Modern Wisdom - #396 - Sebastian Junger - The Brutal History Of Freedom

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Sebastian Junger is a journalist, author and filmmaker. Throughout history, humans have been driven by the quest for two cherished ideals: community and freedom. The two don’t coexist easily: we value individuality and self-reliance, yet are utterly dependent on community for our most basic needs. Expect to learn how having kids in your 50's can give you more freedom than you might think, what happens when you lose 10 pints of blood and have a near death experience, why fighting to the death was most common in free societies, how countries with freedom always get tempted toward tyranny and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy Freedom - https://amzn.to/3nUc4DX  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Sebastian Jünger, he's a journalist, author and filmmaker. Throughout history, humans have been driven by the quest for two cherished ideals, community and freedom. The two don't coexist easily. We value individuality and self-reliance, yet we are utterly dependent on community for our most basic needs. Today, I expect to learn how having kids in your 50s can give you more freedom than you might think. What happens when you lose 10 pints of blood and have a near-death experience while fighting to the death was most common in free societies, how countries with freedom always get tempted toward tyranny and much more.

It is interesting thinking about freedom as a British person because we don't really talk about freedom all that much. Not that we don't care about it, but just that compared with America especially, it's not a value that we hold up as an ideal and looking at the history of it and how people have fought for it and what happens when you lose it and the dangers of having too much of it are quite insightful. In very exciting news, I am going to Austin tomorrow, this Friday. I am flying out to Austin, Texas for a few weeks. I will be recording out there and taking the show on the road as it were.

Video Guideen is staying in the UK sadly, but I will be getting some awesome episodes done out there. I'll be catching up with David Perrell and Aubrey Marcus and David bus and Michael Males So yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be fun and we'll see if I pick up a low-key text and accent in the space of a few weeks But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Sebastian Junger It's a bastion younger, fuck up the show. Alright, thank you very much for having me. A little while ago you had a near death experience. What was the story behind that? Yeah, I mean, you know, I've been in a lot of combat as a journalist with American soldiers and and and otherwise around the world and

I thought all the other dangers behind me. I mean good health. I'm an athlete. I'm in good shape I've got a heart rate of 60 and blood pressure of 120 over 80 and everything you could want at age 50 58 last year and I spelled a sudden Pain in my abdomen and it was an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, which is this like little artery that nobody thinks about and had an aneurysm and is this like little artery that nobody thinks about and had an endurism and it ruptured and I started bleeding out into my own abdomen and by the time they got me to the ER I lost three quarters of my blood and you know when women often

when women die in childbirth which tragically still happens they're basically they're dying the same way they're bleeding to death and they can't find the they can't find the the bleed and they can't stop it and They lose the woman and that's basically what was happening to me, but I was the result of an end I've a ruptured aneurysm and You know by by the time they were they were cutting my neck open to put a line into my jugular to get enough blood into me fast enough to save me By the time that was happening You know I was I was actively dying. I'm an atheist. I'm not religious. My dad was a physicist, but my dead father appeared

above me, who's sort of welcoming me, which is something that I experienced I'm still struggling to explain. A black pit opened up underneath me and I was getting pulled into it. I guess neurologically, the black pit of unconsciousness, I don't know, but it was a very into it and you know it was the I mean I guess neurologically the black pit of unconsciousness I don't know but it was a very uh... it's not like falling asleep it's not like losing consciousness when you're having about to have a medical procedure I was getting pulled into a black hole my dead father was there and the last thing I said to the doctor was you got a hurry you're losing me right now and um... they you know, they did their work, their amazing work, and they saved me. And, you know, I was touching go for a while because I needed another

eight hours to find the leak inside me. And, you know, when you're transfused like that, I had ten units of blood. And when you're transfused like that, you know, other problems happen. Like you start to get, you know, the risk of organ failure and and and things like that. And and luckily I'm healthy and my body managed to stay alive for eight hours until they they they fixed the leak. And I'm very, very lucky to be here. Most people die from this. And I'm very lucky to be here. That's an insane story. I have a friend that I met last year in Dubai and he had, he was put under a induced coma for three months or so and during that time he lived in entire another life

for two years in Singapore and he could tell you the name of the company that he had, the brand of toothpaste he put on his toothbrush where his ties were kept inside of his apartment, he would be able to tell you the name of the street that he went to and he was selling virtual reality software in this other life. And he was testing it on himself. He had a full team, he had a sales team, he had developers and he would go into the experience, the virtual reality experience inside of this or the world. While he's laid in a hospital bed and he doesn't know, he would go into it and he would hear people talking and at one point he gets trapped inside

of the virtual reality world for two months inside of this dream. So this is like two layers down of inception and in that he can hear people speaking to him and he doesn't know what it is and then eventually he gets his fingers into a corner and prize it apart and that's when he wakes up. But during this other world that he lives in for two years, while he's away for about three months, his father dies. So his dad, his dream father dies while his real father's

still alive, and they're watching him while he's in bed, Paul, in bed in this induced coma. And they see that he's weeping. He's got tears streaming out the corner of his eyes and that's when he's burying his dead father in the dream while his real father watches him cry about the fact that he's had to do it. Crazy. That's insane. Did he ever go to Singapore to look up the places

he had thought, you know, the imagine he was? I don't think he has, no. Oh, that's insane. There's a lot of, you know, again, I'm an atheist, I feel like I have to keep saying this, but there's a lot of things we don't understand and I'm very open to the idea that there are dimensions of reality

that we don't understand or haven't even guessed at and that in those threshold states like in a coma guest at and that in those in these threshold states like in a coma or in a sort of transported of religious an ecstatic religious state or on that sort of yeah yeah that we sort of like gain some sort of like entry in some glimpse into another another dimension of reality I can understand how that would be true. And I think my father, the physicist, would also say, yes, there's things we don't understand. And that means that there are phenomena that we can't explain. Even if there isn't some other worldliness going on, even if it's not a

different plane that you're tapping into, sheer, the sheer fact that your brain decided to create some sort of kind of like a polarity thing. It's sort of welcoming. There's something symbolic going on with regards to darkness and father and and then with Paul, this near death experience in an induced coma is semi common. It's like rarely common. And even if all it was was the brain trying to create some sort of an existence in which he could keep taking over. Even if that's it, like just that is pretty miraculous itself. Yeah. Well, my understanding of the medical understanding of an adduce coma is that there's no brain activity at all. So I wonder how they, you know, I wonder how they understand that,

wouldn't likewise with that, you know that, that there's no brain activity. And I was entering a very strange place when I was on that threshold. And I've done some research into it. My experience is a very common one. And it's interesting because there is various neurological explanations, like low blood oxygen and dodging this DMT in your brain that gets released, and ketamine,

endogenous ketamine that gets released, things that will produce visions and hallucinations in test subjects. But when they expose people to those effects, like ketamine, people have wild hallucinations, they don't see the dead. They don't see dead relatives, right? You have to be dying for that to happen and And that's the part that it's it's very common for people who are dying and it's Not really part of the ketamine experience for otherwise healthy people and that's where the mystery sort of begins for me

