Latest / Freedom Flip / Tribe: On Homecoming And Belonging by Sebastian Junger (EP032)

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Tribe: On Homecoming And Belonging by Sebastian Junger (EP032) · Freedom Flip

• 0:00
  The sheer predictability of life in an American suburb left me hoping, somewhat irresponsibly, for a hurricane or a tornado or something that would require us all to band together to survive.
• 0:12
  Something that would make us feel like a tribe.
• 0:14
  What I wanted wasn't destruction and mayhem, but the opposite.
• 0:17
  Solidarity.
• 0:20
  This is Tribe by Sebastian Hunger.
• 0:23
  This book to me is basically explains why so many of Americans and Western people are on SSRIs, which is antidepressants now, and why so many of us feel so alone in today's world that's hyperconnected.
• 0:36
  And if I just summarize it in one phrase, it's our Stone Age minds in space age times.
• 0:44
  What?
• 0:47
  Stone Age minds in space age times.
• 0:50
  So what does that mean?
• 0:53
  our minds are made from the Stone Age times, they're still operating the same, but we're in space age times.
• 0:59
  We're literally going to space with humans.
• 1:01
  We're going to start living on other planets.
• 1:05
  All right, so I really trust your judgment.
• 1:08
  I gotta say that if you think that the book is great, I'm sure the book is great.
• 1:11
  Right now you have me confused.
• 1:15
  It sounds, the first statement, it sounds a person that wants a flood so we can all come together.
• 1:19
  I want a lot of people to die so we can all come together.
• 1:23
  And therefore, stop using antidepressants.
• 1:26
  Okay, let's elaborate a little bit more.
• 1:29
  Let's go.
• 1:30
  Yeah, great challenge.
• 1:31
  So on page two and three, it ties in Benjamin Franklin, so one of the founders of America.
• 1:38
  He said, and they basically explained, Indians almost never ran away to join white society.
• 1:43
  Immigration always seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal.
• 1:48
  And it left Western thinkers confused about how to explain such an apparent rejection of their society.
• 1:53
  Quote, when an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language, and habituated to our customs, Benjamin Flanker wrote to a friend in 1753.
• 2:01
  Quote, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with him, there is no persuading him to ever return.
• 2:10
  On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home.
• 2:16
  They ransomed by their friends and treated, and they ran back.
• 2:19
  And basically, the point is,
• 2:22
  These Indians that lived like savages were all a team, a culture, a vibe that these people who were kidnapped wanted to stay.
• 2:32
  So you literally have these men and women that were returned to culture.
• 2:36
  And they're like, no, no, no.
• 2:37
  I want that togetherness.
• 2:38
  I want to be brought back.
• 2:40
  So why do you think that that's the case, that they behave like that?
• 2:44
  It sets up and frames the entire book on this point.
• 2:48
  And later in page 14 to 15, they talked a little bit about this.
• 2:51
  For all the temptations of native life, one of the most compelling might have been its fundamental egalitarianism.
• 2:56
  Personal property was unusually limited to whatever could be transported by horse or foot.
• 3:02
  So gross inequalities of wealth were difficult to accumulate.
• 3:04
  Success hunters and warriors could support multiple wives.
• 3:07
  But unlike modern society, those advantages were generally not passed on through generation.
• 3:11
  Yeah.
• 3:12
  Social status came through hunting and war, which all men had access to, and women had far more autonomy and sexual freedom and bore fewer children than women in white society.
• 3:22
  Here, I have no master, an anonymous colonial woman was quoted by the Secretary of French Legion.
• 3:30
  Okay, my level of confusion keeps growing.
• 3:33
  Okay, so here's on page 50, it says, but cowardice was punished by death, as was murder within the tribe or any kind of communication with the enemy.
• 3:42
  It was simple ethos that promoted loyalty and courage over all other virtues and considered preservation of the tribe and almost sacred task.
• 3:50
  So I think for me, these all point to this feeling of, I remember being in school and being like, I wish there was a hurricane.
• 3:57
  I just want to get out of this school.
• 3:59
  And it's like you're stuck in a system that doesn't feel right.
• 4:03
  So let me give a little more context on this guy.
• 4:05
  So Sebastian went to war and he came back and he was like, why am I unhappy now that I'm home and it's peaceful?
