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Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
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.
Bouquet’s army lumbered out of Carlisle in July 1763 and within months had defeated the Indians at Bushy Run and reinforced Fort Pitt and several outlying garrisons.
“Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European,”
Virtually all of the Indian tribes waged war against their neighbors and practiced deeply sickening forms of torture.
One study in the 1960s found that nomadic !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.
First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good.
They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.
“In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.”
Around 3 percent of people on unemployment assistance intentionally cheat the system, for example, which costs the United States more than $2 billion a year.
That figure, however, is eclipsed by Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which is conservatively estimated at 10 percent of total payments—or around $100 billion a year. Some estimates run to two or three times that figure.
Fraud by American defense contractors is estimated at around $100 billion per year, and they are relatively well behaved compared to the financial industry. The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent.
The fact that a group of people can cost American society several trillion dollars in losses—roughly one-quarter of that year’s gross domestic product—and not be tried for high crimes shows how completely de-tribalized the country has become.
Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals.
“We would really have all gone down onto the beaches with broken bottles,” one woman remembered of the public’s determination to fight the Germans.
Before the war, projections for psychiatric breakdown in England ran as high as four million people, but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down
Psychiatrists watched in puzzlement as long-standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids.
suicide rates in Belfast dropped 50 percent during the riots of 1969 and 1970, and homicide and other violent crimes also went down.
“When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health,”
Dresden lost more people in one night than London did during the entire war. Firestorms engulfed whole neighborhoods and used up so much oxygen that people who were untouched by the blasts reportedly died of asphyxiation instead.
social bonds were reinforced during disasters, and that people overwhelmingly devoted their energies toward the good of the community rather than just themselves.
Men have to wait, on average, until age seventy-five before they can expect the same kind of assistance in a life-threatening situation that women get their whole lives.
The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good.
Even my taxi driver on the ride from the airport told me that during the war, he’d been in a special unit that slipped through the enemy lines to help other besieged enclaves. “And now look at me,” he said, dismissing the dashboard with a wave of his hand.
Statistically, the 20 percent of people who fail to overcome trauma tend to be those who are already burdened by psychological issues, either because they inherited them or because they suffered abuse as children.
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.
Among younger vets, deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan actually lowers the risk of suicide, because soldiers with obvious mental health issues are not deployed with their units.
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.
Similarly, more than 80 percent of psychiatric casualties in the US Army’s VII Corps came from support units that took almost no incoming fire during the air campaign of the first Gulf War.
In 1980, the APA finally included post-traumatic stress disorder in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
a full 8 percent of all Global War On Terror veterans are on PTSD disability. Puzzlingly, this figure includes Navy and Air Force personnel who were nowhere near ground combat, as well as veterans who stayed in the United States and never deployed.
Soldiers in Vietnam suffered one-quarter the mortality rate of troops in World War II, for example, but filed for both physical and psychological disability compensation at a rate that was 50 percent higher.
Today’s vets claim three times the number of disabilities that Vietnam vets did, despite a generally warm reception back home and a casualty rate that, thank God, is roughly one-third what it was in Vietnam.
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.)
Almost 9 million people lost their jobs during the financial crisis, 5 million families lost their homes, and the unemployment rate doubled to around 10 percent.
(“It was better when it was really bad,” someone spray-painted on a wall about the loss of social solidarity in Bosnia after the war ended.)
