The Art of Manliness - #217： The Importance of Having a Tribe

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast and many modern

00:00:19.200 western democracies individualism reigns supreme the goal of life is to be a man who marches to

00:00:24.580 the beat of his own drummer and is unencumbered by others and individuals who prefer tribalism or

00:00:30.360 group belonging are either looked at with suspicion or disdain but what if our quest for hyper

00:00:35.120 individualism is actually making us miserable and what if belonging to a tight-knit group that

00:00:40.480 requires loyalty and self-sacrifice is the key to fulfilling fulfilled and holy human well that's

00:00:46.420 the argument my guest makes in his latest book his name is sebastian younger you may have read his

00:00:50.680 account of being embedded with the army platoon serving in afghanistan in his must-read book

00:00:54.780 war or seen his visceral documentary about the battles in the coringal valley called restrepo

00:00:59.780 in his latest book tribe younger uses his firsthand experience as a war reporter as a starting point

00:01:05.680 in exploring the vital human need to belonging to a group and today's show sebastian and i discuss how

00:01:11.260 humans are wired for tribalism how males bond and whether or not it's possible to recapture tribe

00:01:16.760 in a large and prosperous society must listen a lot of great insights from this guy after the show

00:01:22.660 check out the show notes at aom.is younger for links to resources we mentioned throughout the show so

00:01:28.540 you can delve deeper into this topic all right sebastian younger welcome to the show thank you very

00:01:39.280 much uh so your latest book is called tribe um but i think for people to understand the argument

00:01:45.040 you're trying to make in it i think they need to know a bit about the background of your previous

00:01:48.780 work in 2007 2008 you were on assignment for vanity fair in the coringal valley in afghanistan

00:01:55.540 where you spent a year with a u.s platoon a remote outpost called restrepo and that's where your film

00:02:01.140 your documentary restrepo came from and your book war came from that assignment i'm curious what did

00:02:06.860 you learn about war that surprised you or would surprise most civilians from your work in the coringal valley

00:02:13.100 probably the most surprising thing for me about war in that context was how the experience of fear is

00:02:23.300 diminished when you're in a group um how your central concern can shift from yourself to others

00:02:31.240 uh i studied anthropology in college and that started to make sense to me there there in our in our

00:02:39.400 evolutionary past there really was no individual survival outside of group survival so one very

00:02:44.680 good way of promoting your own survival your own interests is actually devote yourself to the welfare

00:02:49.800 of the group it actually makes great evolutionary sense and and i got to experience that sort of

00:02:54.980 in the flesh as it were in in real time out of a struggle with this platoon um i i um i should say

00:03:04.900 that the end result of that very intense human bond that's created in combat is that often men miss

00:03:10.100 combat i i say men because it was all men in the platoon i was with um often men with miss combat

00:03:16.660 what they're sometimes mistaken for is missing violence and perhaps some of them do i don't know

00:03:24.360 but i think that the thing that is really compelling uh that they really do miss when they finally get

00:03:29.440 home is that very close bond it's not uh reproducible in civilian society because there's no need for it

00:03:35.360 and it's something that that they can have a great longing for actually and my um you know a lot of my

00:03:41.720 book has been a lot of my work has been sort of focused on that that sort of strange irony of combat

00:03:46.860 right um yeah and going to that point you know the platoon you're embedded was all male

00:03:52.280 and they're taking part in a traditionally all male activity i'm curious i mean the the bond was

00:03:59.120 really intense um but how did the the dynamic between the men in this platoon how did it differ

00:04:07.120 from what you may have observed in civilian men and just in your working life or just in your personal

00:04:12.060 life as well well you know i think i think men have a great capacity for functioning in groups

00:04:20.820 um i think they like functioning in groups i think they like being part of a hierarchy part of a group

00:04:27.040 dynamic uh with a shared task a group task i think that all that plays to a particular kind of male

00:04:34.080 wiring i i just read recently in an academic paper um that they took a group of men had them do a task

00:04:41.080 together and then gave them an enemy which i think probably was a rival team in the case of this

00:04:45.300 experiment gave them an quote enemy and then they were the the group the individuals in the group

00:04:51.080 immediately collaborated much more effectively became much more tightly bonded as soon as they

00:04:56.900 had an enemy uh they took a group of women did the same thing and having an enemy group did not

00:05:02.140 increase the um level of cooperation between the women in the women's group so there there seems to be

00:05:09.120 real differences between men and women in terms of how they deal with each other in a group um and

00:05:14.880 the thing about civilian society is that there are no enemies like so so groups of men are not

00:05:20.020 sort of forced into coalitions uh by necessity and that's of course a wonderful thing i mean no one needs

00:05:28.100 another enemy but on the other hand because of our evolutionary past we are wired for that and some part of the

00:05:34.040 male psyche and maybe you could say the human psyche uh goes underutilized in a situation of great