• 4:14
  And at war, I felt peaceful.
• 4:17
  And he has this quote on page 73.
• 4:18
  Wait, at war, he felt peaceful?
• 4:21
  Say more.
• 4:22
  Yeah, he felt because he was part of the tribe.
• 4:24
  So I'll mention.
• 4:25
  I see.
• 4:26
  You teed it up.
• 4:27
  So on page 73, he said, suddenly I found myself backed up against an iron support column
• 4:32
  Convinced I was going to die.
• 4:34
  For some reason, everything seemed like a threat.
• 4:36
  There were too many people on the platform.
• 4:38
  The trains were moving too fast.
• 4:40
  The lights were too bright.
• 4:41
  The world was too loud.
• 4:42
  I couldn't really explain what was wrong, but I was more scared than I'd ever been in Afghanistan.
• 4:49
  So this is him just waiting for a train and super sketched out and scared.
• 4:55
  Feeling alone.
• 4:57
  After coming back from war.
• 5:00
  So he got so confused by this and his own experience that he said, I need to understand more.
• 5:05
  And this sent him on a journey to capture this knowledge that was out there.
• 5:10
  Okay.
• 5:11
  Does it make more sense?
• 5:13
  It's starting.
• 5:14
  You're starting to win some brownie points here.
• 5:16
  So in page 79, he talks about...
• 5:19
  A 2011 study of street children in Burundi found the lowest PTSD rates were among the most aggressive and violent children.
• 5:28
  Aggression seems to buffer them from the effects of previous trauma that they had experienced because trauma recovery is greatly affected by social factors.
• 5:36
  And because it presumably had such high survival value in our evolutionary past.
• 5:42
  One way to evaluate the health of a society might be to look at how quickly its soldiers or warriors recover from psychologically from the experience of combat.
• 5:50
  So I found that interesting to think about these guys come back and they feel alone and they actually want to go back to more service because of that tribal sense of we're all on the same team.
• 6:01
  And I do think, you know, for people who played sports, you kind of feel that when you're going for the championship.
• 6:06
  Yeah.
• 6:07
  So in America, there are these things called fraternities and sororities.
• 6:10
  You kind of feel that when you're getting haze, which is, you know, yelled at or told you suck.
• 6:15
  It bonds you with these other people.
• 6:17
  And that bonding, I think, is biologically necessary.
• 6:20
  That's the Stone Age mind that we have.
• 6:23
  But in today's space-age times, there's just less and less and less.
• 6:26
  And I think it's creating the anxiety, and he makes a compelling argument for that.
• 6:30
  Wait, so is he making a point in the book that because now we are having more, let's call it material wealth, we are able to afford the houses or whatever that is, then that's separating us more from who we really are, which is a tribe?
• 6:47
  Yeah.
• 6:48
  You nailed it.
• 6:49
  I mean, it's exactly, he goes into that specifically in a later page.
• 6:54
  And he kind of talks about this point that when we suffer, we actually have to bond together and we rely on each other.
• 7:02
  When we're not suffering, we're way more independent.
• 7:04
  And it's kind of that balance between independent and communal or egalitarian and kind of capitalist, right?
• 7:12
  There's this natural shift between the two.
• 7:15
  What is egalitarian?
• 7:16
  Yeah.
• 7:18
  Yeah, they use that book.
• 7:19
  Egalitarian tribal societies means very flat.
• 7:24
  Everyone's supposed to be the exact same.
• 7:26
  Yeah, so it's interesting, right?
• 7:27
  So you would say that they were a little more communist and Indian because they just didn't have physical, they were more hunters and gatherers.
• 7:32
  So you'd pick up everything, put it on your horse and leave.
• 7:35
  You couldn't have any more than that.
• 7:38
  And they didn't believe in owning land, food, animals.
• 7:41
  None of that was, well, I guess horses, you might have owned some animals.
• 7:45
  And he would say egalitarian tribal societies do a very good job at mitigating the effects of trauma.
• 7:50
  But by their very nature, many modern societies are exactly the opposite, hierarchical and alienating.
• 7:56
  America's great wealth, although a blessing in many ways, has allowed the growth of individualistic society that suffers high rates of depression and anxiety.
• 8:04
  Both are correlated with chronic PTSD.
• 8:08
  Okay, pause for a second.
• 8:09
  So...
