you win elections.
And energizing your base
depends on this narrative
of villainizing the
other guy's base.
There isn't room for
two bases in this town.
There's the real,
way the right way,
the American way, and then
there's the other way.
And both sides are saying that.
So both parties, the GOP--
I mean, I happen
to be a Democrat,
and I'm a Democrat
because I think
the GOP is acting slightly
worse than the Democrats.
And when the Democrats act
a little worse than the GOP,
I'm going to become
a Republican.
If that happens or
not, I don't know.
But I mean, that's the sort
of basis for my politics.
And right now, I
think both parties
are acting extremely badly.
And they have decided that
their political future does not
lie in getting Americans to
focus on what unites us all,
it lies in demonizing
the other side
and saying, this is the only
honorable way to do things,
the only American
way to do things.
And both sides engage in
it and it's disgusting.
And honestly, when people
say, he's not my president,
you are saying is
deeply undemocratic
thing when you say that.
He is your president.
He was elected by the people.
I mean, maybe in another
country he's not your president,
but if you're an American--
you may not like him,
I don't like him, but
he's my president.
He was elected.
And that the DNC is not openly
rejecting that sentiment as
undemocratic and undermining
of our national ideals
is disgusting.
And that the GOP, when
Donald Trump engaged
in a seven-year-long campaign
to convince the American public
that Barack Obama
was not a US citizen,
that the commander-in-chief
who was issuing orders
to our military was
actually an imposter,
and that the GOP never
denounced that, and never
said at least to the troops,
hey, guys, hey everybody over
there, listen, your
president is not an imposter,
he is actually an
American citizen.
Don't worry but what
this idiot's saying.
That the GOP never said that
is absolutely revolting.
I mean, it puts
soldiers and veterans
in an untenable position of
following the orders of someone
that shouldn't be in office.
I mean, their jobs are
hard enough as it is.
And I can't believe
that the GOP never
renounced that stupid idea.
And so very clearly in
my mind, the last thing
the two political parties
want is a long line
of people that are
risking their lives--
black, white, rich,
poor, tall, short,
everything-- risking their
lives to save one of their own.
That's the last thing
the parties want.
And I'm not a
conspiracy theorist,
but it's the only way I can
explain the partisan rhetoric
that is coming--
I mean, I don't
think the population
is naturally partisan.
I think they're naturally
like that chain of people
in the floodwaters, right?
They want to be like that.
And it's the only
way I can explain
the behavior of our political
parties in trying to divide us,
that they must see some
political gain in doing so.
And I think they should all
be locked up and put in prison
for doing that to this country.
I think it's
absolutely disgusting.
SPEAKER 1: Right.
I remember when McCain was
running against Obama in 2008
and some person grabbed a
mic and said Obama was not
born here or a Muslim.
And McCain right away
took the person's mic
and said, no, that's
incorrect or whatnot.
And it just seems that the whole
tribal identity to what group
you're on, if you go against
that their talking points,
you're immediately
looked at as a traitor.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: That's right.
No, that was incredibly
honorable thing
that McCain did.
And he answered that question
with more dignity and more
honesty than
Hillary Clinton did,
who is of the same
political party.
I mean, she was
asked the same thing
and she sort of
hedged on it, like I
don't know if he's
a Christian or not,
he says he is, whatever it was.
And she's a Democrat.
I mean, so I can't believe it.
I don't think people want
that for this nation.
I mean, some do,
some percentage does.
I mean, they're marching
with tiki torches.
Those people do,
but that's about it.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah.
So after the bombings
and the Blitz or whatnot,
you mentioned that the politics
climate changed for Great
Britain for 20, 30 years.
Can you go into that?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah.
I mean, I think what
would be derided
as the sort of
modern welfare state
in Britain started with
the collective suffering
and collective
solutions that were
typical of the Blitz and
then the sort of caretaking
that the nation had
to undergo of itself
of the most vulnerable people
in the English population
after the war.
That created a sort
of state society
where there was a lot of
welfare, a lot of state aid,
a lot of medical care.
And that came out of--
I mean, the politicians that
espoused those views came out
of the Blitz and understood
that the society needed
to take care of itself
and devote resources
to taking care of people
who were very vulnerable.
And that ended with Maggie
Thatcher and in this country
with Ronald Reagan.
