Sebastian Junger Quotes & Sayings

When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose ... with a resulting improvement in mental health, — Sebastian Junger

Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world. — Sebastian Junger

War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. — Sebastian Junger

When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don't see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you're walking in. — Sebastian Junger

In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences. The — Sebastian Junger

I don't think journalists in World War II were objective about the Nazis, and I don't think they should have been. — Sebastian Junger

Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders. — Sebastian Junger

If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have. — Sebastian Junger

A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America's fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That — Sebastian Junger

There is no way to know the effect on Paine's thought process of living next door to a communal Stone-Age society, but it might have been crucial. Paine acknowledged that these tribes lacked the advantages of the arts and science and manufacturing, and yet they lived in a society where personal poverty was unknown and the natural rights of man were actively promoted. In that sense, Paine claimed, the American Indian should serve as a model for how to eradicate poverty and bring natural rights back into civilized life. — Sebastian Junger

So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? — Sebastian Junger

A modern soldier returning from combat - or a survivor of Sarajevo - goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good. — Sebastian Junger

Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows about it - donating more kidneys to nonrelatives than men do, for example. Men, on the other hand, are far more likely to risk their lives at a moment's notice, and that reaction is particularly strong when others are watching, or when they are part of a group. — Sebastian Junger

The reprieve doesn't last long though; within a couple of hours the waves are back up to 70 feet. A 70 foot wave has an angled face of well over 100 feet. The Seastate has reached levels that no one on the boat, and few people one earth, have ever seen. When the Contship Holland finally limped into port several days later, one of the officers stepped off and swore he would never set foot on another ship again. — Sebastian Junger

Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long. The — Sebastian Junger

Gang shootings - as indiscriminate as they often are - still don't have the nihilistic intent of rampages. Rather, they are rooted in an exceedingly strong sense of group loyalty and revenge, and bystanders sometimes get killed in the process. — Sebastian Junger

I look at the names on the mailboxes and the bells inside number 1940 and pick out a couple of women's names and press the first one. I stand there waiting, feeling the image
build up and not thinking about what I'm going to say to her because I know
something will come to me like it always does. Nothing happens. I press the second doorbell and in a few minutes she buzzes the door, twice, and I walk into the hallway. The stairs are curved around an elevator and to the right and I go up them, not in a hurry or nothing, just taking them one at a time.
Its funny, isn't it, how the first woman didn't answer the bell or wasn't home or something and just that little chance, you understand what I mean? — Sebastian Junger

In many countries, antisocial behavior is known to decline during wartime. New York's suicide rate dropped by around 20 percent in the six months following the attacks, the murder rate dropped by 40 percent, and pharmacists saw no increase in the number of first-time patients filling prescriptions for antianxiety and antidepressant medication. Furthermore, veterans who were being treated for PTSD at the VA experienced a significant drop in their symptoms in the months after the September 11 attacks. One — Sebastian Junger

I've stopped war reporting. I realized that I'd answered all of my questions about war and about myself. — Sebastian Junger

During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. The aircraft was hit by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with the parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plan hit the ground and exploded. They all died. — Sebastian Junger

The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring president Milosevic had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo's status. — Sebastian Junger

I went to Afghanistan in '96 to write about terrorist training camps south of Jalalabad and Tora Bora, in the mountains. I was there right before the Taliban took over, literally a few weeks before they took Kabul. The frontline wasn't terribly active, but it was definitely there. And they swept into power. — Sebastian Junger

Today's veterans often come home to find that, although they're willing to die for their country, they're not sure how to live for it. — Sebastian Junger

I don't think people would climb mountains or jump off bridges with parachutes or kayak Class V rapids if those things didn't offer the brief and horrible illusion of imminent death. They would just be complicated, time-consuming endeavors that we'd steer well clear of because they got in the way of real life. — Sebastian Junger

It's revealing, then, to look at modern society through the prism of more than a million years of human cooperation and resource sharing. Subsistence-level hunters aren't necessarily more moral than other people; they just can't get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny. — Sebastian Junger

A wealthy person who never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Financial independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide. This might be a fair trade for a generally wealthier society- but a trade it is. — Sebastian Junger

The human concern for others would seem to be the one story that, adequately told, no person can fully bear to hear. Joanna's — Sebastian Junger

Another study notes about Bali: "Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities." As — Sebastian Junger

In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence, an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn't? — Sebastian Junger

During the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, winds were past 200 miles per house and people caught outside were sandblasted to death. Rescue workers found nothing but their shoes and belt buckles ... In 1938, the hurricane put downtown Providence, Rhode Island, under 10 feet of ocean. The waves generated by that storm were so huge that they literally shook the earth; seismographs in Alaska picked up their impact 5,000 miles away. — Sebastian Junger

Military population that has a disproportionate number of young people with a history of sexual abuse. One theory for this holds that military service is an easy way for young people to get out of their home, and so the military will disproportionally draw recruits from troubled families. According to a 2014 study in the American Medical Association's JAMA Psychiatry, men with military service are now twice as likely to report sexual assault during their childhood as men who never served. This was not true during the draft. Sexual abuse is a well-known predictor of depression and other mental health issues, and the military suicide rate may in part be a result of that. Killing — Sebastian Junger

Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products - known as "Mr. Credit-Default Swap" - led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees - including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment. Neither — Sebastian Junger

An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It is up to fate, in other words — Sebastian Junger

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men". — Sebastian Junger

According to the Times notice, Mr. Bauman called his employees into a meeting and asked them to accept a 10 percent reduction in salary so that he wouldn't have to fire anyone. They all agreed. Then he quietly decided to give up his personal salary until his company was back on safe ground. The only reason his staff found out was because the company bookkeeper told them. Bauman — Sebastian Junger

there are still enormous numbers of people who had utterly ordinary wartime experiences and yet feel dangerously alienated back home. Clinically speaking, such alienation is not the same as PTSD - and maybe deserves its own diagnostic term - but both result from military service abroad, so it's understandable that vets and clinicians alike are prone to conflating them. Either way, it makes one wonder exactly what it is about modern society that is so mortally dispiriting to come home to. A — Sebastian Junger

I had grown up during Vietnam. I had no connections to the U.S. military, and I had a pretty cynical default opinion about the U.S. military. — Sebastian Junger

The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs - and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought - will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past. — Sebastian Junger

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it's a dangerous waste of time because they're both right.
...
If you want to make a society work, then you don't keep underscoring the places where you're different - you underscore your shared humanity, — Sebastian Junger

PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets. But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing. Israel — Sebastian Junger

A SOFT fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air. — Sebastian Junger

War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144) — Sebastian Junger

In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don't see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you're walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors - or somebody else's friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially. — Sebastian Junger

order to play that game one more time. The — Sebastian Junger

As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. — Sebastian Junger

Whether ... civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested," he wrote in 1795. "[Both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized." When — Sebastian Junger

No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well. — Sebastian Junger

The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it's disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction - all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most. — Sebastian Junger

If you get an infection, you get a fever; the fever is your body dealing with the infection. If you get traumatized, your mind and your brain have a reaction to that trauma. If you're not dreaming about it, something's probably wrong. — Sebastian Junger

What people miss presumably isn't danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender. — Sebastian Junger

Combat isn't where you might die
though that does happen
it's where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don't underestimate the power of that revelation. Don't underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time. — Sebastian Junger

Well, you got to remember, bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans and, in some ways, he and his ideology killed tens of thousands of his fellow Muslims, including Pakistanis. I understand that that was provocative and complicated for Pakistan, but only if you accept the idea that he was an acceptable member of Pakistani society. — Sebastian Junger

The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America's ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn't acting competitively - that should be encouraged - but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. — Sebastian Junger

Human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money and status. — Sebastian Junger

they may have a harder time achieving the three pillars of self-determination - autonomy, — Sebastian Junger

It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn't willing to make sacrifices for you. That is the position American soldiers have been in for the past decade and a half. There — Sebastian Junger

What I had was classic short-term PTSD. From an evolutionary perspective, it's exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed. Anger keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself in more danger. Flashbacks also serve to remind you of the danger that's out there - a "highly efficient single-event survival-learning mechanism," as one researcher termed it. All humans react to trauma in this way, and most mammals do as well. It may be unpleasant, but it's preferable to getting killed. Like — Sebastian Junger

Because tribal foragers are highly mobile and can easily shift between different communities, authority is almost impossible to impose on the unwilling. And even without that option, males who try to take control of the group - or of the food supply - are often countered by coalitions of other males. This is clearly an ancient and adaptive behavior that tends to keep groups together and equitably cared for. In his survey of ancestral-type societies, Boehm found that - in addition to murder and theft - one of the most commonly punished infractions was "failure to share." Freeloading on the hard work of others and bullying were also high up on the list. Punishments included public ridicule, shunning, and, finally, "assassination of the culprit by the entire group." A — Sebastian Junger

I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you're supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it's not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts. — Sebastian Junger

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. It's time for that to end. — Sebastian Junger

Industrial production actually rose in Germany during the war. And the cities with the highest morale were the ones - like Dresden - that were bombed the hardest. According to German psychologists who compared notes with their American counterparts after the war, it was the untouched cities where civilian morale suffered the most. — Sebastian Junger

As the helicopter fell, its dead rotors started to spin, and Ruvola used that energy to slow the aircraft down. Like downshifting a car on a hill, a hovering auto-rotation is a way of dissipating the force of gravity by feeding it back through the engine. By the time the helicopter hit the water it had slowed to a manageable speed, and all the torque had been bled out of the rotors; — Sebastian Junger

The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements. — Sebastian Junger

The only thing that makes battle psychologically tolerable is the brotherhood among soldiers. You need each other to get by. — Sebastian Junger

Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us? The — Sebastian Junger

When you're scared, you're still hanging on to life. When you're ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if you've never done it before. — Sebastian Junger

The fight lasts ten or fifteen minutes and then the A-10s show up and tilt into their dives. Ninety rounds a second the size of beer cans unzipping the mountainsides with a sound like the sky ripping. The men look up and whoop when they hear it, a punishment so unnegotiable it might as well have come from God. — Sebastian Junger