Yeah, I am familiar from my day's partying. I'm pretty familiar with ketamine and I never saw any of my dead parents coming back, even though both of them were alive. Which means, is it set in setting, which is something that psychedelic research is talking about? Is it the fact that you've been primed because you feel like you're about to die so that there's some sort of predisposition towards thinking that this is the sort of vision that you may have, or is there maybe something else going on? Is it a this is the sort of vision that you may have or is there maybe Something else going on is it a blend of other sort of chemicals? Pretty interesting. Yeah, I mean, I didn't know I was dying so I mean, I was

Fuck yeah, of course you just thought you were No, I mean I said I said to the doctor you're losing a rewrite me right now and I meant I felt myself getting pulled away But I had no idea that I was dying. You never crossed my mind. I mean, I just had a tummy ache, right? And I felt funny. I mean, I was pretty loopy because I had my bloodlogged oxygen levels were incredibly low. My hemoglobin was 1.2. I mean, it's hard to find that on the internet, right? I mean, almost no one goes that low. That's incompatible with life, right?

It's what I was told, 1.2, hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is what transports objectin. So basically, I mean, I was running on Yumes, and I had no idea that I was dying the next day, the nurse and the ICU said, no one knows how you made it. Like, you almost died yesterday. No one knows why you're still here. It was completely shocking to me So maybe there's some kind of body knowledge

That understands your dying on a kind of animal level and produces the appropriate hallucinations entirely possible Or there's something weird going on in reality and there's something we don't understand about that and that you know dead people have some dimension of existence That we don't we don't understand that we that we ourselves access on the threshold of death I mean, I don't know you know, but it's a it's a legitimate question Didn't you say that there were a couple of things that had occurred weird embodied senses sort of subconsciously things that you'd gone through in the time leading up to that incident as well. Yeah, I mean, for many years, for no reason that I can identify, and I was an endurance

athlete when I was young, I'm a very, for a person of my age, I'm very healthy, I'm sort of high performance human, you know, and for many years I had this bizarre certainty that I would die before I was 60. You know, and I'm not really eligible for a heart attack or a stroke or something like that, I just have a constitution that makes that very unlikely. I don't know why, and that's exactly what would have happened but for this sort of miracle but also like two days before I was woke woke up by a nightmare That I had died and I'd crossed over and I was looking back at my family and they were grieving and I couldn't go back to them because I'd crossed over

And I was just like Anguish I I've two little girls you know for the time there were three and one, and I was absent and my wife and I was completely anguished that I sort of screwed up and had died sort of by accident and I couldn't go back again. And I was anguished and it woke me up and that was 36 hours before exactly that happened. Crazy. Given the fact that you had such a profound experience, has there been a lasting mindset shift around how you see the world or a change in your behavior in any way?

Well, I'm a little bit more open to what you might call the great mystery of life and of death. A little more open to the idea that it may not be that we might be something more than purely biological beings and that are everything that we are and at the moment of death. I mean, I've seen dead bodies. I've seen people who are dead an hour. I've seen people who are dead a week. I've seen dead bodies. I've seen people who are dead an hour. I've seen people who are dead a week. I've seen people who are dead a month. It's hard to imagine when you look at those individuals that there's anything remaining of that, who that person was, right? I can tell you right now,

like it just, wow, you're some skin and a bunch of bones. Like you are no longer you, right? So, but now I'm not sure. Like, I still don't understand what happened to me. And people keep saying to me like, uh, well, you know, are you reconsidering your atheism? You know, like, you know, I'm, and I'm like, I didn't see God. I saw my father, you know, like, I don't know, God doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this, but the presence of my father does raise questions about the nature of reality in does raise questions about the nature of reality

in a physical sense and the nature of death in a physical sense. And so other than that, I would say, I mean, it's sort of cliche, but all we know we have for sure is right, and we don't even know that we have today. We know we have this moment, right? This moment that you and I are both in right now, we know for sure we have that because we're in it. And literally moment by moment, you

cannot absolutely know that even the next moment will come, much less the day next day will come, right? You don't know. There was a lady about a week ago who was woken up. She was asleep, but she was woken up because in meteor the size it was set up, but it seems quite gendered. So it's a sort of funny, this was in the media, a meteor in the size of a large man's fist. I just find that in this modern era quite a funny way to describe a meteor. But anyway, a meteor in the size of a large man's fist walloped into the pillow next to her head, right? She was three inches from being annihilated, right?

And yeah, so, or she came to bed and found it there. I don't know which it was, but in any rate, had her head been there, like she would be dead. So you don't know moment to moment that you look, but right in this moment, right now you do, you know you exist, you know you exist, and in this sort of zen sense, that is all we know for sure that we have. And so it makes me just think, be in the moment, like appreciate the fact

that you are alive right now, right here with your little girls, or whatever, like you are right now and just have a reverence for that because it's all you ever know that you have for sure. If that's what you get out of a near death experience, overall, I think avoiding the near death experience would probably have been preferable, but that realization is pretty beautiful.

Another crazy thing, which is what I said to my friend on the podcast, Paul, about the fact that he buried his father once and he was was gonna have to bury him again. You're potentially going to see your father and that sort of black pit again at some point. You may sort of glance off the top of that once and then come back around for a second loop at some point and then see it again. I was taken to the threshold and then brought back. And so I now know what that is like, that place is like. And I got to say, I did not want to go down there. But it seemed like a minor

transition. It didn't seem like this massive like, oh my God, I'm dying. Like it seemed in that moment, it seemed like, well, that whatever that next thing is, it's a small step to the left. It's not a huge thing. It's a small thing. And by the time you're dying, death is a small transition, right? And dying is a, you know, it's a big thing, right? I mean, when you're dying, your body is shutting down,

but there's no moment, right? Where you just get less and less alive and more and more dead right up into the point where you're almost completely dead and very little bit alive. And then that last little bit seems to be a minor step. And there was some, you know, funny way, it took the, it took a bit of the mystery out of it. I mean, a bit of the awe out of it. It's like, oh, death is just, it's a very mundane thing. It's an ordinary thing, right? It's a very ordinary thing that everybody does, and it's not some transcendent thing. It can just be part of what happened during your day. I mean, it was a very strange

perspective on it. Talking about freedom today, and you went from someone who, I guess from the outside looking in as a single guy in his late 40s, early 50s would have had all of the freedom in the world, but then started a family had two young daughters got married, talk me through that experience as someone who's done it later in life. Yeah, I mean, I was married previously. And, you know, my wife and I were still friends, my ex-wife and I were still friends. We've broken up on very good terms and remained sort of like low to each other as friends throughout that process.