I mean, both of those people
had absolutely legitimate
political views and
I think were probably
right about a lot
of stuff, but it
did mark a radical change in
how we understand our society.
And for a full
generation, we saw society
as something whose
main purpose was
to take care of the society.
And then after that it became
something else, something
that had advantages
and disadvantages.
It definitely was a departure.
SPEAKER 1: Can we talk
about the coal miner
story in Europe and the gender
roles and what was going on?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah.
So there was a
coal mine disaster
in Canada in the 1950s.
And basically, they had
something called a bump.
It was an explosion.
There's something in the coal
dust that's very volatile
and can explode.
And the mine shafts
collapsed, they pancaked,
and they killed
scores and scores
of people that were trapped in
these collapsed passageways.
And they trapped something like
I can't remember exactly, 15,
16, 17, 18 people deep,
deep underground like two
miles down.
I mean, what a nightmare.
You're two miles
down in the earth,
everything's
collapsed above you.
You have no idea
if anyone's ever
going to be able to get to you.
You have no water, no
food, people are injured,
and you have 24 hours' worth
of lamp light or battery life
in your lamps.
I mean, talk about a nightmare.
So what happened was in
the immediate aftermath,
those guys--
it was all men down there--
didn't know if the
collapsed passageways were--
if they dug through
100 feet of rubble
and then they're
in the clear again
and they could leave or was it
a mile of collapse passageways?
They had no idea.
So on the chance that they
could dig their way out,
they started digging.
And I mean, this is a very
very traumatized group of men.
And the people that
came to the fore
weren't necessarily
crew bosses or anything
in an official role
as leaders, but they
were very aggressive
men who grabbed
a pick ax, grabbed a shovel,
started shouting orders--
dig here, we're going to do--
they didn't care
how people felt.
Some guys were scared,
some guys were hurt--
they didn't care.
We've got to dig now.
It didn't work.
They could not
dig their way out.
And they ran out of water
and they ran out of food
and then they ran out of light.
And eventually, they're just
sitting there in the darkness
and maybe facing the prospect
that for the rest of eternity,
they'd be buried two miles
down in the earth never
to be dug up even as corpses.
And so of course,
now the struggle
becomes not physical,
but psychological.
And what they needed was a
different type of leader.
They needed a leader who
actually was not aggressive,
who was not a go-getter.
They needed someone
who was empathic,
who was able to sort of take
the temperature of the group
to see who was suffering so
much that they might trigger
a panic in the whole group, who
needed help, who didn't, who
could go without their
sip of water that day,
who needed that
extra sip to get by.
So there were people
that really needed
these sort of communicative
skills, these empathic skills
who was focused on the
unity of the group,
rather than on following orders.
So what psychologists who
studied these people when
they eventually got them out--
and they had to make
terrible decisions.
One guy was pinned, his arm
was crushed between two timbers
and he couldn't move.
And they were
trying to figure out
whether to take one of the
carpentry saws or an ax
and cut him free.
I mean, there were
decisions like that that
had to be made in the darkness.
Imagine.
So what the
psychologists found was
that the first kind of leader,
the really aggressive kind that
didn't care how
anyone felt, that
was a very classically
sort of male role.
It was a very kind of
male form of leadership.
But you needed more
than that in a society
that has to deal with a lot
of different, some of them
being emotional challenges.
You can't just go with that guy.
That's super
important in a crisis.
But in sort of longer
terms, you also
need someone who's
empathic, who's
concerned with the unity of
the group, who wants people
to communicate better
and all that stuff--
a classic classically
female role.
And what these psychologists
found, which is in some ways
entirely in keeping with
this whole philosophy of sort
of transgender today,
is that gender roles
don't depend on sex.
You can have females acting in
a quote male role, as leader,
or you could have
males acting in a quote
typically female role as leader.
The sex doesn't matter.
What does matter is that
these two different kinds
of leadership roles
that we have called
typically male or
typically female,
you can call him
whatever you want
but that is what we
have always called them,
the important thing
is that whether it's
a male or female
filling these roles,
you do need both of these roles
filled and anyone can do it.
You're not bound by your
sex in terms of what role
you can play.
