How to PROTECT Your FREEDOM | Sebastian Junger

There's infantile to think you owe society nothing. Only children owe nothing, but adults owe something. And the question is, what is it that we all owe our society?

I think your book is profound in a lot of different ways. I also think that our culture specifically doesn't really know what freedom is anymore or doesn't really have a clear understanding of what freedom. Because it seems like it's always shifting. You know, it seems like one person's freedom is another person's prison and one person's prison is like it's what. What is going on right now?

Well, I think, I think modern Western societies can be very quite self indulgent. You know, we have it pretty good. Our survival needs are basically provided by specialists and meaning we're housed, we're fed, we're protected by specialists and we don't, we don't have to do those tasks ourselves. So in some ways, I think many people in Western society are quite spoiled and they've gotten this idea that being free means you can do anything you want and no one can tell you otherwise. And of course, anthropologically speaking, historically speaking is complete nonsense. As I say in my book, only as infantile to think you owe society nothing. Only children owe nothing, but adults owe something. And the question is, what is it that we all owe our society?

Well, I think that's the tricky part because, you know, given. And I'm interested to hear your thought on this, but given today's world climate, are we headed further away from freedom or closer towards freedom?

Well, it depends where you live. I mean, if you live in what used to be called Burma, now Myanmar, you're definitely heading away from freedom. It's an oppressive totalitarian state. Ditto North Korea. I would say the same in Russia. If you live in a Western style democracy, democracy is an extremely good safeguard of what we like to call freedom. And you know, it's important to remember that freedom, probably the, historically speaking, the most important and immediate definition of freedom is that you live in a society that can protect itself from its enemies. I mean, the most immediate, historically speaking, the last 10,000 years, the most devastating and immediate threat to your freedom is that an enemy will come in and kill and enslave you. And Western democracies militarily tend to be extremely capable and good at defending themselves economically. They're powerhouses. Right? Which is another form of freedom is that you have economic power as an individual or as a society. And so the final definition of freedom is you live in a society where your rights are protected from centralized authority. I mean, without centralized authority, there's no protecting yourself from an enemy. So centralized authority is an essential part of freedom, but you don't want it so centralized and so powerful that it oppresses its own members. Right. So democracy is actually quite good at finding that balance of excellent protection from outside enemies and really very good representation of individual rights within the society.

Well, as freedoms. You know, it comes down to, you know, some, there's the protection side of things as that tends to shape up. You know, I don't know about you, but I see a cultural shift in some cases where there seems to be, you know, one group of people who are all about protecting yourselves, all about making sure you've got the military capacity, all about making sure all that solidified. Another group of believers might say that they would like to have less of that. What is that dance? How do we bridge the gap? Because it seems like they're neither one of them are necessarily both. Right. Like there seems like there's a happy medium in between them.

Well, right. I mean, saying you want less defensive capability means you are probably in a society where you feel extremely safe. Right?

Yeah.

Which means that's a win, that's a victory. Right. That means that the military has done its job. It's, it's created an environment that, that makes most say, Americans. I live in New York City. Most Americans feel so safe from an invasion by, I don't know, Russia, China, Korea, whatever. We don't really think in those terms. So we feel so safe that we think we don't actually really need the military. Well, one of the reasons we're safe is that the military is on standby in case it's ever needed. And.

Personally I'm not for some ballooning Pentagon budget. I mean, I think obviously with scarce resources and we have to allocate them to.

Yeah.

You know. Right. And if you have a, an overly inflated defense budget and underfunded educational programs, you know, you're creating a different liability for society that can, that can have negative effects generations from now. So, you know, resources have to be used wisely.

Let's, if you're okay with it, let's, let's contrast a little bit the, you know, our American based culture, I guess it's, I guess we're technically on the West. Right. Western side and the Middle east, for example. I know you've had an amazing distinguished career. You spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I got a good friend of mine who, in matters of faith, he says the Middle Eastern area of the world Thinks very difficultly in matters of faith and things of that nature, as far as how they view it, how they dissect it and perspective and all this kind of stuff. I would assume the same holds true in a total worldview. Where do we go wrong or what are we maybe misunderstanding most about how the Middle east operates as well as how it impacts us here?