Thank God. And I'm very grateful to her for that. But during the trek that I undertook, I was going through that process of separation and divorce. And it was very sad, very sad year. And I was why I should just sort of describe it briefly. So, me and a few buddies, we'd all been in a lot of combat, either as soldiers or as journalists. We walked along the railroad lines from Washington, D.C. to Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, about

400 miles. The railroad lines in this country are these sort of swaths of no man's land that are really not patrolled or monitored by the authorities. And you can kind of do what you want out there. And you know, it's a dangerous environment, right? I mean, their trains going by at 120 miles an hour and whatever. They're marginal environments. There are some drifty kind of people out there, whatever.

But it goes through everything, right? The suburbs and the farms and the wilderness and the ghettos and the industrial wasteland. It goes through everything and we were sleeping under bridges and and abandoned buildings and cook and overfires and Getting our water out of creeks and dodging the police because it's illegal of course and You know most nights I say in the book my book freedom most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. And that's a form of freedom. And one that's not to be sneezed at. And although there's many other forms as well. But, you know, after that, yes, I found myself in a very, very good

relationship with a wonderful, wonderful woman. And we decided that I'm trying to have a family and we were lucky. We were blessed and that it happened and we have two little girls. And you know, I've had all kinds of other freedom prior in my life. You know, my first daughter was born in age 55 and you know, one of the reasons I've tried to stay very healthy and athletic is because I want to stay alive as long as possible for them and for me for them. I felt like I was giving up, yeah, you're giving up one kind of freedom and you're getting another kind of freedom,

but that's always true. I mean, you can give up temporal freedom and get a high paying job and make a bunch of money and then you have economic freedom. You can give up, you know, you can give up the sort of safety and stability and predictability of living in a modern society and going to the wilderness and you have the freedom of that, but you're in a fair amount of danger. And if something happens to you, like you have a rupture in appendix, sorry, guy, you're dead, you know, like, so you never get all forms of freedom at once, and the

form of freedom that I got as a father, as a husband and father, is this profound emotional freedom of luck, you know, and you know, in some ways it's the most boundless form of freedom there is, and it has no limits, no depths, you know, it says, boundless is only limited by you. And then, you know, there's something about that that, you know, maybe it would have been lost on me at age 20 or 30 or whatever and that's probably good. I wasn't a dad back then. But thank God I'm a dad now because at this point I would have wondered what's life for. That's a beautiful story. It's a really, really beautiful story to hear. Thank you. Thank you. You say that there's a tension between freedom and community. How does that play out?

Well, you are not you're not safe unless you're part of a group. I mean just in sort of like biological terms Anthropological terms humans do not survive alone in nature. They die almost immediately. We survive As a biological matter we survive because we're part of a group. We don't have sharp claws, we don't have sharp teeth. We can't climb trees very well, we can't run very fast, although on hot days we can run quite far, which makes us different than from most other mammals. But we get our safety, our physical safety, and therefore emotional safety from being part of a group,

a survival group. And that means that if you're part of a group, you have to participate, you have to contribute and you have to abide by group norms. And you know, if you were in a hunter gatherer group 50,000 years ago and you were a young male, the group norm probably expected you to be part of the effort to hunt food, right, and to defend the community with violence, with force if necessary, from a predator or from another group of aggressive humans. That was your job, right? And if you were not willing to do that, you were not fulfilling your, your expected role right? And if you were not willing to do that, you were not fulfilling your,

the your expected role in that community, and you were cast out, undoubtedly you were cast out. And so I looked at the American frontier in Pennsylvania in the 1700s, these early settlers that went into what was called Indian territory, you know, escaped the sort of control and oppression maybe of the colonial government and of the church of that era

to the wilderness, right? God's world, God's great land, right? But the problem is the wilderness was enormously free and enormously dangerous in the way that they reduced those risks that settlers was by having basically a mutual defense pact among the sort of families in every area They would build a stockade and if there was a sort of like if they were Indian raids Everyone would collect at the stockade and defend it and if you were a boy aged 14 or over you were expected to carry a rifle and Use it and fight in defense of the group women had roles as well, of course, equally vital roles. And they would reload the weapons.

They would attend the wounded. They would try to put out the fires that were started by flaming arrows in the buildings. So if you're not willing to do those things, you were not wanted. You're welcome to leave now, like if you're not willing to help defend the group. These settlers got a great freedom in the wilderness, but they had to abide by the norms of the group. They were not free to act selfishly within the group. But likewise, I would say, just in a very mundane level, like we are a, America is a free country in many

important regards, but you are not free to drive on the left hand side of the road, as you do in, in England, in America, and in the United States, you drive on the right hand side of the road. If you drive the left hand side of the road, you're going to kill somebody, or if you're going to red light, you're going to kill somebody. You're not free to do that. You have to abide by the norms of this particular group, which in this case is a community of 330 million people, all whom agree that we'll all drive on the right

hand side of the road to keep highway desks to a minimum. Is there a pretty particularly unique tension now that previously the symbiotic relationship between the individual and the group had to work a little bit more hard because the individual could not survive without adhering to the rules of the group. Whereas now we have a much more fragmented society that's a lot safer. You don't necessarily need to. Yeah, there's some laws that you need to, but the individual has more power as convenience and safety has increased. Well, they have, you know, they can indulge in the illusion that they don't need the group, but, you know, we're all putting gasoline into our cars that is drilled by other people, or eating food that other people grew.

We're living in homes for the most part that other people built. We're dependent. We're outsourcing our defense and survival needs to the fire department and to doctors and nurses and to the police and to soldiers for that matter. And, you know, every survival task that confronted small scale organic societies in modern society has been outsourced, right? So you don't grow your own food, but you have to be a work at 9 a.m. and you work to 5 p.m. and maybe you're paid half a million dollars a year or maybe you're paid $30,000. Whatever it is, maybe you're doing well or not well within that system,

but that system is providing your basic survival needs and in return, you're giving it your time. You're not temporally free, but you're you're free from the sort of most immediate threat to your survival, at least in sort of evolutionary human terms. So the idea that you're like, oh, I'm an American citizen and I don't need anybody. I'm blah, blah, blah. Like just complete nonsense, right? Listen, man, the gun you're carrying, that you're the gun that you're like showing up at the state house with to show what a badass you are and how free you are. That gun was made by somebody else, the ammo is made by somebody else,

the pickup truck you drove down there was made by somebody else and the gasoline that's in the tank was made by somebody else. You are not free at all. And humans never have been. We have never existed alone in nature. We live in groups. The group that we all live in in modern society is an extremely large, complicated group with a huge supply chain that is so

complicated that it really needs some kind of like federal oversight and regulation to keep it running well. And countries that don't have that like Somalia or Afghanistan, the supply chain is very unreliable. There's a black market economy that is extremely exploitative and there's a huge amount of corruption. So, you know, like if you think you're doing, not doing well in this country, with federal oversight, go to Somalia. You will be blessed with no federal oversight.