And so that to me was
this amazing story
because it both confirmed
the idea that society needs
different kinds of
gender roles in order
to function harmoniously
and safely and well,
and it showed that those gender
roles are not dependent on sex.
I mean, it sort of made the case
for both things that are true.
SPEAKER 1: Can you talk
about the [INAUDIBLE]
and then also how our
presidency kind of put
those two into one [INAUDIBLE]?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: So
the Iroquois were really
in some ways a modern state.
I mean, they were a small
scale agricultural and hunting
society in upstate
New York, but they
created these
incredible alliances
that reached all the way
out to the Great Plains.
There's a theory that
had Europeans shown up
in the east coast 100 years
later that the Iroquois might
have been so involved that
they could not have gained
a foothold in North America.
Who knows.
But their government was
really, really interesting.
They had they had women in
positions of great power,
women chose leaders.
And the American
Constitution was
based in part on the Iroquois--
I think it was called the
Iroquois Great Law of Peace.
And it was a document,
it was an understanding
that defined the
individuals' rights
within Iroquois society, an
extremely enlightened way
of thinking.
And Thomas Paine and
some of the other people,
the intellectual creators
of American independence,
used these Iroquois
ideals as part
of what they understood to
be the natural rights of man
and how they're
incorporated into society.
But at any rate, one of
the interesting things
about your society is that they
had war leaders and peacetime
leaders.
And as soon as there was
a war with another tribe,
as soon as there was an
enemy, war leaders took over.
They had absolute authority
over absolutely everything.
And if peace were going to
be negotiated with the enemy,
if they got to the point
of negotiating peace,
once the peace was ratified,
the war leaders instantly
lost all authority and
the governing of the tribe
shifted over to
peacetime leaders.
And the peacetime leaders were
partially elected by women
and could be women.
War leaders were not;
war leaders were men.
But as soon as the conflict
was over, so as not
to risk a wartime mentality
governing a peacetime
society, so as not to
risk that, instantly
as soon as the
peace was ratified,
it shifted over to
the peacetime leaders.
And I read a wonderful book
about the rise of fascism
in Europe in the
'30s, and this guy--
I can't quite remember his name,
a wonderful American writer
of the time--
I mean, he was sort of
documenting it in real time--
Whitaker, his name was Whitaker.
He said that what fascists did
is they convinced a peacetime
society to operate as
if they were at war,
and that was the
brilliance of fascism.
They would take a country that
was at peace, like Germany
or Italy or Spain, and
convince the population
that wartime measures
were necessary,
even though there was no enemy.
And that's what fascism is.
They were making a mistake that
the Iroquois were not making.
SPEAKER 1: And we have
the position of president,
it's like this
conflict and peace
at the same time in one brain.
It's a [INAUDIBLE].
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Right.
And our system has its
advantages and disadvantages.
But for what it's worth, the
Iroquois would say it's crazy.
I mean, it's just
different kinds
of people that can run
a war and run a peace.
I mean, you certainly
don't want someone
who is oriented towards
peace commanding troops
and you really don't want
someone whose orientation
is war and commanding
troops to try to figure out
a fair and civil society.
That's insane.
SPEAKER 1: You also
mentioned the vital tension
between liberal ideas
and conservative ideas
for the society.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah.
So one of the ideas
in my book, "Tribe,"
and that I've sort of explored
a little bit after writing
that book in my
research is the idea
of the sort of false
argument between liberals
and conservatives.
And the false argument
is based on the premise
that one side's right
and one side's wrong,
and each side of course
thinks it's right.
The truth is if you
look at our evolution,
if you look at human
genetics, if you
look at twin studies
that have studied this--
I mean, they know
from twin studies
that genetics determines about
50% of your political belief.
So if you're liberal or
conservative, about 50%
of that belief comes from
a genetic predisposition.
And they know that because
genetically identical twins
are far more likely to have
a far higher concordance
of political opinion
than fraternal twins
that don't share identical DNA.
The only explanation for that
is that genetics plays a role.
If genetics plays a role
in political opinion,
that means that conservatism and
liberalism in its basic forms--
I don't mean Democrats
and Republicans,
I mean very basic human norms
of conservatism and liberalism
and the sort of particular
concerns that each holds--
that those two different ways of
seeing the world were adaptive,
had survival value in
our evolutionary past
or it wouldn't be
encoded in our DNA.
