Freedom

by Sebastian Junger

As for humans, God tests them so they may know they are animals. —Ecclesiastes 3:18 (NIV)

and as free as anybody.” A couple of generations after Boone opened up Kentucky, the U.S. government rounded up an estimated fifty thousand Choctaw, Seminole, Chickasaw, Muskogee, and Cherokee and marched them hundreds of miles to Oklahoma—the infamous “Trail of Tears.” Some made the trip barefoot in midwinter, and mortality rates reached 25 percent.

In 1835 the U.S. government got serious about rounding up the remaining Seminole and sent roughly 5,000 federal troops into the Everglades to root them out. A few hundred Seminole and fugitive slaves fought them to a standstill, in one battle wiping out almost an entire company—107 men. After losing 1,500 soldiers and spending an estimated $30 million, the government finally gave up and left this renegade tribe in peace. Ten years later another round of fighting ended the same way. The descendants of these people continued in almost complete isolation until the 1930s, and they are the only indigenous group to have never signed a legal agreement with the United States.

And if they tried to escape, they were tortured to death like the men, the honors often going to the women of the tribe. “First, they scalped her,” a German woman testified about another captive. “Next, they laid burning splinters of wood upon her body. Then they cut off her ears and fingers, forcing them into her mouth so that she had to swallow them.”

Freedom on the frontier was a kind of mirage, though: the closer you got, the more danger you were in and the more you needed your neighbors for survival, which just meant obeying their rules rather than the government’s. Freedom and safety seemed to exist on a continuum where the more you had of one, the less you had of the other.

Any man who refused to help fight was shunned by the community; even failing to carry a rifle and tomahawk was cause for censure. If such a man were not yet married, there was little chance he ever would be. Theft was judged by a “jury of the neighborhood,” which usually imposed a sentence of flogging and banishment, and women who spoke ill of others were informed that they could say whatever they wanted but would never again be believed on any matter whatsoever.

There were countless ways to get killed, and sleeping on the trackbed was definitely one of them. Drunks and suicides and teenagers with headphones get hit all the time between the rails but there are less obvious dangers as well. Metal strapping can come unlimbered from its load and perform a kind of spastic dance alongside a moving train that will cut you in half. Steel wheels going 140 and bearing many tons of weight can shoot chunks of rock sideways off the rails like bullets. Cargo dangles and flails and falls from cars; an engineer was almost killed by a piece of timber that worked loose from its load and came straight through his cab from an oncoming train. He survived by dropping like a boxer under a right cross.

The best way to not get caught was to not be seen, and most of the time, that was surprisingly easy. If you hear a train, step into the underbrush. If you’re walking up on an overpass or grade crossing, put the binoculars on it to make sure no one in uniform is waiting for you. If there’s nowhere to hide when a train comes through, wave at the engineer. If he doesn’t wave back, assume he’s going to call you in. If he calls you in, hide in the woods and smoke a cigarette or boil some coffee until the cops roll past. If the cops roll past in one direction, they’re going to roll back in the other. If

including the Congressional Budget Office, the United States has one of the highest Gini coefficients of the developed world, .42, which puts it at roughly the level of Ancient Rome. (Before taxes, the American Gini coefficient is even higher—almost .6—which is on par with deeply corrupt countries like Haiti, Namibia, and Botswana.) Moreover, the wealth gap between America’s richest and poorest families has doubled since 1989. Globally, the situation is even more extreme: several dozen extremely rich people control as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity—3.8 billion people.

Countries with large income disparities, such as the United States, are among the most powerful and wealthy countries in the world, perhaps because they can protect themselves with robust economies and huge militaries. They’re just not very free. Even societies with income disparities that are truly off the chart—medieval Europe had a Gini coefficient of .79—are relatively stable until a cataclysmic event like the plague triggers a radical redistribution of wealth.

But throughout the great sweep of human history, egalitarian societies with low Gini coefficients rarely dominate world events.

Economist Walter Scheidel calculates that 3,500 years ago, such large-scale states controlled only 1 percent of the Earth’s habitable landmass but represented at least half the human population. By virtually any metric, that’s a successful society. “For thousands of years, most of humanity lived in the shadow of these behemoths,” Scheidel writes. “This is the environment that created the ‘original one percent,’ made up of competing but often closely intertwined elite groups.”

The bullets were often handmade, and the grenades were fashioned from tin cans stuffed with nuts, bolts, and an explosive called gelignite.

The rebels mustered at half-strength, if that, and knew so little about urban combat that they dispatched someone to Dublin Library to look it up. They hated the English enough to invite the Germans to invade Ireland on their behalf, but the Germans had their hands full on the battlefields of Europe and sent a shipload of weapons instead. The British navy made sure it never reached shore.

Although the real struggle would come later, an initial British victory was almost inevitable. They had artillery, heavy machine guns, and battle wagons made from old locomotive boilers that carried troops who shot through gunloops. A battleship fired her cannon from the harbor and reinforcements poured in by the day. When the British couldn’t get close to the rebels, they shelled them. When they couldn’t shell them, they starved them. By

Watching waves of British soldiers run into gunfire on Northumberland Road, it might have occurred to some of the rebels that there was no reason to expect better treatment from the British than they gave their own citizens. At that time, the top 1 percent of British society controlled almost 70 percent of the wealth, and working-class men were being fed into an industrial war machine across the channel at rates that were unprecedented in history. At the Battle of the Somme three months after the Easter Rising, Britain suffered almost sixty thousand men killed and wounded on the first day—equivalent to the entire population of County Wicklow at the time.

An important part of freedom is not having to make sacrifices for people who don’t have to make sacrifices for you.

The British found that it was easier to kill rebels than to control civilians, and after an initial burst of goodwill, the public turned steadily against them. In the long run, early failure is probably just as great a generator of freedom as early success. To crush the separatist movement, British soldiers arrested too many innocent people, enforced too many harsh laws, and pointed their guns too freely at checkpoints. They were also drunk much of the time. The Easter Rising had managed—or forced—a multitude of rival factions to unite under one political roof, and within two years, the separatist group Sinn Féin won a landslide election.

After two years of civil war, England pulled her forces out and granted Ireland complete sovereignty, with an opt-out clause for the Protestant minority in the north. It was a divided land that still faced decades of violence and strife, but the predominantly Catholic districts of Ireland were free of English control for the first time since 1169. On the face of it,

Anyone who wants to overthrow an established power—a government, an army, or even a dominant corporation—must, first and foremost, believe they are fulfilling a kind of historic destiny.

Centuries of British rule gave them a clear sense of heroic sacrifice, and the potato famine of the 1840s—which killed or displaced a quarter of the population—turned Ireland into a land of almost mythic suffering. Those attributes were amplified by Irish music and literature during a decades-long cultural awakening that led up to the Easter Rising, and Gaelic was resurrected as a source of national pride in direct defiance of British law. And many of the insurgents were Catholic, which made independence from Protestant England almost a divine cause.

insurgency or political movement with leaders who refuse to suffer the same consequences as everyone else is probably doomed.