#975 - Sebastian Junger

Joe Rogan (0:08)

All right, we're live. What's up, man, how are you?

Sebastian Junger (0:11)

Hey, I'm pretty good.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

I'm excited, I walked in on a pool game.

Sebastian Junger (0:14)

Yeah, I barely squeaked it out.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

It was a very nice shot to end it, though. That's the way to end it. So I've been reading your book, man, Tribe. I really enjoy it. It's really good.

And it's so, it resonates. It's very interesting. Into the first chapter, I wanted to move in with the Native Americans.

It was such a, I mean, it was, one of the more interesting aspects of it was something that I didn't know about, which was the European settlers that had been kidnapped and were living with the Native Americans. And then when they were rescued, many of them wanted to go back.

Sebastian Junger (0:51)

Yeah, or they would go into hiding so they wouldn't have to be repatriated to colonial society. They wanted to stay with their adopted tribes. And there was also a lot of, a lot of young white people, particularly white men, but young women, too, who basically absconded across the frontier into tribal society.

They fled white society. They didn't like it. And as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, we have lots of young colonials fleeing to the Indians, and we have not one example of an Indian, as they were called, fleeing to white society.

Joe Rogan (1:25)

Yeah, that was one of the more fascinating aspects of it. I didn't anticipate that. I thought that there would be a lot of Native Americans that would be like, wow, this is way better. Look at all the food, look at the houses.

Sebastian Junger (1:35)

I mean, they had plenty of food.

Whatever, they were a very successful society. In fact, they had better nutrition than the whites did, a more varied diet, and a much, much more egalitarian society than colonial society.

Joe Rogan (1:52)

That was also interesting about it, when you were talking about the women that had moved in with the Native Americans and were expressing how much more freedom they experienced.

Sebastian Junger (2:02)

Yeah, I mean, Indian society, Native society wasn't crushed by Christian morality. So you could divorce, you could marry, as a woman, you could marry whom you wanted, you could get divorced, you could do whatever you wanted. It was very, very egalitarian. What they've shown is that in societies where everyone is necessary for food production, everyone's more or less equal.

And in agrarian societies, agricultural societies, industrial societies, industrial societies, you have large segments of the population, often women, who are not involved in food production, they're involved in reproduction, and so their equality goes down.

Joe Rogan (2:42)

Wow, it's almost like society as we've created over the last couple of hundred years is almost totally incompatible with human genetics, or with the human body, or the human spirit, or whatever.

Sebastian Junger (2:59)

Well, if you look at, I mean, genetics are complicated. I mean, obviously on some level, industrial, modern society is very successful. We have seven billion of us.

But as wealth goes up in a society, as modernity goes up in a society, the suicide rate goes up. The depression rate goes up. Schizophrenia goes up in urban environments.

They're not good for the human psyche. We are designed, we evolved to live in groups of 30, 40 people in a harsh environment, totally inter-reliant on one another for survival. That creates a huge amount of equality within a group and loyalty within a group. That's what we are designed for genetically. Modern society allows the individual to be independent from the group, which is in some ways a great liberation, and other ways it can lead to a profound alienation and depression.

Joe Rogan (3:49)

Yeah, it's just a very confusing thing, it seems, for people to be amongst so many people, but to be alone.

Sebastian Junger (3:57)

Yeah, I mean, we're not wired to be confronted with strangers all day long. I live in New York City, and I love New York City, but all day long, you encounter strangers and you don't recognize anybody. So you can be alone in a crowd, which is not something that human beings have experienced until quite recently in their history.

Joe Rogan (4:19)

Yeah, that was, I think, one of the more disturbing parts about this idea that these people were kidnapped by the Native Americans and wanted to stay with them was that whatever that Native American life was, like however they were living, that just seemed to just resonate with them. It seemed to be what was right.

Sebastian Junger (4:42)