Sebastian Junger in “Tribe” writes about how he lost more friends *after* his army service (suicide) than during. “Humans don’t mind hardship, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary”
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Another book “Third Pillar”, laments loss of community relative to state & market. For early humans the tribe was everything—their state, markets, & community rolled into one. It included raising children (community), exchanging goods (markets), enforcing law (state)— the works
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Overtime, market and state departed from the community: Trade with more distant communities through markets allowed everyone to specialize in what they were relatively good at, making everyone more prosperous. States expanded their role too. Local communities dissolved.
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What led to the departure from community? 1) Agriculture 2) Industry Personal property allowed people to make more individualistic choices about their lives, making us less reliant on each other Basically, we got so rich we didn’t have to depend on others as much for survival
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Well, technically, we’re more reliant on each other since we specialize so much: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1132167931339476993 … We wouldn’t even know how to make cereal from scratch by ourselves.https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1132167975480336384 …
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But this reliance is increasingly abstract -- the producer doesn't meet the consumer -- and so the dependencies aren’t as legible. Those dependencies formed strong bonds. Our bonds aren’t as strong today. (See Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone")
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Community isn’t just important for emotional stability, but also social stability. Community serves as a check on fraud, cheating, cowardice, corruption and cronyism— Community protects us from states and markets run amok.
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Adam Smith said capitalism would work with a strong moral fabric. That moral fabric used to be religion. Now there’s a vacuum. Markets & technology have abstracted away the need for virtually all human contact, let alone humans depending on each other in a legible way.
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Neighbors used to help deliver babies, now ppl just check into hospital. The hospital will give you service, but they won’t care about you like your neighbor will. That’s the tradeoff: Better service, less care. In medicine, you want expertise, but, with your rabbi, maybe not
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Tyler Cowen’s book “Create Your Own economy” details the rise of the personalized info diet. Individualized social feeds replace the newspaper, personalized netflix recommendations replace movie theaters. We don’t have semi reliable communal sense making structures anymore.
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The tradeoff is less shared substrate. Less collective knowledge we all learn, less collective experiences we all share, and less collective identities we all embrace. If happiness is only real when shared, it’s harder to share happiness when you have less and less in common.
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Great traditional communities required - Limited options (for dependence) - No specialists (to ensure we work together) - No external trade (to ensure we work together) - Focus on traditions, no weird ideas - No diversity (homogenous group)
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Guess what - markets do the opposite of all that. More options. More specialists. More trade. More weird ideas. More diversity. And that’s all amazing - but it has tradeoffs: Strong social bonds.
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What are the tradeoffs of traditional communities? What were we trading off back then? Stronger social bonds, but worse medical treatment Stronger social bonds, but we do excruciating manual labor Stronger social bonds, but we don’t share interests as much, aside from geography
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Remember college when you were randomly placed at dorms and became friends with people who, in other circumstances, you wouldn’t become friends with? That’s what traditional communities were like. Maybe those friendships faded after you found your “real people”, or maybe not.
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It’s unclear the Junger narrative is entirely true. It’s possible people are just creating new communities online. “People can go an entire day— or life—mostly encountering complete strangers.” Those strangers mentioned above? They are friendships waiting to happen.
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It’s also unclear we’re unhappier. Or if unhappy, rather be rich & unhappy than poor & happy. Junger mentions that Americans defected to Native Americans camps—for their strong social bonds--but it didn’t go the other way Most ppl wouldn’t make that trade today. Life's too good
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And if we’re less in touch w/ common good, maybe that’s only temporary, because we have common problems we have to face: threat of nuclear war, climate change, AI & job loss
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According Nonzero (https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1120196466859888640 …) our fates are becoming increasingly intertwined, which means we’ll have to encourage social bonds, and design them in new ways. That’s the great irony - we actually depend on each other more than we used to, it’s just harder to see.
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“The poorest ppl in modern world enjoy a level of comfort that was unimaginable 1k yrs ago, and the wealthiest people literally live like gods. “And yet.” Junger adds, if that’s not enough I’d posit it’s easier to bolt on community to wealth, than to bolt wealth onto community
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Why does wealth lead to isolation, anyway? Junger: “Poor people share their time and resources more than wealthy people, and as a result live in closer communities.” The truth is we’d rather be rich and alone, than poor and together, if we had to choose -- but we don’t have to.
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We do however have a different decision to make: Do we turn the clock back, get poorer effectively, all join the army or some national service, bring back tribes? Or do we create new mechanisms and approaches to build community, identity, and meaning?
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Maybe people don’t sacrifice as much today, maybe they cheat more, maybe they care for the common good less. You can try to weed self-interest out of people — by shaming, punishing or killing — or you can design institutions to align self-interest with the common good.
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“Welfare cheats / dishonest workers = tribe members who quietly steal more than their share of resources” Junger argues that we should go back to local community pressures I think we should “upgrade” that software — get over our need for revenge, for tribalism (good vs bad)
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What Junger is saying is that the modern world doesn’t match our wiring. We may have evolved for tribes, but we don’t want to go back to that, just like we don’t want to go back to dying at 35 and losing a few children at birth.
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“A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Guess what? We’re rich:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbfwqjg_mpU …
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“What people miss (from the army) presumably isn’t danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender” We can find other things to develop that unity — sports, novels, video games, VR?
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Capitalism is incredible — it turns a zero sum world into a nonzero sum world. (https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/951554105419313152 …) Our minds, narratives, and cultural/social structures just haven’t embraced it yet.
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The vacuum mentioned earlier is filled by new things—SoulCycle. Daybreaker. Sports teams. Those are halfway solutions. More comprehensive ones will come.
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Junger’s focus on hardship as bringing us together is true. Indeed, what doesn’t kill us make us stronger. The problem is that — when it’s not making us stronger, it’s literally killing us! Being poor kills. Fighting in the army kills (sometimes:https://twitter.com/USArmy/status/1131704927963766785 …
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