Joe Rogan & Sebastian Junger - Modern Society Makes People Depressed

Hello freak bitches. 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. 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 young white people, particularly white men, 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 colon, young colonials fleeing to the Indians. And we have not one example of an Indian, as they were called, fleeing to white society. 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 a way better, look at all the food. Look at the houses. I mean, they had plenty of food, you know, 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. 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. 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, 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. 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. Well, if you look at, I mean, genetics are complicated. I mean, obviously, on some level, industrial, modern societies are 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. The schizophrenia goes up in urban environments. They're not good for the human psyche. We are designed, we evolve, to live in groups of 30, 40 people in a harsh environment, totally interreliant 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. Yeah. It's just a very confusing thing, it seems, for people, to be amongst so many people, but to be alone. 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. 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. Well, we're wired to want to feel like we belong to a group. Native American society was sexually quite relaxed. I was quite egalitarian. In a hunter-gatherer society, you really can't accumulate wealth very well because these societies are often nomadic, so you can only accumulate as much wealth as you can carry, which isn't much. And ultimately, in societies like that, as in a platoon in combat, which is another part of my book, obviously, you're primarily valued for your contribution to the group. And that has been lost in modern society. People are enormously self-serving. Capitalism basically instructs us to do so. That's a whole other evolutionary imperative, which is also important. But in our society, it's way out of whack. So we are wired to serve ourselves, and we are wired to serve the group. And in a healthy society, those two are in a dynamic tension with each other and in ballots. In modern society, there really is no group to serve. And it leads to a really profound sense of meaninglessness for a lot of people. Yeah. I also found it pretty fascinating that when you were really young, when you were working – I think you said you were working construction, is that what it was? I'm trying to remember the story you were about to refer to. You were talking to – you were just saying that you were talking to someone you were working with, and they were telling you to slow down because some of us have to do this for a lifetime. Yeah, I forgot about that story. Yeah. Yeah, I was on a construction crew. It was a highway department of my town. And a lot of these guys were kind of life hurts in the highway department, not a particularly challenging job, in a sense. But you were on your feet all day long in the sun or whatever. And so I was a young guy, and I wanted to sort of prove my mettle or whatever. We were digging a trench, and I was digging like crazy. And an older guy came up to me. He was probably in the 60s. He came up to me and clapped me on the shoulder, and he said, Son, you want to slow down there? Some of us are going to have to do this job our whole lives. And he knew – I was a college kid. He knew I wasn't going to. And I said, Just slow down. No one needs to work this fast. It was really interesting that you were longing for something you were saying, like almost to go wrong. So everybody had a band together, whether it was a hurricane or something, and that that mundane life of just work and doing things you don't really want to do. Well, I mean, the irony about modern society is that it has removed hardship and danger from everyday life, and it's in the face of hardship and danger that people come to understand their value to their society, and they get their sense of meaning from that. And so what you have is when – during the Blitz in London, for example, 30,000 people were killed by German bombs. It was a horror show over the course of six months. It was ghastly, but people were sleeping shoulder to shoulder in the tube stations and putting out fires with bucket brigades and digging people out of rubble, and they were acting as a unified society. And the English government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties because it's a civilian population getting bombed to bits, and the opposite happened. Admissions to psych wards went down during the Blitz and then back up after the bombing stopped. And then afterwards, there was enormous nostalgia in England for the Blitz for those days, as tragic as they were, because English society felt – people felt like they were together. Later, I went back to Sarajevo, where I'd been during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 90s, and civilians would tell me – this was 20 years later, 20 years after the war – people would say, you know, a lot of us missed the war because we were better people back then. We took care of each other. I've talked about that with September 11th. I went to New York City about – I guess it was maybe six months after September 11th, and I was there a couple times. And before September 11th and after September 11th, there was a very clear difference in the way people were behaving. People seemed to be more friendly, more open. They were really appreciative of first responders. I was there once, and a friend of mine, she fainted, and so they called the fire department and came to check her out. And when the firemen showed up, man, you would think fucking superheroes showed up. It was amazing. Everybody was so happy to see them. And it was in stark contrast to the way people used to behave and treat each other, and it was directly because of having experienced this horrific event. Well, adversity produces pro-social behaviors in people. Adversity makes people act well. The lack of adversity, safety and comfort allow people to act selfishly. So after 9-11, the suicide rate went down in New York. The violent crime rate went down in New York. Vietnam vets reported that their PTSD symptoms went down after 9-11. What happens is people suddenly feel that they're needed by their society, by their people. And if you feel needed, you are able to ignore your own personal troubles. As someone in England, an English official, said during the Blitz in London, he said, it's amazing we have the chronic neurotics of peacetime driving ambulances. And if you think about it in terms of evolution, if adversity and danger produced bad human behaviors, we wouldn't be here today. Another way to say that is we are the descendants of the individuals 100,000 years ago who acted well in a crisis. The people that acted badly in a crisis and just took care of themselves and didn't take care of their people, their group, those groups died out. It's people, it's groups that encourage a form of altruism, self-sacrifice of individuals for the group during a crisis. Those groups survive. That DNA gets passed on to us.