See how it goes. What do you class as the opposite of freedom? Because some people would say like tyranny or something, but I'm guessing that's maybe a little bit rough-hune Well, I mean again, I mean, I hope I'm not sort of hiding behinds, you know, anthropology and biology, but in in in long-standing human terms The most immediate threat to your freedom was an enemy group that would come in and kill or enslave you, right? That was the most immediate come in and kill or enslave you. That was the most immediate threat to your freedom. By you, I mean you and your community, you and your tribe, you and your loved ones.

The word freedom is taken from the middle of German freedom, which means beloved. So in that sense, people who were free were the people around you in your community, the people who were beloved by you, and strangers, foreigners, outsiders, did not necessarily have the right to freedom, right? I mean, if you could kill and enslave them, they were your slaves, right? I mean, they didn't have, there was no international law, right? There was no human rights law. There was no international standards like that of human rights and human dignity. Basically, the only people you were, you could not morally kill or enslave where people within your own community. The term murder applied to those people. Killing the enemy was not murder, right? That was killing the enemy.

And so freedom, the essential meaning of freedom is that the people you and your beloved, your community, are without an outside oppressor, right? Which means you can oppress other people, but you yourselves are not being oppressed, right? That's the meaning of the word freedom. So, so, so in the modern world, I would say, we still have to pay sort of homage to that original meaning. If you are safe from the predations of an outside enemy group, you are in a very, very important sense of free. The way you do that is being a well-armed, well-organized state that can repel the attacks of an invader, of an aggressor.

But if you're well-armed enough and well-organized enough to defeat the enemy, then an abusive leader has an apparatus, a security apparatus that is well-armed and well-organized enough to oppress his own people, to basically turn his own people into serfs, which is what the elite of Europe did throughout the entire medieval era, right? I mean, the era observed them that essentially ended with the enlightenment and then with the revolutions in France and America and elsewhere. That system was one of elite power and essentially served them. People had no legal rights. You couldn't sue the king. The king could kill you and your family had no rec rights. You couldn't sue the king. Right. The king could kill you and you had no your family had no

recourse. You could rape and plunder and pillage as much as you wanted if you were royalty, right? There was no democracy brought it into that and the laws that applied to the commoners to everyone also applied to the to the elite Obviously democracy falls a little bit short on that, but at least in theory that was the idea. So that's how you keep, I mean, basically there's freedom from an oppressor and out there's freedom from an enemy and then there's freedom from an oppressor within your own society. And what democracy tries to do is have a well-equipped state that can defend itself and have a system of laws that defense the populace populace against an unscrupulous ruler.

So you've got three identifiers for ways that people and groups can become free as in run, fight, and think, but it sounds like coordinating is actually the first thing that everybody needs to do. There's a pre-step to all of that. Well, yeah, I mean, society is coordinate, right? I mean, that's what a society is. So that's just taken as a given. But there is no state of human evolution where a bunch of individual individuals are like,

oh, this isn't working on our own out here in the jungle. Let's get together and do this. That never happened, right? I mean, we are closest relatives are chimpanzees We we split from from chimpanzees about six million years ago 99% some or 98% of our DNA is indistinguishable from chimpanzee DNA We're very very closely related to them. We are social primates and always have been so in my book freedom What I wanted to figure out was how do humans alone among mammals maintain their autonomy, their freedom, in the face of a larger,

more powerful foe. So individual combatants, a smaller man, can defeat a larger man. I mean, one of the interesting things about mixed martial arts and its early days is that they had no weight categories. And there are plenty of examples of smaller fighters who handily defeated larger adversaries, inconceivable in the primate world, right, in the rest of the primate world. You know, likewise, smaller coalitions can defeat larger coalitions, the Montenegrins and the 1600s, a wild mountain tribe were invaded by the Ottoman Empire, one of the dominant militaries of the era. The Monster Negorans were outnumbered 12 to 1, right? The Ottomans had cavalry, artillery, you know, all the advantages that America had in fighting the Taliban, and the

Monster Negorans handed them their hat, right? I mean, that over and over again, they defeated the Ottomans and expelled them from their land. And inconceivable except for humans. So I was trying to figure out how does this work? So basically, the first, a underdog group, the first thing that they try to do when they're dealing with an oppressor, is outrun them. So the Apache, the American Southwest,

unlike the Pueblos societies that were rooted in place because they're agriculturalists, they're much more wealthy, they're recedentary, they didn't have the option of fleeing, they were rolled by the Spanish immediately. Sometimes within hours of the confrontation, they were defeated or surrendered to the Spanish, where the Apache maintained after first contact, the Apache maintained their autonomy for another three centuries, right? Almost to within my grandmother's life, right? My grandmother was born in 1900.

There were bands of free Apache who survived almost until 1900, right? Because they were mobile, they were free. But if you can't outrun your enemy, you're going to have to outfight it. And that's where this amazing dynamic comes in that with humans, either on one-on-one combat or in coalitionary combat, the smaller group, the smaller individual, can actually win, which means that larger groups like the United States eventually winds up negotiating with smaller groups like the Taliban. I hate the Taliban. They're loads of, right? No respect for women's rights, for human rights, but I've got to say if the smaller group always lost, there would be no freedom in the human experience.

The world would be composed of large fascist megastates that impose their will on everybody else. That's not what the world looks like. And then finally, if you're within a society, you know, this is how you deal with an you know, enemies, right? You run or you fight. But how do you deal with oppression within your own society? If you're being oppressed by the government or business interests or what have you, how do you, what do you do? You have to outthink them. You're now in a chess game, right? You're not going run away and and you can't defeat them in outright combat How do you do it? So I looked at the labor movement In the United States about a hundred years ago

I looked at the Easter Rising in Dublin and in Ireland in 1916 around the same era You know these these are groups that are completely outgunned by the power of the established powers, military, government, and corporate powers, completely outgunned, and yet they managed to eventually achieve their purposes. One way, one very important thing to do, I looked at successful underdog groups and one thing they had in common is they often incorporate women. Not necessarily into the front lines of combat, but into the sort of matrix of the revolutionary movement, the insurgency. Women have lateral networks.

Man are very top-down hierarchical. That's very important when it comes to charging machine guns, it's essential. But women's lateral networks are also very important because they're almost impossible for the state, for the authorities to infiltrate, to decapitate. You can't do it. It's a lateral network like a spider web. Very, very important. And the other thing is that women on a, you know, serve on a, on a social movement. You put women on

the front lines of a strike or a protest. It makes it very, very hard for the police to use force. They will, of course, it happens. But there, there is a sanction against violence, using violent mass, violent public mass violence against women that isn't quite as strong as it is for men. A group of men protesting in the street look like a mob. A group of women protesting in the street, they look like a social movement and you open up with the machine guns on them and it's very problematic for the government, for the dictatorship, whatever it may be.