I mean, the stuff that's encoded
in our DNA has survival value.
And the fact that altruism,
that generosity feels good
is adaptive.
I mean, it would have meant, as
in Darwinian terms, people that
act with generosity and
altruism towards the group
immediately around
them, that those people
had a higher survival
rate than groups
of people that didn't think
that way and act that way.
That's all that means.
So it means that conservatism
in its sort of basic orientation
that unknown people--
strangers, foreigners-- are
suspect, they may hurt us.
We don't necessarily
let them into our group.
The idea in a strong hierarchy
and sort of law and order
within the society, people who
aren't working hard enough,
that's really their problem.
We don't have to bail
them out if they're not
willing to participate
in the group.
That sort of basic
conservative ethos,
whether you agree
with it or not,
has very ancient
evolutionary roots
and clearly served to help
our ancestors survive.
Likewise, liberalism with its
deep concern for fairness,
for having an
egalitarian society where
high ranking people,
high ranking males
can't abuse lower
ranking people,
where the vulnerable
are taken care
of whether they're
contributing to society
or not, where
strangers, foreigners
are not seen as a
threat, but as a source
of new ideas, new kinds of
food, new ways of thinking.
That basic liberal
ethos also contributed
to our survival or
those ways of thinking
would not be encoded
in our DNA and passed
on with twins showing a higher
concordance than everybody
else.
That means that those two sort
of opposing ideas, a society
that has only one or only the
other is incredibly vulnerable,
and that we survive best when
those opposing ideas exist
in a dynamic tension
with each other.
and we arrive at
some middle ground
that incorporates the
best ideas of both
into one coherent ethos.
that's what that means.
So in now in Washington
with this stupid idea
that negotiation and
compromise is bad,
they're dirty words, that
the other side is not
only wrong but immoral
and un-American,
those idiotic ideas that are
now current in Washington
and current right on
up to the White House,
unfortunately, those ideas
are absolutely utterly
in contradiction to
our evolutionary past.
They make absolutely
no evolutionary sense,
no scientific sense whatsoever.
And it's pretty clear
that a society that
is at war with
itself politically,
morally, economically,
culturally
a society that's
at war with itself
and thinks that the
other side shouldn't even
be part of the union--
tell me a marriage
that has survived
that operates like that.
I cannot think of one.
And that is the danger
that this country is under.
We are a powerful country,
we're the most powerful country
in the world.
We are not going to get
taken down by bullets
fired by somebody else.
This country, if this
incredible democratic experiment
that we are ever fails,
ever ends, ever collapses,
it will not be from
bullets from other people;
it will be something
we did to ourselves
and that we did with words.
That's the danger
of partisanship.
And it makes partisanship
actually a national security
issue.
I mean, literally
partisanship is
more dangerous to this
country than al-Qaeda,
far more dangerous.
And it makes it a
national security issue.
And I wish Congress
would see it like that
and form a committee
devoted to somehow ending
the partisanship
that is destroying
this country because it
will destroy this country,
probably faster than we realize.
SPEAKER 1: That was an original
fear the founders, the party
system.
They didn't want people
to form blocs and stop
thinking about the good
of the nation instead
of the good of the party.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER:
Right And the thing
is the parties reflect
our evolutionary past,
but up until now the parties
more or less disagreed
with the other side while
they kind of respected
its right to exist.
I'm a Democrat, I disagree with
a lot of Republican thought,
but I'm glad it exists,
at least so I can have
someone good to argue with.
I mean, conservatives
are what make liberals.
Without conservatives,
liberals don't exist;
conservatives don't
exist without liberals.
I mean, we need each other.
We exist in opposition
to the other.
But that means that we sort of
disagree with the other side
but respect that it has
its own coherent ethos
and that the other side
actually thinks that way
because the other side
thinks that's what's
best for the country.
The idea that the other
side thinks that way
because it's trying to
destroy the country,
that idea is completely toxic.
It would never be that kind
of contempt for someone
you disagree with.
Disagreement's fine,
argument's fine.
It makes for sort of
strong solutions, I think.
But contempt for someone you
share a combat outpost with
doesn't last very long.
I mean, down in
Restrepo, there were
guys who really
disliked each other
but no one had contempt
for anyone else.
