Tribe

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 Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger

I heard about this book and it turned out to be pretty fascinating.  Also short!  It's about two things: PTSD and belonging in society.  Those two things have a lot to do with each other.

Why is it that colonial Americans so often ran off to join Native American people?  They actually made laws disallowing it! 

Why do so many people who have lived through war -- both soldiers and civilians -- miss the war when it's over?   Junger talks about the Blitz, Sarajevo, and other locations.

Junger's theme is summarized in his introduction:

...why -- for many people -- war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to be a great blessing and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations.  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.

He talks about a whole lot of things: how much cheating we tolerate, and how terrible that is for societal cohesion -- how we lack ways to help young men feel like they belong to society and are needed -- how we give lip service to veterans but often completely fail to actually value them (in American terms, that's with a job) -- how we often valorize victimhood in a way that is incredibly unhealthy for actual human beings.

It's very very interesting, and contains a lot of insights about how humans thrive, or don't.  We are very complicated creatures who evolved to live in closely-knit groups, but we also kick against that and like anonymity and privacy.  We've now built a society in which we have way too much anonymity and privacy for our health, and way too little closeness and interdependency.  Our conscious desires are often at odds with our actual needs, and it used to be that our environment just enforced the things we needed (vegetables, fiber, exercise, nature, interdependency) over the things we liked (sugar, rest, wealth, popularity, independence).  We've gotten rid of most of that uncomfortable stuff, and the result...is kind of miserable.

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