By Sebastian Junger
Why modern society undermines belonging
Subject
Themes
In the autumn of 1986, a young man hitchhiking across Wyoming encounters a homeless man who walks half a mile up a highway on-ramp to offer his lunch to a stranger. The man lives in a broken-down car and walks three miles each morning to a coal mine hoping for fill-in work. His lunch box holds a bologna sandwich, an apple, and a bag of crisps. He has almost nothing, yet he gives it away. That act of tribal generosity, rare and precious in modern society, opens a far-reaching inquiry into why humans thrive on hardship, why war can feel better than peace, and why being necessary to others matters more than comfort or safety.
In the autumn of 1986, a young man hitchhiking across Wyoming encounters a homeless man who walks half a mile up a highway on-ramp to offer his lunch to a stranger. The man lives in a broken-down car and walks three miles each morning to a coal mine hoping for fill-in work. His lunch box holds a…
Published in 2016, Tribe arrived at a moment of deep political polarisation in the United States. The presidential election that year exposed sharp divisions along lines of class, geography, race, and education, divisions that the work implicitly addresses through its central argument that modern…
For more than a million years, human ancestors lived in small, nomadic bands of roughly fifty people. They shared food equitably, defended one another collectively, practised intensely involved childcare, and did almost everything in the company of others. They were almost never alone. The !Kung…
One of the most counterintuitive findings in social science is that disasters, wars, and catastrophes consistently improve mental health and social cohesion rather than destroying them. Sociologist Emile Durkheim first noticed that European suicide rates dropped when countries went to war.…
The conventional understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder frames it as a direct consequence of horrific experience: the worse the trauma, the worse the PTSD. But evidence from across cultures and conflicts suggests a radically different picture. PTSD may be less a disorder of trauma than a…
Anthropologist Christopher Boehm surveyed 154 foraging societies deemed representative of our ancestral past and found that, in addition to murder and theft, one of the most commonly punished infractions was "failure to share." Freeloading, bullying, and hoarding were also high on the list.…
American Indian tribes varied enormously in their cultures and economies, yet virtually all of them recognised that war damaged not just warriors but entire communities, and that healing required collective ritual. The sedentary Papago, whose economy was based largely on agriculture, considered war…
For three centuries, while America transformed itself from a scattering of colonies into an industrial powerhouse, it existed alongside thousands of miles of wilderness inhabited by Stone-Age tribal peoples. The proximity of these two radically different civilisations produced a strange and…
A father who had fled both the Spanish Civil War and the German advance on Paris told his teenage son something unexpected when the boy refused to sign his selective service card: "You don't owe your country nothing. You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life."…
Months after returning from Afghanistan, where rockets detonated against packed-clay earth during fighting alongside Ahmed Shah Massoud's Northern Alliance, a war reporter finds himself backed against an iron column in a New York subway station, convinced he is going to die. The crowds are too…
In a sawdust-floored bar in Pamplona during the festival of San Fermin, two drunk Spaniards and three drunk Moroccans nearly come to blows over a plastic Viking helmet. Five men grip it simultaneously, grunting in two languages, gradually deforming the thing they all want. Then the Spaniard calls…
By Sebastian Junger
Subject
Themes
In the autumn of 1986, a young man hitchhiking across Wyoming encounters a homeless man who walks half a mile up a highway on-ramp to offer his lunch to a stranger. The man lives in a broken-down car and walks three miles each morning to a coal mine hoping for fill-in work. His lunch box holds a bologna sandwich, an apple, and a bag of crisps. He has almost nothing, yet he gives it away. That act of tribal generosity, rare and precious in modern society, opens a far-reaching inquiry into why humans thrive on hardship, why war can feel better than peace, and why being necessary to others matters more than comfort or safety.