You don't want to have
contempt for someone whom
you may be counting
on to put a tourniquet
on your femoral artery bleed.
And that's what we're
doing in this country.
We have contempt for
people we may actually
depend on for our lives.
I mean, we don't know
if or when this country
will be turned into one
huge combat outpost.
We have no idea when
that's going to happen.
It happened in Houston
and everyone acted well.
But we're really gambling
with this country
of sort of institutionalizing
this partisan rhetoric
where we actually have a kind
of deep loathing for half
the country.
Are you insane?
It doesn't work.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah.
You mentioned moral
courage and then
there was another courage,
which was more of like saving
someone [INAUDIBLE] or whatnot.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah.
So from studies of
sort of bystander
rescues from fires
and other catastrophes
that happen sort
of spontaneously
in the world, what they
know from the statistics
of these incidents is
that the vast majority--
98% or something like that--
of bystanders who spontaneously
expose themselves to danger
to rescue people they don't know
who are in a burning building
or whatever, almost 100%
of the people that do that
are male, particularly
young male.
And they will risk their lives
particularly for children--
in this order, for children,
for young women, for old people,
and eventually for young men.
Young men are the first to
rescue and the last to get
rescued, as they should be.
Young men in genetic terms are
very replaceable in society,
young women are not.
I mean, the constraint on
the health of a society
is the number of young
women, not the number
of young men, which
is one of the reasons
that young men are sent into
the meat grinder of World War
I. If the troops in World
War I had been young women,
Europe wouldn't exist anymore.
It would be over.
Europe recovered quite
quickly from World War I
because it was almost
exclusively young males that
were getting killed.
Had it been millions
of young women,
we would still be seeing
the consequences of that
in the demographics over there.
So those are the statistics.
Like it or not, those
are the statistics.
People using their free will
walking down the street,
whether they risk their lives
to save somewhere or not,
it's almost 100% male.
That doesn't mean that men
are braver than women--
it doesn't mean that at all.
There are different
kinds of courage.
And there's also moral
courage that does not depend
on sort of a physical reaction.
So men are adapted to that
kind of physical feat.
On average, we're 20%
larger and stronger
than women are on average.
But there are moral
decisions that don't
depend on physical strength.
So during World War II,
a very serious decision
that families had to make
was the Germans are coming,
here's this Jewish family
we don't even know.
They just showed
up in our driveway.
Are we going to hide
them in the basement?
We're Gentiles, we don't have
a problem with the Nazis.
We're fine.
But here's this Jewish family,
they're fleeing the Germans.
Do we hide them or not?
If we hide them,
they may survive.
We don't know them, we
don't owe them anything,
they just showed up.
If we hide them,
they may survive.
If we hide them and the
Germans discover that,
everybody's dead.
So women were significantly
more likely to make
that morally courageous choice
of hiding a family of people
they don't know who would
be killed by the Nazis,
more likely them men were.
It didn't require scaling
a burning building,
jumping onto the railroad tracks
to help someone with a train.
It didn't require
a physical act.
Men, frankly, are more adapted
to that kind of physical act.
But it required
incredible courage,
and that's moral courage.
And it's equally
important and you
can't have a humane
and civil society
if people are not willing
to act with moral courage.
And moral courage doesn't just
mean sacrificing your life.
It may mean sacrificing
your career.
It actually may mean standing
on principle and saying,
I cannot abide this,
I'm stepping down.
I'm not running for Senate
next year or whatever.
There's principles
that I have that I
value more than my career
more than my party,
more than anything.
And as Martin Luther said, here
I stand for I can do no other.
That's moral courage.
It doesn't have to
be life and death.
SPEAKER 1: Can we talk about
reintegration of veterans
into our society?
You mentioned World
War II and much more
casualties than what's going
on in Iraq and Afghanistan,
PTSD rates were a much higher
in Iraq and Afghanistan
than they were
after World War II.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah.
So we're social primates.
We clearly were adapted
to recover from trauma
because the natural world
is incredibly traumatizing--
forest fires, floods,
predators, enemies.
If a significant
proportion of human beings
were psychologically
incapacitated by trauma
and could not
function and it had
to be taken care of
by everybody else,
the human race wouldn't exist.