War affected my family a lot, and I was quite curious about it. I first went off to war in the early 90's as a journalist, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed a career. War reporting has been very glamorous and exciting, and everything else that young men like. — Sebastian Junger

Well, the fact that the news industry doesn't have enough money to only send salaried staff to war zones means there is an enormous, wide-open opportunity for young people who want to be on staff and don't know how to get there. — Sebastian Junger

People really in the meat grinder of the front lines are not, for the most part, insured or salaried network correspondents. They're young freelancers. They're kind of a cheap date for the news industry. — Sebastian Junger

If contemporary America doesn't develop ways to publicly confront the emotional consequences of war, those consequences will continue to burn a hole through the vets themselves. I — Sebastian Junger

I have been working since I was 20, and I'm 38. I actually once averaged out what I had made over my professional life. I think I could have made that much as a waiter or an insurance salesman. You know, I spent so many years in my 20's making $10,000 a year. — Sebastian Junger

War. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn't acting competitively - that should be encouraged - but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn't, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves. In — Sebastian Junger

In keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. — Sebastian Junger

I decided to start a medical training program for freelancers, only freelancers. They're the ones who are doing most of the combat reporting. They're taking most of the risks. They're absorbing most of the casualties. And they're the most underserved and under-resourced of everyone in the entire news business. — Sebastian Junger

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me. — Sebastian Junger

The story about Bessie Goldberg that I heard from my parents was that a nice old lady had been killed down the street and an innocent black man went to prison for the crime. Meanwhile
unknown to anyone
a violent psychopath named Al was working alone at our house all day and probably committed the murder. In our family this story eventually acquired the tidy symbolism of a folk tale. Roy Smith was a stand-in for everything that was decent but utterly defenseless. Albert DeSalvo, of course, was a stand-in for pure random evil. — Sebastian Junger

Much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140) — Sebastian Junger

The coward's fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others' lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. - J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors — Sebastian Junger

Disasters, he proposed, create a "community of sufferers" that allow individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others — Sebastian Junger

I think human society for tens of thousands of years has sent young men out in small groups to do things that are necessary but very dangerous. And they've always gotten killed doing it. And they've always turned it into a matter of honor and a way of gaining acceptance back into society if they survived. — Sebastian Junger

It's fun to have money, but the more money I get, the less interesting it becomes. If you don't have very much, you have to think about it. If you are starving, you become interested in food. If you are struggling to pay the bills, money becomes tragically important. — Sebastian Junger

People who do really dangerous tasks can't afford to sit around and discuss the merits of what they're doing. — Sebastian Junger

There are photographers who don't really engage with their subject. It's a really unfortunate phrase, but they take their photo and they leave with it. It works but I think it ultimately limits how profound the work can be. — Sebastian Junger

The combat environment has the effect of flattening out civilian identities. If you're young or old, or a graduate from Harvard or the son of a farmer from Alabama, or if you're gay or straight or good-looking or ugly: none of those things matters much in combat, as long as you can conform to the group expectations. — Sebastian Junger

You don't owe your country nothing," I remember him telling me. "You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life. — Sebastian Junger

I think, unfortunately, we live in a world where people attack other people and I think a legitimate rationale for war is the saving of human life, the saving of lives of people who cannot defend themselves. — Sebastian Junger

At 19, your brain hasn't finished wiring itself. So the first time you have a good friend die, most people don't go through that at 19. Soldiers do. They're facing life in this accelerated, compressed form, and a lot of times, they're not ready for it. — Sebastian Junger

The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money, and status. Bluntly — Sebastian Junger

In my eyes Marlantes has become the pre-eminent literary voice on war of our generation. He is a natural storyteller and a deeply profound thinker who not only illuminates war for civilians, but also offers a kind of spiritual guidance to vets themselves. As this generation of warriors comes home, they will be enormously helped by what Marlantes has written. I'm sure he will literally save lives. — Sebastian Junger

The attacks of 9/11 came out of Afghanistan. It was a failed state, a rogue nation. That's why al Qaeda was there in the first place. — Sebastian Junger

Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable. — Sebastian Junger

Men, on the other hand, are far more likely to risk their lives at a moment's notice, and that reaction is particularly strong when others are watching, or when they are part of a group. In — Sebastian Junger

What would you risk dying for - and for whom - is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves. The vast majority of people in modern society are able to pass their whole lives without ever having to answer that question, which is both an enormous blessing and a significant loss. — Sebastian Junger

One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. — Sebastian Junger

Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and bajraks. The bajrak system identified a local leader, called a bajrakar, who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty. — Sebastian Junger

The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them "self-soothing," but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates - we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees - and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. — Sebastian Junger

Billy's at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into meteorological hell. — Sebastian Junger

A grenade launcher will easily take out a tank; a Molotov cocktail placed in its air intake will destroy one as well. — Sebastian Junger

Unfortunately for Mariners, the total amount of wave energy and storm does not rise linearly with wind speed, but to its fourth power. The seas generated by a 40 knot wind aren't twice as violence as those from a 20 knot wind, they are seventeen times as violent. The ship's crew watching the anemometer climb even 10 knots could well be watching their death sentence. — Sebastian Junger