Super Soul Special: Sebastian Junger: The Quest for a Tribe

I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. present. Your journey to become more in to the deeper world Everybody should know this by now that when I read a good book or experience anything that I feel I can share, I want to share it with the world. And I recently... Read this book called Tribe by Sebastian Junger. You might know him as author of The Perfect Storm and War.

several documentaries but it's just a tiny little book tribe it's called tribe on homecoming and belonging and I was so struck by it that immediately wanted to tell everybody I knew about it and if possible talk to Sebastian Junger and now you're here Sebastian Junger for me to talk to

You say in the book that for hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have lived in close-knit social groups or tribes. that people lived and worked side by side, their survival was intertwined, They provided mutual support, we all did. We shared resources, protected each other. And now our modern society is just the opposite.

that we live in isolation, that we have fewer chances to really help our fellow human beings, and we have no guarantee that we're going to receive help and care in return. And as a result of that, so many of us are depressed and divided, and in America, the divisions are only getting worse. Is that why you wanted to write the book?

Broadly, yes. I mean, more immediately, I had spent a lot of time at a small outpost with American soldiers in eastern Afghanistan, an outpost called Restrepo. I made a documentary about it and wrote a book called War. And what I noticed... was despite all the combat, I mean, there were firefights almost every day, complete isolation from the outside world, real hardship and deprivation, despite all of that,

There was this strange sense of well-being among everybody. We slept shoulder to shoulder in the dirt. It was very dangerous out there, very little food. And after the deployment, a lot of the guys that I knew, I was a journalist out there, but a lot of the soldiers I knew said that they missed it, that they didn't want to go back to America.

And that reminded me of something that... A mentor of mine had told me when I was young, his name was Ellis, he was half Lakota Sioux, half Apache, and he said to me when I was young, he said, you know, all throughout the history of this country, along the frontier, white people were always running off to join the Indians. But Indians never ran off to join the white people. And that always stuck in my mind and reminded me of the soldiers. And I wanted to understand why this reluctance to return.

to modern society. And maybe that explains the extraordinarily high rate of PTSD that American soldiers seem to have. And so I plunged into the sort of psychological research. into happiness and well-being. And as it turns out in modern society, as wealth goes up, the suicide rate goes up, the depression rate goes up, the PTSD rate goes up. Modernity and wealth bring many great things, but not psychological health.

And so interesting when you talk about the fact that after 9-11, that all the things that we would expect. Those of us who are not really aware of how this works, you would expect that people would be more depressed, you would expect that the crime rate would go up, you would expect that violence would increase, you would expect all of that, and instead it was the opposite. Yes, it's an odd sort of...

I think, of our evolution, the worse things are, the better people act. And people like acting well. They like to see themselves in a good light. And the problem with affluence and safety and stability, and those are good things, of course, but the problem with those things is it doesn't...

They don't require people to act well in the service of their community. If everyone's relatively well off and living on their own or in single family homes, they don't need help. They don't need to borrow food from their neighbors. They don't need to get their neighbors to help them. build their house or what have you. The poorer the society, there are huge stresses that come with that, but the poorer the society. the more collaborative people have to be.

And people enjoy collaboration, we're wired for it. And one of the interesting things that I found was that if you take an affluent modern society and you collapse it during a crisis like the Blitz in London or a hurricane or a flood, what happens is that these very modern people suddenly are operating in a way that's in keeping with their evolutionary past. They're functioning in small, interdependent groups.

They're being very generous. They're putting other people first. These are all survival adaptations, but they make people feel good. And as a result, often later after the terrible, terrible times have passed. and things are normal, again, people will be very nostalgic about the blitz, about the hurricane that hit, about even the blizzard that knocked out power for four days. Anything that gets people to cooperate makes people feel good. Yes, and I thought of your book and your word.

Not too long ago when I was watching a news clip and there was this young African-American young man in his 20s, appeared to be, and the story was about him being out. in the waters for 24 hours straight rescuing people. And there was sort of this like, he was like on a high, like a glow about him. He was so excited about it when the reporter asked him, aren't you exhausted? Isn't this overwhelming? And he said, No, this is what Texans do.

And I thought about your book, that exactly what you're saying, that in the worst of times, like natural disasters, people get to feel some of the most of themselves. Yes, and with all due respect to Texans, it's really what humans do. And we wouldn't be here if we didn't work that way. I mean, if catastrophe and danger and hardship brought out our worst human behavior. the human race wouldn't have survived. And you mentioned 9-11. I live in New York City.

A terrible, terrible time, of course, in that city after the attacks. But the suicide rate went down in New York City after 9-11. The violent crime rate, the murder rate, they all went down after 9-11. And pharmacists even said that there was no increase. in new people seeking antidepressant prescriptions at their drugstores. In other words, people weren't reacting to the attack. with depression. They were being sort of activated. They were becoming more socially aware, more participatory.

in their community because they knew their community needed them. In the Blitz in London, of course, the civilian population of London was bombed. just about every night by the German Air Force for six months straight. Men, women, children, old people, these aren't hardened soldiers, these are just civilians.

And the government, the authorities, were prepared for mass psychiatric casualties, mass hysteria. And the opposite happened when the bombing started and missions to psych wards in London went down. One amazed official. said the chronic neurotics of peacetime are now driving ambulances.