One lion attack in
the camp, everyone
is incapacitated and curled
up in the fetal position
and everyone starves.
It can't work that way.
We recover from trauma,
we're survivors,
were an incredibly
resilient species.
We can survive virtually
anything psychologically.
It's extraordinary
what we can survive.
That psychological
survival is greatly
aided by the
community of others.
We have a very hard time.
Traumatize a rat and put
it in a cage by itself,
the rat doesn't do very well.
That's what we are.
We're traumatized rats
in cages by ourselves.
And the problem
with modern society
is that we go into
combat in groups,
we come back
individually, and we
disperse to our
single-family homes
our apartments, our stratified
society where rich and poor are
not in it together, the
political parties aren't in it
together, the races
are not in it together,
and everyone is living basically
in these little cubby holes.
That does not help our
psychological adaptation
to trauma, it doesn't
help our healing.
And so every
generation in America
has gotten wealthier
and more individualized.
So my wife is the
youngest of 12 kids.
Her dad was 55
when she was born.
He fought in World War II from
North Africa to Sicily, Italy;
south coast of France;
all the way through France
to Austria-- the whole deal
as a lieutenant and a captain.
They just kept replacing
men underneath him.
He was wounded many times--
I mean, a level of
trauma that very
few in the current wars I think
have undergone, thank god.
He came home to
his hometown and he
lived within a few blocks of his
six brothers, who had all also
served.
The transition from the
battlefields to the home
really wasn't much
of a transition
because when those guys
got home, everywhere
they turned there
were other people who
had been on the battlefield.
It was a large scale war that
involved the entire country
in one way or another.
That's no longer true.
I'm not saying that as a moral
judgment, it's just reality.
That's no longer true.
We don't need a massive military
like we did in World War II.
That's great.
There's a real upside to that.
But the downside is that
when people come home,
chances are they can't
sit on their front porch
and look around and say, that
guy's a vet, that guy's a vet,
and that guy's a vet.
If I'm feeling a
little weird one day,
I can just go over
and knock on his door
and we can have a beer
together and talk about it.
That's not possible anymore.
The kind of community
that happens on Facebook
is better than nothing,
but it's not community.
It really isn't.
It's a pale
substitute for sitting
on a porch drinking a beer with
somebody and really talking.
SPEAKER 1: Do we have
any audience questions?
AUDIENCE: So on that
note, I had a question
about technology's
role in society
and where you see that going.
Because I know a lot of
ways you can take that,
but one conversation
that happens a lot out
here is about the eventual
obsolescence of human labor.
And I mean, there's a
robot mowing the lawn
right now so it makes sense.
So what are your thoughts
on just the general role
of technology in society and
people being able to feel
needed?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I mean,
in general, modern society
requires less and less of
the individual's input,
and there's a real
psychological harm there.
So there's one study I saw
comparing depression rates
in urban and rural
North America compared
to urban and rural Nigeria.
Nigeria is one of the
poorest, most messed up,
chaotic, and violent
countries in the world.
I've worked there, it's a
very tough place to work.
The lowest depression rates
were rural Nigeria, which
is also the poorest population.
When people don't have
a lot of resources,
they have to act collectively,
and in that collective action
they are buffered from their
psychological troubles.
In the wealthiest
societies, there's
very little collective
action because everyone
is wealthy enough to
take care of everything.
Instead of a neighborhood of
10 homes having one lawnmower
that they share, everyone
has their own lawnmower.
That's great, it's
also not great.
So as you automate
things people,
need each other less
and less and just engage
with each other less and less.
And there's a real harm there.
And so we know in the
last 10, 15 years suicide
rates, depression rates, anxiety
rates have all been going up.
And I can't prove--
I'm not interested in
proof somehow proving
that that's the
effect of the internet
and social media on our sort
of collective mental health,
but it is interesting
to note that it exactly
coincides with young
people shifting
the central energy of
their social interactions
from one-on-one in the
same room to online.
The shift has happened
in the last 10 years
and the anxiety
rates in young people
have skyrocketed, as have
suicide and everything else.
So I think the great
lie of our generation
is the phrase social media.
It's really not social media,
it's anti-social media.
It has great applications.
It's great for disseminating
information, organizing people.
I mean, the internet is amazing.
God forbid we lose it.