• 8:12
  Is it true that American society suffer a lot, super high rates of depression and anxiety?
• 8:18
  Correct.
• 8:19
  And what he's making the point is that this is because we are more apart from each other than ever?
• 8:26
  Correct.
• 8:27
  And is he making a point that this is because we have more means to do that?
• 8:31
  Or why is this happening?
• 8:33
  Yeah, I think it's part more of a means.
• 8:37
  And they show this if you look at after wars, society just feels more together.
• 8:42
  Like it creates a bonding, the suffering, the loss of life, all of these things, which is because we don't have enough suffering.
• 8:48
  Yeah, that's part of it, right?
• 8:50
  I mean, you'd argue, right, someone who hasn't gone through any suffering in their life, when they have a little issue that knocks them off track, they really are freaking out, right?
• 8:59
  Sometimes that's because they had so much PTSD as a kid that they want to control everything.
• 9:04
  Many times it's because they didn't have any suffering.
• 9:06
  So it's kind of the bell curve.
• 9:08
  And he's really contrasting this to kind of Native American societies, not pure Marxists.
• 9:14
  Like at that time, they didn't really have anything.
• 9:17
  It was just how you live together as a group.
• 9:23
  I really like this other flip I'll go to on page 127.
• 9:27
  It says, so this is, again, American-speaking a soldier who served in Afghanistan.
• 9:34
  If you want to make a society work, then you don't keep underscoring the places where you're different.
• 9:39
  You underscore your shared humanity.
• 9:42
  And then he went into the United States.
• 9:43
  He said, the United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone, which is, I think, super interesting as a flip, right, to argue.
• 9:58
  And that's what the Russians, you know, often said was it has to be destroyed from within.
• 10:03
  And I think even kind of us, our families, our little communities—
• 10:09
  It's kind of understanding where do you want to be in this supporting each other, relying on each other versus being completely independent.
• 10:16
  We naturally get more stressed and anxious when we don't have others we can depend on.
• 10:24
  So the last piece that I would hit would be the final banger.
• 10:29
  Man, this is dark stuff.
• 10:31
  Wait, question, question.
• 10:33
  This is the last banger of the book?
• 10:35
  Last banger of the book.
• 10:36
  Okay.
• 10:37
  Okay.
• 10:37
  We've hit them.
• 10:38
  I've slipped them in throughout.
• 10:40
  For nearly a century, the national suicide rate has almost exactly mirrored the unemployment rate.
• 10:45
  And after the financial collapse, America's suicide rate increased by nearly 5%.
• 10:52
  In an article published in 2012 in The Lancet, epidemiologists who study suicide estimate that the recession cost about 5,000 additional American lives during the first two years, disproportionately among middle-aged white men.
• 11:05
  That is close to the nation's losses in the Iraq and Afghan wars combined.
• 11:11
  And I think it's interesting, right?
• 11:13
  Man, I wish that he had the numbers of COVID.
• 11:16
  I think that would be fascinating to watch.
• 11:18
  Yeah.
• 11:18
  He wrote this book before.
• 11:20
  Of course, yeah.
• 11:22
  And I think it's really interesting.
• 11:24
  One other banger he mentioned was just this.
• 11:27
  In these Native American tribes, after war, they would come back and the entire village would purify for 16 days.
• 11:36
  The men, the women, the kids.
• 11:37
  And it was to get rid of this insanity that they called war.
• 11:40
  Yeah.
• 11:41
  even though they had wars all the time, right?
• 11:43
  Native Americans were killing each other nonstop because they recognized everyone was going to grieve over the loss, the wives, the husbands, the friends that were lost.
• 11:53
  And they wanted to purify themselves and then support those that suffered as a group and as a tribe.
• 12:00
  And I thought that's pretty neat to just look at this tribal.
• 12:04
  And I kind of tie it in with my own fortunate gift of living close to my family.
• 12:09
  You know, my family and then a number of my chosen family.
• 12:12
  Is you just know you can fall back on them.
• 12:16
  And they talked about these immigrant societies, right?
• 12:19
  They're required to do that.
• 12:20
  They're struggling.
• 12:21
  They're new to the country.
• 12:23
  They kind of pack together and living.
• 12:25
  And you generally see they seem way happier than these people that are leaving, going across the country away from everyone they know just to make an extra $10,000 a year.