Yeah, I mean, I mean that's a really complicated, that's a really complicated conversation. I mean, one of the core tenets of democracy is that it is, its principles are secular.

Right.

As soon as you have a sort of religious society rooted in religion, you're basically saying people that don't share that faith. I mean, I'm an atheist, right? So if I lived in a quote, Christian.

If I lived in a country that was governed by a quote, Christian government, where would that leave me? Right. I'm being deprived of my rights as an atheist or as a Muslim or whatever. So the problem in many, in religious societies, including in Christian societies before the advent of democracy, is that basically theology ruled the law, it ruled the society and it provided a rationale for protecting a sort of top down elite that ran essentially a feudal society to their own benefit. One of the problems of Middle Eastern countries right now is that they are top down totalitarian states often that are unbelievably corrupt. All of that as it used to be with Christianity, all of that is sort of like has the imprimatur of morality because they've got the mullahs or the priests or the ministers on their side, as was the case in feudal in medieval Europe. The Middle east is still sort of run like that in a lot of those societies. And you know, obviously that's very, that's not a good thing. One of the things the Taliban did, I should say, you know, they were, they're a, an extremely sort of religiously minded government. They promised to clean up corruption and they did that in 1996 and they're vowing to do it again. You know what, I would, I would. I loathe the Taliban. I think it's a horrible, oppressive regime. But cleaning up corruption is good for the common man, the common person. And we should sort of acknowledge that.

Yeah, no, that's good. You know, I want to maybe hit on this for a second because, you know, obviously I think we all want freedom. We all want to be able to live our lives. I want to say more or less how we please. It seems like the freedom infringement comes when I live my life, somehow affects someone else's life. Negatively kind of scenario. Is there a core difference or a core element of freedom versus rights? How do we go from okay, well, this is my freedom to this is someone else's rights and that kind of transition?

Yeah, I mean, typically, I would say the word freedom is best applied to a situation where you are not being dominated by or killed or enslaved by an outside enemy. Right? Yeah.

When you're talking about your own society, you're really talking about your rights. And once you start saying free, once you start using the word freedom in a conversation about your own government, you're really considering that your own government to be your personal enemy. Well, that's the beginning of the end of a democracy. Like if we start talking about the government as literally an enemy, that is not a free society. Right. That is a society that is going to break down into sort of almost kind of feudal ways. Right. Where these sort of fiefdoms and sort of sort of regions of localized power. But you've lost a centralized organization, which of course is the core of a successful economic system in a modern industrial state. Right. So what I would say is like, let's use the word rights when we talk about our rights as citizens within the United States. Right. We do not have the rights to drive on the left hand side of the road in the United States because we will kill people.

We are not free in that sense. We don't have the right to do that.

During the rise of fascism in the 1930s and the 1940s, particularly the Nazis, there was a military draft because our government decided. My dad grew up in Europe. He was a refugee from two wars from Spain and then from France. That's how we wound up in America. Our government rightfully decided that fascism was a threat to human dignity and to human freedom and, and had to be defeated. And to do that, we needed a military draft to have enough manpower to storm the beaches of Normandy and defeat the Germans. Right. So we live in a free society. We are fully protected by our rights. But the government does have the right. We give the government the right to make large scale decisions for all of us that protect the common good. So the question today is, all right, we as a country, we were willing to accept a military draft to defeat fascism. Today, are we willing to accept the mandate that you should wear a mask when you're indoors with other people because of the threat of a pandemic? I'm a journalist. I'm not going to tell you what the right answer is to that. But that does seem to be the conversation right now, do we accord the government the right to mandate things like that for the common good? I think an obvious reading of that idea is yes, of course it does. For example, we can't drive on the left hand side of the road. We accord the government that. Right. All the time in our daily lives.

Yeah. Well, it seems like what's missing, and maybe, maybe this is a deeper conversation, but it seems like what's missing a lot of times in, in that is healthy discord there. That's a, it's a lot of very deeply rooted. I believe this, I believe this. There's no common ground rather than an open discord. How have you seen not having healthy discords shape what world economies at this stage or world markets at this stage in the game?