00:05:39.460 stability and safety right and that kind of goes against the sort of the popular idea that men are

00:05:43.940 sort of loners and you know lone alpha wolves men actually like to be working together in a group

00:05:49.780 i mean i think sometimes women in pair bonds women experience men as sort of loners because

00:05:56.760 um the men aren't you know typically are not actually sharing their feelings

00:06:02.640 and um i think women sort of decode that as a kind of insular individualism uh when in fact many 1.00

00:06:11.300 men actually many men like that have this sort of other life the sort of other side of their life

00:06:17.300 where they're actively responding to groups of men um in a way that might surprise the woman actually

00:06:24.340 but they're not responding to groups of men where everyone's sharing their feelings

00:06:28.420 the group is uh close and functional uh and tightly bonded precisely because people are the men are not

00:06:38.140 sharing their feelings i mean sort of quote over sharing of one's feelings when it was in her life

00:06:43.720 actually can get in the way of healthy relations uh in some cases and certainly for men right so i'm

00:06:50.000 curious did the bond that you saw between the men in the platoon that you were working with in the

00:06:54.920 corungal valley was that what planted the seed for your latest book tribe

00:06:58.280 actually i've been thinking about tribe since my early 20s in some ways i had a uncle figure a

00:07:06.940 kind of mentor figure named ellis who was half lakota zoo half apache and he was born literally born on a

00:07:14.520 wagon in 1929 during the depression and i remember when i was a kid when i was young him saying to me you

00:07:22.000 know the along the history of the frontier in this country the white people were always running off 0.99

00:07:26.400 to join the indians but the indians never ran off to join the white people and i thought about that

00:07:31.980 my whole life and um that was even the case uh he told me that was even the case with white captives 0.68

00:07:37.820 of the indians who were adopted into indian families in tribal societies and when given the chance to

00:07:43.700 come home by a peace treaty or what have you um that that that often these these adopted uh adopted

00:07:52.020 white members of indian families didn't want to did not want to go back to quote civilization and 1.00

00:07:56.180 and as i always pointed out you people go native but they don't go civilized we don't have any phrase

00:08:00.660 for that and um so that stayed in my mind my whole life and then i started to encounter soldiers who

00:08:07.160 didn't want to go back to america they wanted to stay you know in combat and in affiliation with

00:08:12.100 one another in afghanistan and it reminded me of what ellis said and you know my book tribe is not

00:08:18.120 about soldiers and it's really not about ptsd in my third chapter i use those topics as a way to

00:08:24.480 illuminate the strengths and failings of modern society when you have people who come from modern 1.00

00:08:29.740 society come from america go overseas and experience life in a platoon in combat they're basically

00:08:36.480 experiencing a recreation of our evolutionary past we evolved to live in groups of 30 40 50 people i

00:08:43.580 mean that's the best guess in terms of our hominid ancestors of what life was like for hundreds of

00:08:48.220 thousands of years they experienced that very close ancient human affiliative group experience

00:08:55.180 and then they come back to our society what they see when they return is a great way of seeing our

00:09:04.820 society with fresh eyes from a fresh perspective and that that's how i use soldiers and ptsd as a way to

00:09:11.120 sort of like do a an x-ray as it were of modern society and what its shortcomings are and and for that

00:09:17.120 matter what it's what its strengths are so i mean there's a popular idea and i think this comes from

00:09:22.560 you know a very modern worldview and we're so deeply embedded in in in modern society we have

00:09:29.100 this idea that if there are disaster strikes war strikes everyone's going to return to the sort

00:09:34.960 of hobbesian every man for himself dystopia where people are going to be pillaging and you know the

00:09:40.700 whole you know fantasy apocalyptic fantasy is going to come life but you argue that's not actually the

00:09:46.040 case i mean what's the usual human response when disaster strikes well if if adversity and hardship

00:09:53.820 and danger produced our worst human behaviors we wouldn't exist as a species i mean we we evolved

00:10:00.480 for two million years um as a social species in a very harsh dangerous environment and if an attack

00:10:08.360 by a lion or a rival tribe or a famine or an earthquake or what have you if that produced

00:10:13.940 anti-social behavior where every person fended for themselves keep in mind we're a species where

00:10:19.800 group survival is the only survival and if it if adversity produced individualization we would have

00:10:25.960 we would not have survived we would not exist as a species so as an evolutionary principle you can just

00:10:31.680 assume that adversity brings out our higher human virtues rather than our lower human virtues and

00:10:38.020 um so if you look at the historical record that's absolutely the case i mean what happened in london

00:10:44.280 during the blitz i mean 30 000 people were killed during the bomb bomb a german bombing campaign over

00:10:49.860 the course of six months um if anything london society became more egalitarian more tightly bonded

00:10:57.240 more collaborative more cooperative it did not descend into riots and mayhem and looting um even new