And so, in the labor movement in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, they were confronting National Guard with fixed bayonets. And the men were sure a powerless to confront this show of force, so they started putting women on the front line of the protests and these young boys in uniform with fixed bayonets did not know what to do. They're looking at women just like their sisters and their mothers or maybe their daughters, right? And one frustrated police captain said he said one good cop can handle 10 men, but it

takes 10 cops to handle one woman, and they did not quite have the manpower to handle those protests, and that tipped the balance. And the other thing that these underdog groups have a successful underdog groups have in common is leaders that are willing to die for the cause, literally willing to die for the cause. And if you don't have that, if you have leadership that's sort of hiding behind the people that they lead either literally or figuratively our leaders will not accept blame will not take risk

who will who will not own mistakes uh... who will not expose themselves to gunfire of it to actually a shooting situation you have leaders like that they're really really not leaders. Their opportunists, it does not work. Yeah, there's, you see this echo symbolically in stories and in movies as well. The leader of the goody side is always the guy that's charging into battle. He'll stay behind to help the wounded man and carry him on his shoulder. Whereas the leader of the baddies, he's always up in some ivory tower commanding people around and then it's the good guy that will eventually rise up the lift and fight through all of the layers, and then eventually get to this bourgeois twat that someone needs to kill. So yeah, you see this,

you see this happen. What was the story with Michael Malin that you looked at? Yeah, I mean, Michael Malin was an Irish revolutionary in 1916 who commanded a brigade in Dublin. And you know, was eventually caught. I mean, there was a after a week of combat in Dublin, in bloody combat. And a lot of people died. And you know, the bridge for throwing soldiers at the problem by the thousands and the rebels who had machine guns and were hiding in sandbag departments, they figured this out, they were just mowing down these British teenagers, conscripts. But this is the same era when the British lost 60,000 men on the first day of the Battle of the Sum.

Something like that killed and wounded if I'm remembering my numbers correctly. It was the population of County Wicklow and Ireland. And one day, that was just the first day and nobody blinked, right? So human life didn't mean anything. And I'm sure the Irish rebels were like Jesus that they treat their own people like that. How are they gonna treat us? We don't wanna be part of this fiasco, right?

So Michael Malla and was one of the leaders and I think he had four children and he was married and had four children. And you know, he was tried sort of a sham trial and not allowed any representation and condemned to death for treason and on his way to the jail where they would kill him. He passed the wagon, passed his home and he saw his dog. Was that done on purpose? I don't know. I don't know. And he saw his dog in the yard and there are these

anguish letters that he wrote in the hours before his day. His family was allowed to visit him on his last night and Then he was left alone in his cell with God, presumably. He was very religious. In my book, I have printed in full his last desperate letter of anguish to his wife and children. And the first sign of light and dawn, at dawn, they took him from a cell and walked him down to the stonebreakers yard and stood him before a wall. And the firing squad leveled their rifles, and on command they fired in units.

Unison and killed them. And the medical examiner, they killed I think 12 or 14 Irish revolutionaries like this. And including a man named Connolly who was the commander of the Dublin forces that fought the Brits. He was wounded twice. I mean, the big job that his age had was to drag him out of gunfire because he kept risking his life to command the troops. I mean, he was the epitome of heroic leadership, right? And he was shot twice, he wanted twice, and he couldn't even walk

to his own death when they executed him. They had to carry him in a stretcher and prop him up into chair. And the medical examiner that was president at these executions said that the only people in the situation that were not nervous, that were not shaking, were the condemned, the condemned men, and the firing squads were all shaking, they were so nervous. They were the fearful ones. And, you know, I should say, I should say that this, what you said about Hollywood movies about villains being these sort of bourgeois twats in a tower, getting other men to do their bidding. And on the good side, there's a selfless leader that grabs the flag and charges forward as it were. You know, what we're depicting in the bad guys

is our own society. I mean, that is exactly what our leaders are. They're in state buildings telling other people what to do. And, you know, I get into modern society and no one wants the president himself leading the charge. You know, I mean, it just wouldn't work, right? I mean, it's just, I mean, you know, like with Conno charge, you know, I mean, it just wouldn't work, right? I mean, it just, I mean, you know, like with,

like with Connolly, you know, we, you know, we need those people to help run the show. So you don't want them taking a bullet that, you know, that's for soldiers to do, but I totally get it. But, but just to your point about what the sort of bad guys look like, they look like, we make them look like us. And they have leaders, I feel like political leaders in modern European Western democracies, including

America, are sort of notable for their moral cowardice. I mean, they, you know, there is no principle they won't trample to further their political interests. Well, that's the equivalent. The equivalent of not taking the bullet is standing by your word. You don't need to stand in front of the gunfire, but if you are to say a thing, you need to not forget that you said that thing three weeks later and pretend that you said something else

and try and spin a different line out. I think this is one of the reasons why we have concerns about the trustworthiness of the people at the top. Yeah, I mean, I would vote for someone who was willing to lose an election because he or she felt that the truth was necessary to articulate. So Liz Cheney, I'm a Democrat, right? Liz Cheney is very conservative and she is standing up Liz Cheney is very conservative and she is standing up to the sort of like Magga Donald Trump world by insisting on reality, right? Insisting on the truth about January 6th and about Donald Trump's efforts to subvert the

election. And, you know, I would vote for her, even though I'm a Democrat, I would vote for her. She's an arch-conservative. I would vote for her simply because she is willing to sacrifice her career for the sake of the truth and our democracy and our democratic system. I would vote for her over a Democrat who was not willing to tell the truth in a heartbeat, right?

And but that's the, that is now the standard for courage. Is are you willing to tell the truth? And I feel like a lot of politicians actually won't even ask that standard is pathetic to pretty low bottom it's a low bar right it's absolutely pathetic and if there weren't such a enormous financial reward for being in government i mean mitch book on all has ten million dollars in the bank where the hell did mitch book on all get ten million bucks right i'm not

sorry got saying got that illegally but there's a sort of aspect of unseemliness that you have people who are exploiting Diane Feinstein, a Democrat also, like, is completely violated ethics rules about insider stock trading, right? And I mean, 37, I think it was 37 Congressmen and women have violated, and I'm getting this from Russell Brand, by the way. So you can go check it. You can go check it, but I just interviewed with him a few days ago, and I looked up some of his busy videos, so assuming that he has his facts right, I sure he does, 37 American Congressmen and women have violated their own ethics standards about insider stock training.