All of human knowledge
in this little machine--
I mean, it's incredible.
But I say it's anti-social media
because when you put people
in a group-- when you
put them in a room,
you put them in a restaurant--
they will ignore
each other in order
to pay attention to something
that basically is just ones
and zeros on the screen.
If you saw 10 friends, people
who actually like each other,
standing around all
reading their own book,
you would think these people
need to be institutionalized,
there's something
seriously wrong with them.
That is not human behavior,
that is not social behavior.
And I think it's really costing
young people psychologically.
SPEAKER 1: I have
an online question.
You mentioned how important
being part of a tribe is.
What are some
strategies and methods
folks can use to find the level
of connection you discuss?
It seems many groups
and organizations
fail to give most people the
depth of connection they're
seeking.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah.
I mean, a real tribal community
is one that lives around you;
that you depend on for
your food, for your safety.
I mean, it's a living group--
I mean, in the classic
sense of the word tribe.
We're not going to burn down
the suburbs, ban the car,
and start living in sort
of collective units.
I mean, obviously
that's not what we're
talking about as a solution.
So how can we have it all?
How can we enjoy the benefits
of this modern society?
And the benefits are enormous.
I mean, we'd need a whole other
hour just to enumerate them.
We're very, very lucky
to live in this society
in all kinds of ways.
But how can we have
that and reclaim
some of the sort of communal
energy and connection
that clearly makes
people feel good
and that arises
spontaneously in a crisis
like a war or a catastrophe?
How can we have that communal
thing without the crisis,
without the war?
You have to do it proactively.
You have to say, I want
to make that happen.
It will happen naturally if we
get slammed with a hurricane,
but let's not wait for that.
Let's make it happen.
And I think there's a few
things we could do as a nation.
The largest community we're
part of is the nation.
I think national
mandatory national service
with a military option.
I think it's immoral
to force someone
to fight a war they
don't believe in,
but it's entirely
moral to require
that someone put
some time and energy
into this incredible collective
experiment called the United
States and democracy.
I think it's entirely
moral to require that
and I think it's quite helpful.
I think it's good.
It gives people a sense
of belonging to something,
a sense of meaning.
It also mixes rich and poor,
black and white, religious
and non-religious.
It mixes everybody up
like the military does.
That's one of the great
things about the US military,
it mixes everybody
up and stirs them up
and judges them
on their behavior
and not on their skin
color or how much money
they have or whatever else.
That would be an amazing
thing for this country.
And I defy the two political
parties to divide us
if we have all had two years
of national service behind us
and we know people from
these other demographics
that our leaders would
want to demonize.
I defy the GOP and the DNC
to divide us with that.
The other thing, I think it
would be extremely important
as a people to demand that
our politicians refrain
from contemptuous
rhetoric, I mean
rhetoric that undermines our
sense of unity as a nation.
It's protected
under free speech.
Free speech is sacred, you
don't want to mess with that.
But that doesn't
mean that that kind
of really toxic
partisan rhetoric
shouldn't be condemned.
And I think if we
asked our government
to form a committee that would
examine toxic partisan rhetoric
and condemn it in a bipartisan
way, that would actually
communicate a lot to
the rest of this nation
that we actually are a nation.
People who have harmed
this country really,
really badly like the dozen
or so mostly white men
who collapsed the
economy in 2008, that you
can harm this country that badly
and not pay any consequence
means we're not a nation.
Bowe Bergdahl
betrayed this country,
he might spend life in prison.
I don't think he harmed the
country in a material way,
but he certainly betrayed us.
He might spend his
life in prison.
But the dozen or so men
who collapsed our economy
and cost us all $14 trillion,
not one of those guys
was even indicted.
What's that communicate to us
as to whether you we're unified
or not, whether
we're a tribe or not?
Of course we're not.
You can hurt us that badly.
I mean, you can punch
my sister in the face
and I won't do
anything about it?
That's not a family.
What is that?
That's us right now as a nation.
Those people should
be in court--
I almost said in prison.
Those people should be in court.
And finally, at
the personal level,
you can go out and find things
that feel communal and good
and feel that when
you're in that place,
people are judged
on their own merits
and not for their
role in society,
their position in society.
So one thing I've found, I
was a long distance runner
for a very long time.
I was a pretty good runner as
a kid, I ran some good times.