• 12:36
  And I think this is the root thing that I thought was so powerful as I reflected on myself is what problems do you want in your life?
• 12:44
  The problem of wishing you made a little bit more money or the problem of your stress and anxiety because you don't have your family, your friends, your chosen family around you.
• 12:55
  That is powerful.
• 12:57
  And I think that is going to depend what God are you praying to.
• 13:07
  And I think that is very normal to fall into the temptation of praying to the God of money.
• 13:16
  And you go after a certain opportunity.
• 13:21
  And then you forget about your social pillar.
• 13:25
  It's definitely something that I've been thinking more and more about.
• 13:32
  Do I feel at home?
• 13:34
  Do I feel like this place is my home?
• 13:37
  And I was speaking about this with a friend yesterday.
• 13:42
  And I think that a great way of identifying if a place could feel like home is do the people that I see, are they at home?
• 13:51
  I think that that is the critical part.
• 13:53
  For example, if I go to visit you, I go around the neighborhood and I realize, okay, you live here.
• 13:59
  Your parents are from here.
• 14:00
  Your grandparents are from here.
• 14:02
  And that applies to 90 plus percent of the population in this place.
• 14:07
  Okay.
• 14:08
  This is their home.
• 14:11
  Now, if you go to another place, another city, that is more a transient city, let's say Miami, right?
• 14:17
  It's hard to find, okay, yes, my family, all my family, everyone is from here.
• 14:23
  It's much more, okay, this is the place that we land and then we see where we go.
• 14:28
  Yeah.
• 14:31
  Yeah, I think you're spot on.
• 14:34
  I think that it's interesting to think about
• 14:39
  What is home?
• 14:40
  Because you just defined it as a place where if you tie back to this tribes by Sebastian Hunger, they're all hunter-datherers.
• 14:50
  They're moving as a tribe.
• 14:51
  And they follow this gun bars.
• 14:52
  Yeah, I wouldn't say that it's a place.
• 14:53
  I think that it's about the people.
• 14:55
  Yeah, and that's what I was getting to.
• 14:57
  Yeah, it's about the people.
• 14:58
  It's not necessarily about the place.
• 15:01
  Nowadays, we don't live in a place where the whole group of people move to another place.
• 15:07
  Yeah.
• 15:08
  That's it.
• 15:08
  The whole city moves from Miami now to Alabama.
• 15:12
  Like, that's not going to happen.
• 15:15
  I think it's not going to happen.
• 15:16
  You're right.
• 15:17
  But that would be more mirroring what we've experienced as humans for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.
• 15:26
  And I was thinking about this with my own family, right?
• 15:38
  It's like, I can be wherever in the world.
• 15:40
  And I sort of think about as we expand to be living on other planets, like I could do another planet.
• 15:46
  Like, yeah, it's probably going to be hard or different at first, but it's way more important to be with them than it is where I am living, what country, what globe, what place.
• 15:56
  And if you flip back, right, that's a freedom flip.
• 16:00
  We're actually going backwards to how we've been for as long as humans have been alive, hunter-ratherers.
• 16:06
  We've only, and he makes this point in the book, we've only actually used land for 10,000 years.
• 16:13
  10,000 years ago, we started planting seeds and staying in one place because we were domesticated by the wheat, right?
• 16:19
  It didn't domesticate us.
• 16:20
  We didn't domesticate it.
• 16:21
  It domesticates us.
• 16:22
  There's a freedom flip.
• 16:24
  And it's kind of fascinating to imagine if you stay anywhere long enough, you'll become an immigrant.
• 16:31
  You'll have to leave, most likely.
• 16:33
  Any country in the world, you've had to be moved.
• 16:36
  So if you zoom out long enough, that would be required.
• 16:40
  And then it's a question to yourself of what's most important if I have to move?
• 16:45
  Who is most important?
• 16:47
  Something that to me is fascinating about the American culture is why parents get kind of very excited or they push their kids to leave their house at the age of whatever, 17 or 18.
• 16:58
  And I just find it fascinating because in Argentina, we don't really have that.
• 17:03
  Maybe it's because we don't have the financial means to just, oh yeah, I'm going to go and buy a place.
• 17:08
  I'm going to go and rent a place on my own.
• 17:11
  And also because we live, let's say, in Buenos Aires, you go to work in Buenos Aires.