Well, look, we, I mean we, our lives are bound by ration. I mean at the end of the day, we have to answer to a rational, a world that runs according to.

Rational rules. Right. I mean gravity exists, right. So we have to pay money to get airplane tickets.

Because we can't ourselves defy gravity. That's just.

Our lives are ruled by those realities. Right. So one of the great ways at arriving at a sort of like a workable common position is to have differences of opinion argued out where on both sides agree to respect rationality and data. Right. And so you have the left wing and the right wing trying to figure out social policy, economic policy, the national debt, like how much money to give the military, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You have different interests and different perspective, different viewpoints coming, arguing, fighting, maybe even loathing each other. But at the end of the day, in a democracy.

Any population is basically half conservative and half liberal. At the end of the day, those compromises, those middle positions are quite wise. I'm not, I would guess that those middle positions are quite, quite good for economic health. And again, I'm not an economist, but I'm just guessing the middle ground is basically where we want to be at. We arrive at that as a, through a process of respectful.

Disagreement. Yeah. We sort of arrive at those, that middle place.

Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems like it's problematic for any, any nation that wants to be free or any person that wants to be free or, or have.

Rights that are, that are kind of for humanity as a whole. It seems like the, anytime the pendulum swings too far one way or the other, a lot of damage occurs. It seems like that. Let me ask you this. You know, Freedom is such a profound book. What made you decide to write that? This book right now this time when you, when with everything else that you've had going on in your life.

Well, you know, I'd written a book called Tribe about how community works. Right, yeah.

And the consequences if you don't have community, which made it many affluent modern societies because people don't need each other to survive.

Communitarianism is sort of a weaker force. And there's a. There's a subsequent decline in mental health in those populations, which is sort of ironic. Like the more affluent the country, the poorer the mental health tends to be. Right?

Yeah.

Suicide, depression, that kind of thing. So I was thinking about, okay, people are willing to die to defend their group, their community, their family, right? Is there anything else people are often willing to die for? And the immediate answer was yes, freedom. It's this other thing that people risk their lives for. Why, why is that? How does it work? How do humans maintain their, their freedom, their autonomy? And I decided to look at this sort of interesting question that humans are the only species where the smaller individual or the smaller group can actually defeat a larger adversary. And rest of the animal kingdom, the biggest grizzly bear, the biggest elk, the big, the largest coalition, usually male coalition, defeats the smaller one. Right. Not in humans. And there are, there are examples abound through history. For example, the Montenegrins in the early 1600s, there's this wild mountain people, right? Very poor, very proud and very warlike. And they were invaded by the Ottoman Empire and the, the most powerful military entity of the day. Right. Of that era. And the Ottomans outnumbered the Montenegrins 12 to 1. Imagine fighting 12 guys in a bar fight by yourself. You would lose.

No, thank you.

No, thank you. Exactly. They are artillery, they had cavalry.

And the Montenegrins handed them their hat over and over again. So what I wanted to look at is how do, how do underdog groups defeat larger groups? And that essentially is what my book Freedom is about. Is divided into three sections. Run, fight. And think you can run away and evade them like the Apache evaded Western authority, the Spanish and then the Americans for centuries. Or you can stand and fight. And there's many examples of, of smaller combatants or smaller groups defeating larger ones. The Taliban are the most recent example of that with the U.S. government, the U.S. military, and then finally within your own society. How did the labor movement 100 years ago defeat the sort of like aggregate corporate industrial interests that were allied with the government and had the National Guard at their disposal. How did these people do it? Right. Basically they played chess with the government. Right. They out thought them. And one of the ways that they out thought them was by incorporating women into the movement. And women are extremely important in creating social change, particularly against very disadvantaged odds. Why did they do that? At that particular point in my life, I'm intellectually curious. I had the idea, what is it people will die for? Freedom is one thing they'll die for. Why is that? How does it work? And so that's how I found my way to that topic.

