Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

I couldn't put this book down after the first few pages. It is very well written, and I saw and felt what the author wrote. I calmly, and surprisingly, learned a lot I never knew and began to understand! I will read it again ... and I recommend it to everybody.

I saw him interview on his latest book. Prompted me to order all of his books. He makes me think. His books are smaller In The number of pages

In Louis Dumont’s "Essays on Individualism" he compares those days gone by when neighbors gathered to rebuild the barn destroyed by calamity, with modernity, when insurance premiums are paid to strangers who contract strangers to rebuild the barn for a stranger. Likewise, Junger opens his book with a lamentation, “I’d grown up… where people’s homes were set behind deep hedges… and neighbors hardly knew each other. And they didn’t need to. Nothing happened that required a collective effort. Anything bad that happened was taken care of by police… fire department… or town maintenance crew.”Junger’s book is about why for many, he writes, “war feels better than peace, and hardship can turn out to be a great blessing… Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” Thus echoing Chantal Delsol in her "Icarus Fallen": “Hardship makes a people. So does its absence.”As Junger tells it, this started early. Benjamin Franklin puzzled over it, as did a Frenchmen in 1782 when he noted, “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European. There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.” Yet, Steven Pinker would be pleased that Junger makes clear the fictions of a Nobel Savage are not the reason. Instead, while modernity advertises individualism in the latitude of every “free choice” it can invent, modernity is hostile to freedom. Modernity, Junger writes, “created exactly the opposite of [surplus leisure time]: a desperate cycle of work, financial obligation, and more work.”Junger claims the agricultural revolution, followed by Industrial Age (and now Information age), violated the kind of creature humans evolved to be. Rather than socially dependent creatures with feelings for our tribe, modernity made us asocial, isolated creatures often with hostility for others in a new imitation of tribe based on political ideology. While our political Right vilifies nonworking freeloaders, the Left promotes care for the needy. But according to Junger both coexisted in hominid social structure as part of a unified whole for hundreds of thousands of years. The former evolved from the reality of scarce resources with the threat to tribal survival a freeloader presents. The later evolved from a tribal mentality that values every member as a healthy defender of the tribe. Of America’s petty ideologies, this Afghanistan and Iraq war correspondent notes, “Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.” The social system we built is based on abnormal psychology, and yet we assume its normal through habit. The stress we feel and daily tensions we experience say otherwise. Could there be another species so odd?Good book. Short. 3.5 stars, rounded up.

We've lost that sense of belonging and paying attention to the larger vessel, that container we all belong to and that connects us. While we may be cut from the same cloth while being beautifully unique individuals, we contribute to the more extraordinary assemblage, whether or not we are aware of that. Concepts from this book keep returning to mind since I've read it. Most edifying.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.” —Pogo, by Walt Kelly (1912-1973)Sebastian Junger’s central theme is the epidemic of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) suffered by returning American war fighters that is exponentially higher than any previous conflict in world history.The root cause, according to Sebastian Junger, is not war, violence, death and destruction overseas. It is not the VA back home. It is us.Junger opens with a brilliant narrative—footnote free and wonderfully informative—of how primitive tribes, societies and communes through history waged wars and successfully dealt with the aftermath.Then he cuts to the chase. A quick sampling:“The vast majority of traumatized vets are not faking their symptoms, however. They return from wars that are safer than those their fathers and grandfathers fought, and yet far greater numbers of them wind up alienated and depressed. This is true even for people who didn’t experience combat. In other words, the problem doesn’t seem to be the trauma on the battlefield so much as reentry into society.”“Todays veterans often come home to find that although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it. It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life, and rampage shootings happen so regularly that they only remain in the news cycle for a day or two. To make matters worse, politicians occasionally accuse rivals of deliberately trying to harm their own country—a charge so destructive to group unity that most past societies would probably have just punished it as a form of treason. It’s complete madness, and the veterans know this.”Before casting a vote November 8, 2016, I urge you to read TRIBE: On Homecoming and Belonging. And give it as a gift to everyone you care about.Denny [email protected]

I previously read "Freedom" by Sebastian Junger and I liked it alot. But I found Tribe hard to put down. It was a fluid, easy read that really had me thinking about society today and why we are struggling the way we are...it's our lack of community. This book has pushed me to seek out people in person more often as a small step to building more community in my life.

A very well written book with a ton of interesting comparative facts to substantiate the points.

I was intrigued by his take on what makes humans happy e.g. One can peacefully sleep in a group of 30 people in war zone vs a very disturbed sleep for a solo hiker in a serene forest. Loved this example and there are many point he made which are quite deep.

Livre très interressant que j'ai beaucoup apprécié. Livraison efficace. Explications très succintes des propos de cet auteur très connu dans son domaine.

Why are suicide rates in western societies so high? Why do soldiers miss the war, even though it was a terrible experience? How are we organized, how do we take care of each other - and why do so many people in our society fall through the cracks?This book raises these questions, analizes them and offers new views. What this book thankfully does not do: It does not offer an easy solution - because there probably isn't one.After reading trough this book in a day and a half I understood more about my society, about my own behavior and about the human race as a whole. The book itself is - as usual with Sebastian Junger - very well written, very easy to digest while at the same time not being superficial. It is a must read for everyone who is interested in society, in the human kind, in conflict and in how one works.