Freedom

by Sebastian Junger

The water was ice cold and filtered through the chert and limestone of the country and tasted as though civilization was still something in the future.

The poor neighborhoods were easy to walk through because people would offer us water or ask if we were okay; in affluent areas they were more likely to call the cops.

People love to believe they’re free, though, which is hard to achieve in a society that has outsourced virtually all of the tasks needed for survival.

Everyone—including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government—depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.

For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for, if not died for, and that raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all—rationing water during a drought, for example—are forms of government tyranny.

The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infanti...

Industrial carnage was new to society and civilians were not prepared for it. In fact, the first medical diagnosis for psychological trauma was called “railroad spine,” because it was so closely associated with the mass casualties of railroad accidents.

The word freedom comes from vridom, which means “beloved” in medieval German, and is thought to reflect the idea that only people in one’s immediate group were considered worthy of having rights or protection. Outsiders, on the other hand, could be tortured, enslaved, or killed at will. This was true throughout the world and for most of human history, and neither law nor religion nor common decency held otherwise.

Dutch scholar named Hugo Grotius began his attempt to regulate warfare by observing that men must “not believe that nothing is allowable, or that everything is.”

The authors of the American Constitution were among the wealthiest and most powerful men of their society and yet, with a few narrow exceptions, they made themselves subject to the same laws and penalties that governed others. (Many also risked being hanged for treason if the British won the war.) It was one of the few times in recorded history that a society’s elite stripped themselves of special protections and offered to serve the populace, rather than demanding to be served by them.

self-serving leaders can literally get people killed. But in any society, leaders who aren’t willing to make sacrifices aren’t leaders, they’re opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They’re easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards. Wealthy nations might survive that kind of leadership, but insurgencies and uprisings probably won’t; their margins simply aren’t big enough.