Sebastian Junger is an American war journalist, author, and filmmaker. I really enjoyed this book as he makes a compelling case for the creation of a more egalitarian society.
xiv - How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for sacrifice?
xvii - The word “tribe” is far harder to define, but a start might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with.
xvii - Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.
p20 - The mechanism seems simple: poor people are forced to share their time and resources more closely than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses - and certainly isn’t the American ideal - but it’s much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence. A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Financial independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide. This might be a fair trade for a generally wealthier society - but a trade it is.
p21 - The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status.
p77 - If war were purely and absolutely bad in every single aspect and toxic in all its effects, it would probably not happen as often as it does. But in addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them.
p83 - Suicide is often seen as an extreme expression of PTSD, but researchers have not yet found any relationship between suicide and combat. Combat veterans are, statistically, no more likely to kill themselves than veterans who were never under fire. The much-discussed estimate of twenty-two vets a day committing suicide in the United States is deceptive: it was only in 2008 that -- for the first time in decades -- the suicide rate among veterans surpassed the civilian rate in America, and though each death is enormously tragic, the majority of those veterans were over the age of fifty. Many were Vietnam vets and, generally speaking, the more time passes after a trauma, the less likely a suicide is to have anything to do with it. Among younger vets, deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan actually lowers the risk of suicide, because soldiers with obvious mental health issues are not deployed with their units. Further confusing the issue, voluntary service has resulted in a military population that has a disproportionate number of young people with a history of sexual abuse. One theory for this holds that military service is an easy way for young people to get out of their home, and so the military will disproportionally draw recruits from troubled families. According to a 2014 study in the American Medical Association’s JAMA Psychiatry, men with military service are now twice as likely to report sexual assault during their childhood as men who never served. This was not true during the draft. Sexual abuse is a well-known predictor of depression and other mental health issues, and the military suicide rate may in part be a result of that.
p87 - Thirty-five years after finally acknowledging the problem, the US military now has the highest reported PTSD rate in its history -- and probably the world... The United States spends more than $4 billion annually in disability compensation for PTSD, most of which will continue for the entire lifetime of these veterans. Horrific experiences are unfortunately a human universal, but long-term impairment from them is not, and despite billions of dollars spent on treatment, roughly half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have applied for permanent PTSD disability… This is not a new phenomenon: decade after decade and war after war, American combat deaths have generally dropped while disability claims have risen. Most disability claims are for medical issues and should decline with casualty rates and combat intensity, but they don’t. They are in an almost inverse relationship with one another… Today, most disability claims are for hearing loss, tinnitus, and PTSD -- the latter two of which can be imagined, exaggerated, or even faked… As with welfare and other so-called “entitlement” programs, a less rigorous definition of need -- though well-intentioned -- may have produced a system that is vulnerable to error or fraud. Self-reporting of PTSD by veterans has been found to lead to a misdiagnosis rate as high as 50 percent. A recent investigation by the VA Office of Inspector General found that the higher a veteran’s PTSD disability rating, the more treatment he or she tends to seek until achieving a rating of 100 percent, at which point treatment visits plummet and many vets quit completely. (A 100 percent disability rating entitles a veteran to a tax-free income of around $3,000 a month.) In theory, the most traumatized people should be seeking more help, not less. Investigators reluctantly came to the conclusion that some vets were getting treatment simply to raise their disability rating and claim more compensation.
p92 - What people miss presumably isn’t danger or loss but the unity that these things engender. There are obvious stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation, so during disasters there is a net gain in well-being. Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild. A modern soldier returning from combat goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good… Whatever the technological advances of modern society--and they’re nearly miraculous--the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.
p126 - The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs--and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought--will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.
No comments:
Post a Comment