Quotes from Sebastian Junger

When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health," Lyons wrote in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 1979. "It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.

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

social bonds were reinforced during disasters, and that people overwhelmingly devoted their energies toward the good of the community rather than just themselves.

The positive effects of war on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped.

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

Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.

The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.

Sheep and cattle disperse across far too much land to be monitored, so herding societies often depend on a reputation for ferocity and revenge to keep people from stealing them. A wheat field is almost impossible to steal, so farming societies can afford to be much more docile.

Killing seems to traumatize people regardless of the danger they're in or the perceived righteousness of their cause. Pilots of unmanned drones, who watch their missiles kill human beings by remote camera, have been calculated to have the same PTSD rates as pilots who fly actual combat missions in war zones.

When it comes to a matchup between a smaller fighter and a larger one, each has a particular advantage. Large fighters are usually stronger and can outmuscle opponents if they get their hands on them. And small fighters have less mass to set into motion, so they can move faster and use less energy doing it.

Since only 10 percent of our armed forces experience actual combat, the majority of vets claiming to suffer from PTSD seem to have been affected by something other than direct exposure to danger.

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

decade after decade and war after war, American combat deaths have generally dropped while disability claims have risen. Most disability claims are for medical issues and should decline with casualty rates and combat intensity, but they don't.

a surprising number of Americans—mostly men—wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and on some occasions even fought alongside them. And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society. Emigration always seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal, and it left Western thinkers

Why do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?

When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs," Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, "[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.

And yet when I went to sleep, it was like I became part of some larger human experience that was utterly heartbreaking. It was far too much to acknowledge when I was awake.

Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European," a French émigré named Hector de Crèvecoeur lamented in 1782. "There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.

Both are profound acts of selflessness that distinguish us from all other mammals, including the higher primates that we are so closely related to.

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." When

scripture: a true and honest accounting of everything that underlies the frantic performance of life.

Some scholars, including Weatherford, believe that the Great Wall of China was built as much to keep their own people in as to keep the "barbarians" out.

A modern soldier returning from combat—or a survivor of Sarajevo—goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good.

Like wealth discrepancies, mortality rates provide a rough indication of relative freedom, and when social classes die at radically different rates from one another, some are obviously less free. An important part of freedom is not having to make sacrifices for people who don't have to make sacrifices for you.