Freedom

by Sebastian Junger

Early settlers tended to push up the major rivers until they ran into the first set of waterfalls—the “fall line”—and those spots became jumping-off points for people who were even more desperate or adventurous.

Outside of actual wilderness, the narrow swaths of property that run alongside railroad lines are probably the least monitored in the country. If you had to cross a chunk of America without anyone knowing—if you were a fugitive, say, or broke and worried about vagrancy charges, or just didn’t want to talk to anyone—you’d do well to choose the kind of railroad lines that run up the Juniata.

Track is often laid in summer so that in winter it contracts with cold into a state of tension.

Every component of a railroad track will eventually loosen, warp, break, or fail, which means that railroad lines are constantly being worked on by repair crews. Much of the 140,000 miles of railroad line in America has no original components left at all.

(The ancient Celtic measurement of a “league” was defined as the distance a man could walk in an hour—roughly three or four miles.)

The poor have always walked and the desperate have always slept outside.

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.

The men were friendly in that kind of intense, aggressive way that can flip straight into violence, and I didn’t want to be there long enough for that to happen.

Throughout history, good people and bad have maintained their freedom by simply staying out of reach of those who would deprive them of it.

America could seem like that as well, a country moving so fast and with so much weight that only a head-on collision with itself could make it stop.

The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.

The wealthier we are, the higher our standard of living and the more—not less—we depend on society for our safety and comfort.

We ate everything with our hands and our knives, tossing the gristle to the dog and then wiping our hands down on pants that already seemed filthier than anything our hands could offer.

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.

Workers usually died individually, but passengers often died by the trainload.

We called our trip “the Last Patrol,” and it seemed like a long hard weird thing to do until we were actually out there, when suddenly it was so obvious that we rarely even caught ourselves wondering why we were doing it.

The temptation to ignore reality while believing in a divine benevolence that will protect you from harm has gotten a lot of people killed over the ages. What truly is benevolent, though—what will save you over and over, or often die trying—are other people.

Enshrining human rights as the apex of international law is one of the greatest achievements of Western society—perhaps greater than landing on the moon or decoding the human genome—but depends entirely on maintaining a delicate balance between national sovereignty and collective action.

Human violence reaches way back into our evolutionary past and is usually about the same things that are important to chimps: resources, territory, and sexual access to females.

The central conundrum of fighting is that you cannot dominate your opponent without attacking him, but attacking ruins your defense and opens you up to counterattack.

The fewer enemy there are, the harder they are to kill and less likely they are to be defeated.

One of God’s great oversights is that dogs don’t live as long as men, I thought. And that men don’t move as fast as dogs.

The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own. Power is so readily abused that one could almost say that its concentration is antithetical to freedom.

The great virtue of hunter-gatherer societies around the world was that, although leaders understandably had more prestige than other people, they didn’t have more rights.

Although democracy may not survive as a broad form of freedom, its core virtue of insisting leaders be accountable to others and willing to make sacrifices is crucial to any group that faces adversity.

Women are the final component in defeating a dominant power. First and foremost, they impart a kind of moral legitimacy to protests that could otherwise be dismissed as simple mayhem. And, like small men in a fistfight, they are often underestimated in ways that can be endlessly exploited against an overconfident adversary.

At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with—and may even hate. That is true for small-scale societies like the Apache and Iroquois as well as for large-scale democracies like the United States.

a few times in your life you arrive at a place where your future has been waiting for you all along,

Finally, I relied on the research, scientific and historical rigor, and sheer brilliance of scores of authors and academics. Without them, this volume would not exist, and I am deeply indebted to these scholars not just for their lifetime of hard work, but for their obstinate dedication to the truth.