Their own standards that law that they themselves passed, 37, right? That's not ethical, right? That's immoral and that and people like that forget about being able to benefit financially. These shouldn't be anywhere near office, public office if they're willing to do that. I mean, that's what, okay, you don't have to take a bullet. That's, you know, politics don't involve literally fighting the enemy and the trenches, right? But at the very least, you can go for a go, the opportunity to admit yourself for four years, at the very least, you can do that for us, and they're not even rising to that.

It's a severe distance from the philosopher king of the Marcus Aurelius era, you know, you think about somebody who's concerned with virtue above all others that will sell the inside of the palace wares to try and pay off the debts of the nation. Yeah, I mean, I think this is why for me, politics feels like such a wasted endeavor that the understanding of how to limitely hijack the electorate has taken precedent over people actually doing what is good. Like being able to manipulate cognitive biases means that someone who isn't good can appear more good than someone who is. That's that's unfortunately the situation that we're in.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, if you live in a sort of small scale organic survival group of 30, 40, 50 people, as humans have done for most of their 200,000 years of existence, it's very easy to detect fraud, to detect that kind of duplicity, that kind of dishonesty and cowardice. And it's usually punished by death. I mean, there's an anthropologist named Richard Bome who looked at the application of capital punishment within hunter-gatherer societies, right? And the most common reason for killing one's leader in a hunter-gatherer community, in modern day hunter-gatherer societies and what is known from the last hundred years of anthropology in these societies, the most common reason by far was abuse when leaders abused their position

of power and worked to benefit themselves ahead of other people. I know that there were tribes, native tribes in America, you know, 100 plus years ago, where cowardice, you know, warrior who was cowardly on the battlefields was killed by his fellow warriors. Like you were a coward, man, you didn't defend the tribe, sorry. Like, we're going to do you a favor. You've disordered yourself. We're going to do you. We're going to spare you having to kill yourself. We're going to do it for you. Right. That's leadership. That's selflessness. That is acting on behalf of your tribe. And

and lead, you know, political leaders now, that's not even on the menu. Right. So how do we monitor, how do we patrol that that behavior, monitor that behavior, we're not in groups of 30, 40, 50 people or 100 people or 500 people, we're in groups of millions and millions. And you know what it used to be, there was a great thesis that the modern, that the monotheistic God was invented during the advent of agriculture, when surplus food allowed great numbers of people to live together, basically there were communities of strangers. of agriculture when surplus food allowed great numbers of people to live together. Basically, there were communities of strangers. Anonymity was possible after the admin of agriculture.

That was when the monotheistic God was sort of invented to an all-seeing, all-knowing, punitive God who would punish sin. The community might not know who you are and you steal a loaf of bread and you get away with it because no one knows who you are, you know, whatever. But God knows who you are. It's a monotheistic, all-knowing God. That was invented to control, to encourage good behavior in a society that was so large, there was anonymity. But now we're basically a godless society, you know, it's not my naphias, so I get it. So what do we have in its place?

We have CCTV. You know, basically it's very hard to commit a public crime without it being captured on video. And thank God, right? Because there are lots of very, very bad people who've done very bad things, including the London Underground bombers of 2004, you know, one of them was captured because he was seen on CCTV cameras.

So they're a good thing. They've taken the place of a monotheistic guy. But what do we do now as the electorate? How do we get people to act that way? We get them to act that way by penalizing at the polling booth, penalizing selfless behavior, dishonest behavior. You know, we have to call it out, and we have to call it out in our own party,

because we call it out in the other party, and everyone's going to ignore it. We have to call it out among ourselves, among our own. And that's something that the Democrats and the Republicans are uniquely bad at. And the country, it's not going to be an honest system until those two parties decide to apply some real morality to their own people. Yeah, game theoretically it doesn't sound like a good strategy to stop focusing on the enemy and start focusing on the inside. But that's without the luxury of a God's eye view.

If you were to say, look, I want the best sort of world community nation that I can do, you need to hold everybody to account, not just the opposition to try and get yourselves back into power, to do what? To have four more years of shitty power. That's not going to get you very far. Thinking about the people riding into battle, I heard a story about a Spartan soldier who was incredibly proficient, he was one of the finest soldiers in the army, and he went into battle naked.

So he stripped off all of his armor, stripped off all of his clothes, just went in shield, sword, and spear, and when he got back, he was punished. He was punished by the commanders of the army because he'd endangered a Spartan asset himself. He had endangered one of the assets of the army by being so reckless with the way that he went in. So even somebody, that's another control measure. What we're talking about here are control measures, whether they be monotheistic gods that cause you to emergently try and act in the way that you think that you should, whether they be CCTV cameras that dictatorially tell you that if you do not act in the way that you're supposed to,

whether they be cultural norms that are kind of this embodied, sensed, communitarian version of this, and you even have when somebody oversteps them, Arquand, somebody utilizes their skill or their prowess and is wasteful with it in a society like Sparta, where it was all about trying to get the most done, trying to squeeze everything you could out of a small society, even those soldiers were told,

you can't endanger an asset, even if it's yourself. Well, listen, I'll tell you, I've been in a lot of combat with US military and we were in a situation of one point up on a ridge in the Taliban were on either side of us. There was no way to hide, right? And they were about to open up on us. And there was no good place to be, right? And the only chance we had was by we, I mean, the soldiers I was with was to unleash so much firepower back at them

you know I mean sort of hide behind behind our own firepower but eventually you run out of ammunition right and so it was extremely exposed place everyone had run out of water it was very hot so everyone was black on water it was not black on water they run out of water they're drinking the fluid in their IV bags so where people wounded they wouldn't have IV fluid, it was a desperate situation and we were getting ready to get hit and it was going to really suck. And the lieutenant stood up in this sort of awful moment of quiet before we were going to get hit and we could hear it on the icons on the radio chatter from the enemy like, okay, we've got them, they have nowhere to hide, they are done,

right? And we were waiting for this hurricane of lead, right? And the lieutenant stood up. I mean, the only place you can be is like on the ground as close to the ground as possible. So standing up in this situation, I can't tell you how hard that would be to do, right? And the man stood up to look around to see where his heavy weapons were positioned to make sure that they were in the best possible position. Again, think pondally in Dublin in 1916.

He stood up to see where the heavy weapons were placed, the 240s, particularly to make sure they were placed right. And the staff sergeant that was right next to me said sir please sit down we need you we need you to stay alive it's your job to make decisions it's our job to get shot at and the staff sergeants stood up he said tell me what you need what tell me what you need to know and I'll find it out and you take please take cover. And so that's exact. That is leadership. And when corporations sometimes bring me in as a consultant to like how to make their

corporations like feel more like a tribe. So that basically there's more like group loyalty by the workers. So they'll produce more and everyone gets richer, right? Particularly the leadership. When they bring me in for that consultation, I say, look, you have to be a leader. A leader makes sure that they may benefit disproportionately when things go well, no problem, right? Leadership should be rewarded disproportionately as higher responsibilities, takes more experience, et cetera, et cetera. But if there's a downturn and

people are going to make less or people are going to have to be fired the leadership of this company has to experience the negative consequences before the people they lead or at least with them, right? So before you fire anybody you have to get rid of your gear and bonus, right? And if you don't, that's not leadership. That's, you're just running a company at that point. You're not leading a company. You're running a company.