00:11:03.500 orleans where there was supposedly all this looting i mean there was a very small amount of that it was

00:11:07.140 people hungry people looking for food um and it was not a kind of um widespread cashing in on the

00:11:14.040 chaos uh that was that was all really kind of urban myth and actually the the violent crime rate fell

00:11:19.740 after hurricane katrina likewise new york city after 9-11 all this anti-social behavior declined uh the

00:11:27.000 suicide rate went down the violent crime rate went down in new york after 9-11 so humans respond 0.88

00:11:33.140 extremely well to catastrophe uh they don't turn on each other they actually turn to each other for

00:11:39.360 support and collaboration and and um uh and a kind of shared ethos of group survival

00:11:46.300 so i mean i'm curious i mean so there's this great power that comes with tribe feeling you belong to

00:11:51.280 this tight-knit group but you know the thing i read the feeling i got as i read your book it seems

00:11:56.180 like we can only get this power whenever we're facing some sort of very visceral challenge right

00:12:02.620 we war natural disaster so i'm curious i mean how do we capture the power of tribe when we live in a

00:12:10.740 time of prosperity and peace and relative peace today um well we we basically have evolved in this

00:12:22.240 situation which is one of great great fortune i mean we're you were very very lucky human being

00:12:27.000 to live in an era of um transportation mass transportation and anesthesia and if you have

00:12:34.460 surgery you get anesthesia and whatever i mean i mean the list goes on and on of our of our blessings

00:12:39.440 but what you're kind of asking how do we have it all how can we have the blessings of this modern society

00:12:45.900 and the societal bonding and societal strength of um of a of a society that's facing great adversity

00:12:56.880 and and and bonding together because of that i i don't know that we can i mean it it um it may not

00:13:03.120 be possible um we're not going to dismantle the suburbs and start living in communal groups of 30 or 40

00:13:09.800 people that's not happening um i think you could i mean just as a thought experiment you know if you

00:13:17.000 ban the car if you ban the automobile it would force people like the amish do actually it forced people 1.00

00:13:22.660 to live within walking distance of their home and um the amish because they do not drive they ride 1.00

00:13:28.300 horses which is also a limited transportation um they have very low rates of of suicide and and

00:13:34.940 depression um because they're because they're forced to live in communal groups so you know one thing

00:13:41.260 you could do is ban the car that's probably not going to happen either so how do we keep exactly our

00:13:46.140 same level of luxury and regain this sort of communal warmth and closeness um i don't know i it it um i think

00:13:56.820 it has to be a conscious deliberate effort to look around you in the community that you live in not the

00:14:02.900 workplace uh not your rugby intramural rugby team or whatever all these all those are great

00:14:09.020 opportunities for human connection but when you talk about community you're talking about the people

00:14:13.800 you can see from your front porch you're talking about the people literally around you and chances

00:14:18.760 are you don't know half the people around you i i heard about a guy an author actually who lived in

00:14:24.500 the neighborhood somewhere i don't know where and um someone was um murdered in the neighborhood

00:14:30.600 and he was so appalled at the lack of communal reaction to this tragedy that he spent a year

00:14:37.700 sleeping in the homes of everyone in his neighborhood i mean with their permission with

00:14:43.160 their consent obviously just made himself part of that family for a night and he went around the

00:14:48.940 entire community sleeping in everyone's homes trying to bond people together um i think it's going to

00:14:55.200 take a deliberate conscious act uh to produce that those kinds of effects within communities that are

00:15:02.340 obviously um very dispersed and fragmented and not inward looking and at the other end of the spectrum

00:15:08.100 at the sort of macro level i think we have to have a um a changed national consciousness of what it

00:15:17.020 means to be part of a nation um when you i've done this if you ask a room full of people what do you owe

00:15:22.340 your country all you get is blank stares no one has any idea what they owe this incredible entity that

00:15:28.380 we all belong to you know other than their taxes uh for most of human history if you ask if you ask

00:15:34.560 someone um what they owed their um their group their people their tribe they would have an immediate

00:15:41.360 answer and they would probably say well circumstances required i owe them my life and um and that's

00:15:47.880 something that's disappeared from the national conversation and i think in order to feel like

00:15:52.640 we belong to something we have to renew that conversation and figure out what does it mean

00:15:56.600 to be part of a country part of a nation what what are the duty we all know the benefits what are the

00:16:01.100 duties well so i'm curious i mean we talked about how it disappeared i mean what happened was it this

00:16:04.980 sort of just a byproduct of modernity i mean just sort of these macro forces that you know economics

00:16:10.980 technology that just sort of eroded that sense of community and belonging well i think evolution

00:16:18.280 has produced two opposing reactions in us um one is the impulse towards uh community because that

00:16:27.780 that that that increases our survival our survival rate our survival chances um the other impulse which i