As I got older, I couldn't run
as much and I started boxing--
a really scary, tough sport.
I wouldn't say I'm
particularly good at it,
but I would say that it's
pretty much consumed me.
I don't know why.
The thing that I
really like about it,
other than just the insane
physical effort of it--
which I for some reason
need something like that--
what I really like about
it is that at the gym,
I go to Mendez Boxing in New
York City, it's a basement gym,
it's been around for 30 years,
you leave your street identity
when you walk in that
door down the staircase.
You could be a poor
kid from Brooklyn,
you could be a suit from Wall
Street coming to work out
at lunchtime and
there's no prejudice,
there's no bias in
either direction.
You're not judged for either.
You're judged for how you act.
And if you respect
and honor the sport
and respect the other people
in the gym and you work hard,
it doesn't matter if
you are a Golden Glove
champion or a 55-year-old guy
who just took up the sport.
It doesn't matter,
you have respect.
That is a tribal type community
and it's an amazing thing.
And it's one of the reasons
the poor kids from Brooklyn
and the suits from
Wall Street all
go there and spend a huge
amount of their energy devoted
to this thing that
will probably not
pay off in any athletic sense.
But it's clearly important.
So you can find
things like that that
operate on those terms that
are incredibly healthy.
SPEAKER 1: I've got a question.
On a recent podcast,
you shared your vision
for how civilians can better
support our troops when
they come home.
Do you have any
tangible suggestions
for how Googlers
can make veterans
feel like they're welcome
and part of our Google tribe?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER:
So on my website,
sebastianjunger.com, there's
something called Veteran Town
Hall.
And the idea is really simple.
It's based on ceremonies
that Native American tribes
in this country would
conduct with warriors
who had come back from combat.
It's very, very simple.
The idea is that
people who fight,
warriors fight for their tribe,
their community, their people.
And when they come
back, that community
must know and
deserves to know what
that was like for the
warrior and that there's
an incredibly cathartic value in
the warrior explaining what he
or she did for the community.
But there's also a real
value in the community taking
on the moral burdens and
the triumphs of the warrior
so they're all in it together.
And so obviously, we live in
a de-ritualized, non-tribal
society but we might be able
to recapture some of that.
So the idea that I had
was that on Veterans Day,
instead of the parade which I
don't think parades have high
therapeutic value for
people particularly,
or in addition to the parade,
the town hall gets opened up--
they're not doing business,
it's Veterans Day--
and veterans of any war
who served in any capacity
get 10 minutes to talk
about how it felt to serve.
And if you say, I
support the troops,
that means actually going to
the town hall and listening.
And you might be a super
conservative patriotic kind
of person who really doesn't
want to hear a Vietnam vet
scream at you for 10 minutes for
having to fight a war that he
didn't believe in.
You may not want to do
that, but you know what?
He's your countryman and
you paid for that war
and he had to fight it and
you didn't, he fought for you.
You need to listen.
You might be a
super lefty anti-war
and you really don't want to
hear some young guy saying
that his experience
in the military
was the very best thing that
ever could have happened to him
and he misses it.
You may not want to
hear that, but you what?
He's your fellow citizen.
You pay for that war whether
you agreed to it or not.
It was your taxes that sent that
guy over there so hear him out.
You may learn something.
And everyone might be
quite uncomfortable to have
someone stand up, and I've
seen this, and basically
be crying too hard to really
talk coherently because they're
trying to explain how their
brother got shot and killed
right next to them and
they should have died,
not the other guy and they
have the guilt of survival
with the rest of their life.
We all need to hear that.
And so when you do that,
you are basically saying,
we're a community as a nation,
we're a community as a town.
The people that have
served this country,
we honor them even if
we disagree with them,
but we're here for them
and we'll hear you.
As long as you need to
talk, we're here to listen.
And that's an extremely
important process
for both sides.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you.
That was an excellent response.
Do we have anymore
audience questions?
Awesome.
Well, thank you so
much for joining.
We really appreciate it.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: My pleasure.
SPEAKER 1: We love all the
work you do and to please
continue making documentaries
and books because we definitely
will be buying them.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Thank you.
I really enjoyed
talking to you guys.
Thank you for sticking it
out for the full two hours.
That's great.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]