If you keep your gear and bonus and fire people because there's a downturn in the market, you're just running a damn company. You're not leading it. If you want to lead it, if you want loyalty, you need to lead it. And if you lead it, you will make it clear that you will suffer consequences right alongside the people that are trusting you. Not a welcome message in the corporate world, I should add. Yeah, but it's not. It makes me think about an example. So I run nightclubs. I have done for a very long time. I've stood on the front door of a lot of them. And part of that, me and my business partner have been the directors of this company since we were 18.

We've always been the top of the tree and then we've just added in people below us all the way up. Every single night that we run an event, one of us stands on the front door of the nightclub. And we're in Newcastle, which is the Winterfell of the UK. It's the final city before Scotland. In the winter, it gets brutally cold. It's wet. It's dark. It's miserable. We stand on the front door of the night. Every single one, there is never

been an event that we've operated, where somebody hasn't stood there. We have always been there right next to the boys, right next to the event managers, right next to the door staff that kick people out and we'll freeze our nuts off on the door along with them. And for a long time, people have asked, what is it that you do? We don't do that much. The whole purpose of us creating a business that runs in a slick and organized way is that it's so self-sufficient that everybody knows the jobs that need doing beforehand. And there are a lot of nights where we stand there and I feel like a spare part. I'm like, well, I'll just make sure that the DJ's drinks are topped up again.

You almost end up doing the most sort of surplus ridiculous jobs because there isn't anything for you to do, but it's less about the fact that you're there to do a job and it's more about the fact that symbolically you are there with the rest of the group. Look, it's freezing, it's cold, it's gonna be a shit Thursday in the middle of January. We're gonna do 400 people tonight

when we should do a thousand and that's what, break even 500 people. So we're going to lose money and I'm going to get out of bed at 10 pm at night and I'm going to stand on the front door of a nightclub with you for five hours and there's going to be drunk people and they're going to complain but we're all going to do it together. And a big part of that that we see as well is in small businesses like ours that's quite hierarchical. There's lots of different little layers that we create so people can progress and it feels like they've been promoted and stuff The guys that get the most respect are the ones that people have seen enter the company at the absolute bottom They started fliring and doing street PR and giving out guestless bands trying to get people in then they were the guest best guest Lister then they became a junior event manager and they smashed it at that then they become a full event manager And they smashed it at that then a senior then a city, and people see this lineage of them going up bit by bit by bit

and they know that they've earned their stripes. They know that they have the chops to be able to do the thing that they are telling you to do. They've done it. I've done thousands and thousands of knocks on doors. We got to the point where my knuckles were bleeding during my gap year because I was knocking on the doors of so many different halls of residence to say, hey you coming out tonight, hey you coming out tonight. So I've been there, but the only reason that I can tell my boys to go and do that is because I've done it as well. I'm like, look, this is a fucking right of passage. This is what you do. If you want to get to the stage where you can have your own company or where you can be paid the sort of money that you want to be paid, like step into the fire.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, right, you're signaling that you're part of the group. You're not outside it. You're not above it. And I was thinking, this morning, actually, I was sort of, what's the definition? You know, I wrote a book called Tribe. It was a charted to find where the tribe is. And some people think that, oh, if you're a football fans, football fans are all like

one tribe, but they're not a tribe, right? I mean, there are group of people that have a common interest, but they're not a tribe in a meaningful human sense. And so the definition I sort of came up with this morning was the idea of what happens to you happens to me. We're in the same tribe because that's true. And you were saying that to the people that were working for you,

like if you got to stand out there in the cold, I'm gonna stand out there in the cold. Now I may be completely useless. And if they say to you, listen, sir, why don't you go inside and get warmed up, it sucks out here, we, sir, why don't you get it go inside and get warmed up, it sucks out here. We got this. Like the lieutenant in my story, you then you you can honorably step down, right? You can honorably say, okay, I understand. Thank you. Appreciate it, right? I mean, there's

no merit in being stupid either, right? Yeah, isn't it interesting that that kind of has to be gifted from below? It's not the sort of thing that you can bestow upon yourself. But real leadership is given from below, right? It's by consent of the lead. Imposing leadership, it really isn't leadership, right? I mean, when it's sort of imposed from above And that's the problem with inherited wealth

It's not earns and you have a huge amount of social and economic capital that can be imposed on other people and it hasn't been granted by them and And it hasn't been earned and so but when the people that you're leading Ask you to take care of yourself like we need you, right? Then you're good and it's because you have signal to them what happens to you happens to me until you tell me otherwise, right? And then I will step inside and have come come whatever yeah exactly whatever it may be. And you know in the in the Marines, Whatever it may be. And in the Marines, there's a motto, officers eat last. Right?

In a situation like that, what you may well have is enlisted men saying, sir, please get a plate of food. We understand that officers eat last. We appreciate it. Now, can you please speed yourself? We respect and admire you, and we want you to eat. So that's the honorable way to do it. Likewise, Connolly and Dublin took his age, dragging him out of gunfire to keep him safe.

He wasn't going to do it on his own, but he would do it for others. One of the things that I've found that's been quite interesting is how stresses from the outside cause groups to stick together. So when freedoms get threatened, a community suffers a collective trauma or whatever, people usually bind together. What I've found really interesting is that I don't think we've seen that up against the global threat of COVID over the last 18 months. Yeah, I mean the problem with COVID is that there was a lot of mixed messaging by political leaders. Um, I mean, my political leader at the time, Donald Trump started by saying it didn't exist. There wasn't a threat at all, right? And then he

continued to have very confusing messaging about masks and vaccines. And you know, the point where it's completely hypocritical. I mean, the entire administration was vaccinated. And so was all the Fox noobs. And yet the messaging coming out of those groups was that vaccinations were somehow applauded by the left to take it, you know, whatever. I mean, it's just complete nonsense. Right. So when you have a political leadership and very powerful people that are actually

endangering the public for their own political benefit, you're not going to have a healthy response to COVID. So I get that for the USA, but I don't think I've seen a particular wonderful sense of belonging and coming together really anywhere on the planet. Maybe you could argue that the USA are culturally so influential that if they cough everybody else catches a cold of Covid of misinformation perhaps. But do you remember that video? I think it was in Italy and there was someone singing on a rooftop and there was balconies all the way around and they were all watching and there was another period where maybe in Spain or Italy against somewhere in Europe, someone was doing a workout routine on their own rooftop and all of the people

on their balconies overlooking that were doing it as well. Now that to me, that was one of the moments where you go, wow, that sort of human spirits really binding together, Everybody is in this. We know, I know what it's like to be locked down in the UK. Yeah, I don't live in New York the same as you. Yeah, my life situation is different to yours, but I kind of know what it feels like to be locked in my own house because of this pathogen that's outside. So we have more of a shared experience now than we probably ever did before.

