Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

by Sebastian Junger

In the case of these few stories, however, I had to rely entirely on my memory. After giving the matter much thought, I decided that doing so was within my journalistic standards as long as I was clear with my readers about my lack of documentation. The people in those stories have been in my mind my entire life and have often served as crucial moral guides to my own behavior. I only wish I knew who all of them were so that I could thank them somehow.

Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

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.

It’s about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning.

Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.

“Here I have no master,” an anonymous colonial woman was quoted by the secretary of the French legation as saying about her life with the Indians. “I am the equal of all the women in the tribe, I do what I please without anyone’s saying anything about it, I work only for myself, I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”

as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it’s possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren’t a good trade for freedom.

Kung people of the Kalahari Desert needed to work as little as twelve hours a week in order to survive—roughly one-quarter the hours of the average urban executive at the time.

modern society created a surplus of leisure time. It created exactly the opposite: a desperate cycle of work, financial obligation, and more work.

Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society—despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology—is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history.

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.

three pillars of self-determination—autonomy, competence, and community—and

In 1961, Fritz assembled his ideas into a lengthy paper that began with the startling sentence, “Why do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?”

Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.

“In every upheaval we rediscover humanity and regain freedoms,”

“We relearn some old truths about the connection between happiness, unselfishness, and the simplification of living.”

We didn’t learn the lesson of the war, which is how important it is to share everything you have with human beings close to you. The

best way to explain it is that the war makes you an animal. We were animals. It’s insane—but that’s the basic human instinct, to help another human being who is sitting or standing or lying close to you.”

For some reason everything seemed like a threat: there were too many people on the platform, the trains were moving too fast, the lights were too bright, the world was too loud.

What I had was classic short-term PTSD. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed.

If you experienced the death of a loved one, or if you weren’t held enough as a child, you are up to seven times more likely to develop the kinds of anxiety disorders that contribute to PTSD.

the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, if you have an educational deficit, if you are female, if you have a low IQ, or if you were abused as a child, you are also at an elevated risk of developing PTSD.

In 1980, the APA finally included post-traumatic stress disorder in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

As awkward as it is to say, part of the trauma of war seems to be giving it up.

What people miss presumably isn’t danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender.

“PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets. But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing.”

idea of belonging, and the trick was to convince people that their interests had more in common than they had in conflict.

The earliest and most basic definition of community—of tribe—would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend.

There is virtually no source of oil that does not incur enormous damage to either the local population or the environment, and driving a car means that you’re unavoidably contributing to that damage.

When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don’t see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you’re walking around in.

One way to determine what is missing in day-to-day American life may be to examine what behaviors spontaneously arise when that life is disrupted.

“That’s when I began to heal,” Brendan told the room. “When I let go of the anger inside me.”

Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker.

Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples.

People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.

Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?”

That sense of solidarity is at the core of what it means to be human and undoubtedly helped deliver us to this extraordinary moment in our history.

It may also be the only thing that allows us to survive it.