00:16:37.020 think is also a product of our evolution is to maximize of our maximize our individual benefit

00:16:42.620 um so when modern society evolved when it developed in the last few hundred years

00:16:48.980 um it produced enough enough capital enough um technology produced enough took away those sort of

00:16:58.880 physical burdens of actual survival to the point where we do not correctly we do we

00:17:06.900 we do not think we need to participate in the public good in order to ourselves physically survive

00:17:12.500 you don't literally need your neighbors the people you can see from your bedroom window you don't

00:17:17.700 literally need them in order to put food on the table tonight uh in order to defend yourselves

00:17:24.320 from uh the neighborhood across the river that might attack you in order to defend yourselves from

00:17:30.640 a predator that might wander into camp you don't literally need those people so there's no reason

00:17:34.660 to contribute to the public good because there's no you don't you don't need the public good in order

00:17:40.620 to survive so what that means is that the the other evolutionary imperative of maximizing individual

00:17:48.620 benefit that's the only thing left standing right that actually works in a capitalist society that works

00:17:54.500 extremely well um and and that's the ethos that we all end up pursuing but there's this gaping hole in

00:18:00.800 our psyches um that left left by the loss of community yeah and i mean some of those gaping

00:18:07.960 holes i mean you you know make the case that a lot of the social illness or not social is mental illness

00:18:13.820 depression uh even some of like the mass shootings that we've been seeing that proliferating in the

00:18:19.000 past you know 25 years might be a result of this lack of tribe in our life yeah i mean you you know

00:18:27.420 the cause and effect is hard to determine in a society that's this complex but um but we do know

00:18:33.200 that as wealth goes up in a society modernity tends to go up um and that brings with it an elevated

00:18:40.980 suicide rate so as wealth goes up in a society the suicide rate goes up not down the depression rate

00:18:45.780 goes up not down as income disparity increases uh anxiety disorders increase in the population

00:18:54.580 um one very interesting statistic from the blitz in london was that the the government was prepared

00:19:02.380 for mass psychiatric casualties during the blitz and uh understandably i mean here's a civilian population

00:19:08.820 that's getting you know bombed into the stone age by a by a modern air force and um to their surprise

00:19:16.800 the um to the surprise of the authorities the admissions to psych wards went down during the blitz in

00:19:23.720 london you know one official said um we have he said we have neurotics driving ambulances you know

00:19:29.840 basically when your community is being attacked or is under some kind of stress um everyone everyone

00:19:35.980 realizes that they're actually needed that their people need them like their community needs them

00:19:40.180 and that buffers people against their own psychological demons yeah that's that's really interesting

00:19:45.180 so i mean sebastian i mean this is there's a lot more we could dig into um and the book was fantastic

00:19:50.700 but where can people learn more about about it and the rest of your work well my website is

00:19:56.440 sebastianyounger.com and it has obviously all my books all my films uh on their tribe is prominently

00:20:04.460 displayed um i have i have an idea for helping veterans return to society uh called uh a veterans

00:20:11.840 town hall basically you give on veterans day in every country in every uh town or city in this country

00:20:18.400 you open the town hall to um to veterans to speak for 10 minutes each veterans of any war

00:20:25.980 we've done this we even had a world war ii veterans stand up uh veterans of any war have the chance to

00:20:31.520 stand up and speak for 10 minutes to the community about war what war felt like it's not patriotism it's

00:20:36.400 not anti-war activism it's just this is what it felt like to go to war for everybody for you all in

00:20:41.320 the room and it's incredibly cathartic thing for the veterans but it also gives the community a chance

00:20:48.320 to feel like a community in the ancient tribal sense and i think that if this idea spread enough

00:20:54.640 uh it might actually produce that at a sort of nationwide level so on my website sebastianyounger.com

00:21:01.460 there is a page for veterans town hall and it's very the principles are simple the guidelines are

00:21:07.160 simple you don't need a license you don't need permission you don't need anything you certainly

00:21:11.100 don't need money to do this you just have to um convince the town manager to unlock the doors on

00:21:15.580 veterans day and you can do this yourselves and it's a very very powerful experience i love that

00:21:19.960 well sebastian younger thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure thank you very much i enjoyed

00:21:25.240 it my guest today was sebastian younger his latest book is called tribe it's available on amazon.com

00:21:30.280 and bookstores everywhere go check it out and also make sure to check out his other work uh war

00:21:34.520 it's available on amazon as well and you can also watch his documentary restrepo uh you can get

00:21:38.760 that on amazon.com too well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more

00:21:55.040 manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com

00:21:58.840 and if you enjoy this show and have got something out of it i'd appreciate it if you give us a review

00:22:02.460 on itunes or stitcher that helps spread the word about the show as always i appreciate your

00:22:06.580 continued support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

The Art of Manliness - July 14, 2016

#217： The Importance of Having a Tribe

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