And it's the same for people that are in China and in Vietnam and in Australia and everywhere. There's always been that argument made. If Earth was threatened by an alien species, imagine how quickly our differences would be forgotten because we would bind together. And you get that, I think it's called, is it the globe effect that astronauts get once they've been out to space and they view the Earth without borders

and they come back and they realize we are just one race, one species, blah, blah. I hoped 18 months ago that COVID was going to be that thing and it just hasn't, it doesn't seem to have occurred anywhere. Well, it's not an existential threat, right? I mean, I mean, it's way worse than the flu, which is deadly disease. And it's communicable, flu, which is a deadly disease, and it's communicable, unlike something, but it's not an existential threat to society. And I think what the skeptics were saying is that the protections against COVID are an existential threat because of crippled economy.

That's where the debate happens. But look, the Black Death in Europe, in what was the 12, 13, 1300s, 12, 1300s, 1300s, killed one out of three people. That's an existential threat. And if COVID were killing one out of three, thank God it wasn't. But if it was killing one out of three, I think you might have seen a different reaction. But even to the extent we've lost 600,000 people in this country, but if you lose 600,000 people during an alien attack, it'll traumatize the nation for a century. That gets your attention. The problem with the 600,000 is to spread out over a couple of years, and it's happening invisibly in ICUs around the country.

And it's in some ways it's sort of theoretical, sort of abstract. But even despite all that, and despite the fact that we had to stay away from people, in order to protect people, which is deeply antithetical to human reflexes during the crisis. But even so, I think there was actually a fair amount of sort of solidarity of the sort

that you described in New York City. People were, I think it was at 5 p.m. every night, people leaning out of their windows, banging pots and pans for the healthcare workers that were working in the ERs in the hospital. So, you know, I think for a modern society that's very, very fractured and alienated, there was actually a fair amount of sort of like communal sentiment around all of this. Yeah, it makes me realize why false flag events by governments have seemed alluring over time. You know, you look at trying to do a thing, trying to have some catastrophe occur that forces, that's what they're actually doing. They're trying

to artificially inseminate this sense of binding together. Here is the threat, there is something happening out there and we need to bind together, we need you to come together as one. That's what they're trying to enact. That's right, and the problem is, they are, at least in my country right now, they are politically, they are doing that

with half the country. They're saying half the country is a threat to this country. If you're a Republican, the Democrats, the Socialists, Communists, Godless, Black Lives Matter, Democrat, anarchists are a threat to this country, right? So they're saying is that half of the country are literally the enemy, right? The enemy.

They're not the beloved, right? They're not the definition of freedom. They're not, they don't deserve freedom. They don't deserve to be free. They're the enemy, right? They're not one of us. The Democrats, I don't think do it in the same way and not as sort of virulently as the Republicans have lately,

but they have a bit of that as well. And so when you cast your own people as the enemy of the state, you are creating civil war. That is one of the steps to fascism, right? I mean, that is a classic step in the fascist playbook, is take the political opponents and say, not only do I disagree with them,

not only are they not nice people, they're actually an enemy of this country and they must be eradicated. And that's how you get fascism. It's a classic, classic move in the fascist playbook. And that's one of the things that really bothers me about the last few years in this country. We have a very robust democracy and we have a military, which is absolutely loyal to democratic ideals, whether it be a Republican or a Democratic president, they don't really care. My father grew up in Spain and left when Franco

and the fascists came in. And Franco succeeded because he had the military behind him. That will never happen in this country. And therefore, in my opinion, fascism will never come to this country. Boy, it's awfully ugly to see the sort of preparatory steps in action, even if it will never come to that. It's crazy when you create in-group, out-group dynamics within a nation, when there's other

things that need to be worried about. And this is, I think, why the people that have done research into China and into Russia and into sort of long-term trajectories and concerns about what's happening to the globe. That's the ones who are, you know, standing in the middle of the street with a megaphone desperately saying, look, there are bigger fucking problems out there. There are really bigger problems. There's this quote from your book that says, if the enemy is not going to show mercy, you

might as well fight to the death. Freedom as a supreme value was born out of the fact that there were really no alternatives worth considering. And the result was that the freest people were the most warlike. What that sounds like is kind of a race to the bottom or a race to extremity. And when you have that enacted against another nation, you end up securing your

own nation. But when you start to play this self-referential game within a country, what you end up with is ever escalating tensions, ever more malicious strategies in order to be able to manipulate people and make you the side seem like the bad guys and make you seem like the good guys. And that's why it doesn't surprise me again that we don't really know what politicians think or what the truth is or what's going on. Yeah, and you can read the word war like to mean best able to defend themselves, right? And if you can't defend yourself, you're not going to be creepy for very long. Usually, an enemy will come along and dominate you.

And that has been true for I think all of human history. And there's plenty of examples, but the great thing about democracy is that an international law is a sort of taken care of that problem, right? There are coalitions of nations that have treaties, if you're a mutual defense packs. So you attack Belgium, you're attacking the whole EU, you attack Belgium, you're attacking NATO, right?

You're all of a sudden you're attacking half the world, and so it has a state, those treaties have a stabilizing effect. And I would say that when you cast, And I would say that when you cast people as an enemy now, we're in a situation, at least in America, we really cannot plausibly be invaded by anybody. So when you cast people as an enemy, it's pretty much a sort of naked attempt to just reinforce your political

base. It really is not a threat to this country, not from the other political party, not from Black Lives Matter, not from China. I mean, there are economic threats, but you know, whatever, but they're not a threat in the sense that enemy is the word is usually taken. And it's a naked political ploy. And you know, it really should be called out because it is the beginning of the end of democracy. It's going to destroy it. Sebastian Junger, ladies and gentlemen, freedom will be linked in the show notes below. You are not on social media, so there's nothing else for people to keep up to date with. Do you have a blog or a website or anything? I have a website, SebastianJonger.com, J-U-N-G-E-R, is my spelling of my name. My publisher started

some social media accounts for me. I have a flip phone, you're up, so approve it. I have a flip phone. I'm not interested in social media, but I'm just going to, and I hate the idea of tweeting meaningful things, 140 characters at a time, but I have taken two posting sentences from my book freedom on Twitter with photographs, and sentences that often involve the concept of freedom just for people to share a debate. So I do do that a little bit, I'm pretty easy to find in that way. So thank you, it was a pleasure talking to you. I really enjoyed it.