No, and I think that's good because I, you know, it's. They're, they're, they're. They all resonate, right? Run, fight and think. It totally resonates. Did you see a commonality in your research and preparing and whatnot, of which of those had the greatest level of performance in terms of a developing democracy or in terms of developing into the next level? Um, is there, is there a certain, you know, a tribe, you know, the run tribe, for example, that, you know, there was a lot of success with that one, or, you know, what did you, what did you discover?

Well, but you know, basically, people use their greatest asset. So, you know, I box a little bit, right? I'm not a big guy. I'm five foot nine, you know, 170.

You know, I spar sometimes with the guy who was a former NFL football player, okay?

The one thing I don't do is stand in one place and trade blows with them, right? I'm gonna lose, right? Yeah, I move around. I move around enough that he's, he's like, dude, can you stop moving around so much? Like, let's have a fight already, right? So he's a good friend of mine, you know, it's all friendly, but. And if he tried to move around as much as I did, he would get winded faster than I would, right? Because big people or big armies, there's a direct. It scales up quite nicely. Big people, big fighters just burn through more oxygen because their muscles are bigger and heavier and need more, you know, need more stuff to run, right? And so you use what's advantageous to you. So the Apache.

In the American Southwest for hundreds of years, they were a lightly armed, highly mobile group that really could not go stand toe to toe with the U.S. cavalry and win. At the end of the day, like the Taliban couldn't either. So they didn't do that. They remained mobile. And they, you know, they were expected. The Apache warriors were expected to be able to cover 70 miles a day, 7 0. 70 miles a day on foot, day after day. They were so mobile that in that in rough terrain, they could outrun the US Cavalry. Right. As a result, the Apache society remained largely, largely free, you know, well into the 1800s. I mean the last band of sort of quote, wild Apache gave themselves up in 1886, almost within my grandmother's lifetime. Right. The machine gun had already been invented, the telephone, the electric lights, you know, the internal combustion engine. I mean it was a fully modern society and we still were not capable of caging those people in. And so, so, but then, you know, if you can't outrun your oppressor, you're going to have to out fight them. That's what the Montenegrins did.

Yeah.

Right. And eventually, if you're within the society, you know, you don't want to leave America. You've just arrived from Syria or from Italy or from England as an immigrant to this country and you're working in a factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts. You don't want to leave. You want to change society so that your right, basically your rights are fully protected. How do you do that? You're now playing chess with the U.S. government. And what one, what they started to do was, I mean, of course authorities don't have that much trouble killing men. It's not a big moral problem. Killing women can be more problematic morally and in sort of public perception. Right. So what these guys started to do was put women on the front lines of the strikes of the protests, you say, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And so the women were confronting, I mean all very brave people, men and women alike, but these women were confronting National Guard troops with fixed bayonets. Right. But these boys didn't know what to do. Right. These are kids, these are 19 year old boys in uniform. They've got sisters, they've got mothers. They're not going to start bayonetting women. Right? Yeah. And so one, this one cop police captain said so an amazing quote, he said, he said one good cop can handle 10 men, but it takes 10 cops to handle one woman. And they just didn't have, have the manpower to do it. And the strikers won.

Wow. Wow. Yeah. There's lots of profound examples which is like that throughout freedom. Let me ask you this. What if, you know, I believe that certain times as an author myself that certain, certain, certain works call you like, you know, it's, it's whatever the perspective that you shape that shapes that. But what are you hoping that this book delivers to the reader more than anything else? What, you know, what, what are you hoping to share with them and get their, you know, heighten their understanding on.

You know, I think it might be this. I touched on this in my book tribe as well. I mean, humans.

Die almost immediately when they're alone in nature. You drop a human into the wilderness, they're usually dead by the end of the week, Right?

Yeah.

We survive and we thrive because we're a social species and we live in groups. And what that means is, is that groups can have autonomy from other groups. Right. But if you're part of a group, you really don't have autonomy. Right. I mean, you owe the group your loyalty. You owe. You have to abide by the group norms, and if you're not willing to, you can leave.

Yeah, right.