• 17:16
  You go to study in Buenos Aires.
• 17:18
  So you can even stay in the same neighborhood that you were born.
• 17:21
  Wow.
• 17:21
  You don't need to go somewhere else.
• 17:23
  I just find interesting that many people choose to go to the other side of the country.
• 17:32
  Yeah, I think to me, it ties back to you think you can run away from problems and
• 17:39
  And look, I've been a victim of this too.
• 17:40
  I want to go travel because I'm different.
• 17:42
  It's a different place.
• 17:43
  But you're always bringing your baggage along, right?
• 17:46
  The bags, your baggage, your emotional baggage, your physical baggage.
• 17:49
  And I think people don't realize that, especially at 18.
• 17:52
  That's part of the reason you want to go somewhere else.
• 17:54
  You're not happy with life, your family.
• 17:56
  You're trying to run from problems.
• 17:58
  But I think that the culture is set up in that way.
• 18:01
  This is the part that I want to double click that I don't know if you see it because it's just so embedded in society, which is there is tons of universities that people can go.
• 18:11
  They will have way less debt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
• 18:15
  And it doesn't really guarantee that they are going to get XYZ job.
• 18:20
  And they decide to go, no, no, no, I'm going to go to six hours, five hours away from home.
• 18:26
  by plane, because whatever, I don't know.
• 18:30
  Yeah, it's interesting.
• 18:30
  I think there's a lot of different reasons.
• 18:32
  Sometimes people feel entitlement.
• 18:34
  They're just not worried about money or they don't see any reason to think about the cost.
• 18:37
  I think others is they have problems.
• 18:39
  They don't get along with their parents or they felt ostracized at high school.
• 18:43
  Or maybe they were a great student and they have take pride in whatever, getting into the quote top college they could go to.
• 18:51
  I don't think it's just one answer.
• 18:53
  Sorry, the other thing that I have a hard time understanding is why by the age of 17, 18, you went through three different schools.
• 19:05
  That to me is mind-blowing.
• 19:08
  See, this is fascinating because I've been critical of that, of staying in one school.
• 19:15
  But you're right, this book...
• 19:17
  And what you're saying would argue you just stay in the same one because it creates such a tight tribe.
• 19:22
  A hundred percent.
• 19:23
  Like if in Argentina, most likely when you are speaking with people, you say the school and we feel pride about our school.
• 19:35
  We don't change the school.
• 19:36
  And usually changing the school is not really a good thing.
• 19:40
  Yeah.
• 19:41
  It's not an easy thing either.
• 19:43
  Yeah, kids really struggle when their parents are moving around and they're changing school each year.
• 19:47
  My cousin changed the school each year for like six, seven years, and she just couldn't make friends because she always knew they were going to be gone next year.
• 19:54
  And then she got, you know, was in a bad place.
• 19:57
  Now, the flip side, right, freedom flip is I have seen kids that go to the same school from pre-kindergarten through high school, and then they fall off a cliff because they never learned this skill of making new friends, of not being known by the same group their whole life.
• 20:12
  But it's deep, right?
• 20:14
  This book would agree with you, Pablo.
• 20:16
  Yeah, that can be an exception.
• 20:17
  I think that what you just mentioned, yeah, it happens to... Yeah, it happens.
• 20:24
  But you can say the same thing about the Native Americans.
• 20:27
  Like, well, they don't make friends with other tribes.
• 20:30
  Like, yeah, well...
• 20:32
  The thing that's interesting in the book was we've talked about home and the feeling of home, and you brought it up with me as well.
• 20:39
  And this book has been on my mind because it really challenges that whole preconceived notion that the expanding kind of British and then United States across America was better.
• 20:52
  But these British or American people that were kidnapped would then leave home.
• 20:59
  Once they were brought back to society, they would leave to go back to the Native Americans.
• 21:04
  And it was perplexing.
• 21:05
  No one could understand it.
• 21:07
  And it's fascinating, too.
• 21:09
  I think there's maybe also for men, there's this call to the wild of like you like the wild nature.
• 21:18
  And that draws you there.
• 21:21
  I love it.
• 21:22
  All right, so the book is Sebastian Younger, Tribe.
• 21:27
  Quick 100, 120-page read.
• 21:31
  That's a flip.