Quotes from Sebastian Junger

the air raids failed to trigger the kind of mass hysteria that government officials had predicted.

If war were purely and absolutely bad in every single aspect and toxic in all its effects, it would probably not happen as often as it does. But in addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them.

Suppose now, not to give them flour, lard. Just dead inside

The human concern for others would seem to be the one story that, adequately told, no person can fully bear to hear. Joanna's

there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.

No people can live more happy than the Indians did in times of peace...Their lives were a continual round of pleasures.

One of God's greatest oversights is that dogs don't live as long as man.

self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others.

However it is defined, freedom is due, in part, to the fact that powerful nations do not always win wars and powerful men do not always win fights.

PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets. But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing.

He was unable to find a single instance where communities that had been hit by catastrophic events lapsed into sustained panic, much less anything approaching anarchy. If anything, he found that social bonds were reinforced during disasters, and that people overwhelmingly devoted their energies toward the good of the community rather than just themselves.

Another study notes about Bali: "Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities." As

The poor have always walked and the desperate have always slept outside. We were neither, but we were still doing something that felt ancient and hard. Most Americans did not own a car until after World War Two, and traveling often meant walking out your front door and not stopping. [...] We walked around four hundred miles and most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of

Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society—despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology—is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history.

It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn't willing to make sacrifices for you. That is the position American soldiers have been in for the past decade and a half. There

People think you always have to go for life, but you don't. You can quit.

the 1,323 soldiers who were wounded in that war and

Unfortunately for Mariners, the total amount of wave energy and storm does not rise linearly with wind speed, but to its fourth power. The seas generated by a 40 knot wind aren't twice as violence as those from a 20 knot wind, they are seventeen times as violent. The ship's crew watching the anemometer climb even 10 knots could well be watching their death sentence.

The reprieve doesn't last long though; within a couple of hours the waves are back up to 70 feet. A 70 foot wave has an angled face of well over 100 feet. The Seastate has reached levels that no one on the boat, and few people one earth, have ever seen. When the Contship Holland finally limped into port several days later, one of the officers stepped off and swore he would never set foot on another ship again.

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.

A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America's fundamental calculus about economic justice.

Whether… civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested," he wrote in 1795. "[Both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized.

I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I've done it so many times. First there is a kind of shock at the level of comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about—depending on their views—the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president, or the entire US government.

It may be unpleasant, but it's preferable to getting killed.