That's just part of the deal of being human. So I looked at the, this amazing example of the Pennsylvania frontier. My ancestors on my mother's side settled in the Pennsylvania frontier. They endured an Indian attack, an Indian raid on their homestead, and the two teenage boys were killed. The mother managed to escape into the cornfield with an infant and a four year old. And my family is descended from that four year old who managed to survive in the cornfield. Right. So I'm writing about a part of the country that I've walked through and that one side of my family's from. So on the Pennsylvania frontier, people often went out there in the 1700s because they did not like the sort of oversight and the oppression of the colonial government or later the American government. Right. So they went into the wilderness. Well, the wilderness, you're very free, but you're in enormous danger. Right. It's a wild, dangerous place. There were native tribes that didn't want you there. And so what these settlers realized is that they escaped the sort of tyranny of the government, but very quickly found themselves in a situation where they owed their loyalty to, to the other settlers of that area. And when there were then when there was an Indian uprising and a sort of border war on the Pennsylvania frontier, you had to help defend the community. And particularly as an adult male, if you were not willing to carry a rifle and a tomahawk and a scalping knife and literally defend the stockade. Right. Defend the community against these attacks. If you were not willing to do that, you were banished, you were not wanted. So basically you were not oppressed by the government, but you had to abide by the group norms and you might even owe the group your life. If you weren't willing to agree to those terms, you were not welcome in the group. So what I want people to understand is that there is no such thing as complete safety and complete freedom. Your safety comes from this fact that you are part of a society, you are part of a group. And that's true if you are a hunter gatherer in the Kalahari Desert in Africa, the Kum, the San, as they're known now, or you're a member of our amazing industrial, technologically advanced society in America. Either way, you owe your survival to the fact that you're part of a group. So what do you owe it? And that's the great question in our society. What do we owe society? And you know, I would say as individuals, the fact that society doesn't demand anything or very little of us is actually too bad for us. Like when you, when you, when you contribute to the common good, to the public good, it actually is very mentally very healthy. It makes us feel good. It actually is quite a good buffer against psychological.

Many people's psychological struggles. I found that in, during the Blitz in London when the whole society had to come together to, to survive in nightly aerial bombardments for six months that killed 30,000 civilians. When the society had to come together to face that, mental health improved. It improved during the Blitz. Admissions to psych wards went down during the Blitz. Well, I would say in modern America, one of the pities is that we actually don't give more to the common good. I wish we had to do that.

Yeah, no, no, that's an important distinction. It's interesting. I was just having a flashback to 9, 11. I was. Gosh, I was sitting on a couch because I just happened to be sick that day and was watching the news and watched the planes flying to the World Trade Centers. And as painful as that event was for all of us to go through as a country, the one thing that I noticed within about three weeks of that was this resurgence of community amongst all of us, all Americans, regardless of how far left or how far right we were swinging or whatever. It was like we all felt attacked or we all felt somehow violated and stuff like that. And as a result, we were willing to join arms and then, you know, attack what we thought, like it was a greater evil. Since then, it seems like there's an element of, you know, this has obviously been 20 plus years ago now, but it seems like there's this also this element of trying to battle back a certain level of entitlement, a certain level of like, I don't need to contribute, but I get, but I get to get all the benefits of not contributing, if that makes any sense. Can you speak to that for a second?

Well, I think, you know, it's what we touched on it earlier in the conversation, you know, I think that speaks to the.

Sort of privilege that we assume in a modern wealthy society. And you know, listen, there's plenty of people in America who are not wealthy. I mean, wealthy by, in sort of by global standards. We are a very wealthy nation that includes some very poor people. And that's a damn shame, I think. Very wealthy society. And we get used to the idea that we, you know, that, that, that we don't owe anything. Right. Now, if you were part of a hunter gatherer community.

It'S very clear what you owe the group. Right.

You.

I mean, no, the group doesn't survive without everyone contributing to it. Whether that means that you're great at making.

You know, making pottery or baskets or starting a fire or make your bows and arrows or hunting or whatever it may be like, the group clearly needs your skills. And if you're not willing to contribute to the group, the group's not going to feed you. Right, right. That's, that's just obvious. Well, in this society, we have so much surplus and we all feel so replaceable. Right. That it's easy to think that you. That there is no contract between you as an individual and the society.

A, that's nonsense. B, it's a pity because you are losing out the government. The country is going to be fine without you. But when you don't contribute to this amazing society that you're lucky to be part of.

You are losing the incredible feeling of being part of something greater. Right. And I don't know how to tell you to do that. I don't mean you personally, I mean all of us. Tell all of us to do that. I'm just saying this is a huge amount of data from psychological, from, from psych studies. Yeah, logical studies. That when you contribute to the group good, to the public good, your sense of well being, your sense of living a meaningful life goes up and you are actually buffered from the risk of depression and suicidal thoughts.

Yeah. I mean, coming from homelessness myself to where I'm at today, I can honestly say that one of my greatest tools that I used to get where I'm at today.

That turned into compassion and empathy over time was the simple fact of when I started making a contribution around me, where I was at just now, you know, like, you know, coming out of very difficult circumstances, I just started to contribute. Helping a friend move or these, these small little things that add value to people. And I also find that.

In that same case, that so much of my feeling of freedom is directly tied to my feeling of unity or community.

Right, right. I mean, anthropologically, historically, you're absolutely right. We are free because we are part of a society that respects our individual rights and also is capable of defending itself and feeding itself and surviving. And the amazing thing about democracy, and of course it's not perfect and it has huge blind spots. When they wrote the Constitution, which is an extraordinary document. Right. When they wrote the Constitution, they forgot black people. Right. They just didn't think of them. Right. Unforgivable oversight eventually got rectified. I mean, it's a work in progress. But what I would say is.

That.

The great thing about democracy is that if you feel your rights are being infringed, you have recourse. You have the courts.

And you have the polling booth. And if those things do not go your way, sometimes people are forced to demonstrate in the street.

Yeah.

As the mill workers did 100 years ago to protest absolutely appalling working conditions and just laughably low. I mean, these factories had. Were so poorly run that they were experiencing one. One death a day among the workers. A death a day and no one cared. Right. So, you know, and likewise, you know, there have been protests throughout American history. And, you know, some I agree with, some I don't, but the fact that that can happen usually fairly peacefully with a minimal loss of life and that the. The authorities don't open up with machine guns on the crowd as they did in Uzbekistan in, you know, 2004, I think it was, and in, you know.

In Egypt and Algeria and, you know, et cetera. I mean, there's a lot in Argentina in the 1970s, 80s, like, you know, an unfree society uses deadly force against people who are protesting peacefully. That's how you tell an unfree society.

Yeah, Well, I mean, I guess, you know, for me to you, thank you for taking the time to write for you, because I think. I think it's a great tool right now to open up a healthy discord and dialogue because I think a lot of us have forgotten in some instances where we came from, how far we came and how far we could go if we would just work together to then actually have a sense of rights and a sense of consistent freedom on a regular basis. So thank you from me to you for taking the time to write the book. Everybody should go pick it up. Go pick up freedom right now. I know it's wherever books are sold for sure. Where can everybody else find out more about you?

You know, my website is sebastianyounger.com sebastianyounger j u n g e r.com and my publisher. I have a flip phone. I don't really like social media. I don't really engage in it, but my publisher maintains a Facebook page and a Twitter feed for me, and basically they feed it with things from my work. So it is my writing. I'm just not doing it myself. Somebody else is.

Well, well, if people. If people aren't familiar with what I. Which I'm pretty sure most of them are, but if they're not familiar, once they read your work and see your work, they'll. They'll keep diving in, for sure. No doubt about it.

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation myself.

I did too, as well. And you can welcome back on the show anytime, my friend.

Thank you so much. Take care.

All right, take care, Sebastian. See you.

Bye.

If you love that interview, go ahead and check out this next one right here.

And so if you tell me that.

I'm doing something wrong, I'm more apt to listen to you because I know you're doing it from a place of wanting to help me, not wanting to hurt me.