In other words, you might even be a troubled person, but if your community needs you and you think you can help, it gets you to ignore, you have the luxury of ignoring your own problems because you're focusing on other people and that feels good.

How can we then? some of what that is, what happens to us in crisis, in natural disasters, in wars and apply it to the everyday or does it not apply? Why does it take natural disasters, some kind of crisis for us to come together as community? Well, that's the million-dollar question. I mean, can we live in a nation of 300-plus million people?

Can we live in modern houses and neighborhoods where we're not dependent on our neighbors for our very survival? Can we have the benefits of this modern society but have the closeness? of a small-scale society facing adversity. Or even the closeness of a modern society facing adversity. Can we have it all? And yes, and what would that community be? Because, you know, when I read what you were talking about, how you grow up, how you grew up.

I didn't grow up like that, but now I live like that in a community where nobody has to depend on anybody for anything. And everybody is sort of behind their own hedges or behind their own gates. And maybe you'll see your neighbor at the supermarket. the way I grew up in a community where you literally did borrow the sugar and take vegetables over to your neighbor's house and if somebody was in trouble then the rest of the community gathered around that person.

The irony, of course, of modern society of affluence is that it does not bring psychological health. I read one study. that compared women in North America to women in Nigeria. Nigeria is a very poor and pretty violent society I've worked there, the women with the highest rates of depression were urban women in North America, which was the wealthiest group. And the women with lowest rates of depression were rural women in Nigeria.

So, again, how do you take advantage of the benefits of affluence and stability and peace? But somehow bind communities together. Well, just to be clear, we're not going to burn down the suburbs, ban the car, and have people live in sort of communal hunter-gatherer groups. Of course, we're not contemplating that. That is our evolutionary past. That's what we're wired for, but we're not going to be doing that in this society, barring a massive catastrophe that we wouldn't even want to talk about.

So it means we have to be sort of proactive. And now we happen to live in a community of, our largest community that we're in is 320 million. It's our nation. And even if you live in a neighborhood where you don't depend on your neighbors for anything, we all do depend on the unity of the nation for our lifestyle and ultimately for our safety and our survival.

In some ways, I think the fracturing that's happened in America has started not from the bottom. I don't think politics are a function of fracturing at the neighborhood level. I think It's the other way around. I think we are fracturing because we are watching what's happening at the top. And I think we have to take a proactive step.

and develop an ethos in Washington of unity. And there are ways to do that. I think national service, for example. And I don't mean the draft. I don't mean forced military service. I mean national service. for everyone would be one way to start making people think of the nation as a group project that we're all participating in and that's important to all of us.

You know, you talked about the brutal fighting in Bosnia, and when you went back 20 years later, people admitted that they missed the war. What were they actually missing? Yeah, my first war was Bosnia and Sarajevo. It was a modern city besieged by a modern army, and the people in that city were used for target practice for three years, and a fifth of them were killed or wounded. And that's the city that I was first exposed to war in. Terrible.

I mean, awful, awful situation that went on for years. And when I went back there just a few years ago, so it was a gap of about 20 years, What I found was that the people The people who had survived that, even civilians who were badly wounded, that they missed it, and they felt that during the war they had experienced their better self.

That during the war, they had all been more generous, more courageous, more concerned about others. People had lived communally. They'd lived in the basements of buildings, sleeping shoulder to shoulder, just like I did with soldiers. at Opioid Rastropo in Afghanistan. They shared food. They were thinking about other people as much as they were thinking about themselves. And then stability came and affluence came.

And they had the luxury of thinking individually. But what was lost was that incredible generosity of spirit that people exhibit when the chips are down. And there was some graffiti in Bosnia. that reads, things were better when they were bad. It's a profound irony of human existence. Yeah, nobody wants to experience the bad. No, no one wants to experience the bad. But this one woman who I...

interviewed, who had survived, you know, she almost lost her leg from a Serb tank round as a 17-year-old girl during the war. She kept her leg, she'd survived. And she was the one who told me, she was a journalist, she told me that she... and a lot of people missed the war. And she said that there's terrible partisan fighting in Bosnia right now, political bickering in Bosnia right now between the different ethnic groups.

And she said that a few years ago they had terrible flooding in Bosnia. And, of course, floods don't distinguish between white, black, Bosnian, Serb, Croat. No distinctions are made by floodwaters, right? And she said that the floodwaters... had brought all of the ethnic groups together and that the politicians who were using these divisions to augment their power

that they fell silent because they knew that if they tried to do that during this time of great cooperation between the ethnic groups, that they would be sidelined, and so they didn't dare say anything. And it makes me think of some things that are happening in this country.

Yes, people not saying anything when you know terrible things are happening. You write that the most profound question is, what should I risk dying for or what would I risk dying for? And for whom? Is that a question that people in our society ask themselves anymore? Well, the natural answer for that is Most people would say my family, right? Right, of course. I mean, that's just sort of an automatic. Of course, you would face danger, face death to protect your children, your spouse.

But for most of human history, we didn't just live in families. We lived in small communities, small mobile communities. that we depended on for our food, for our sustenance, our safety, our survival. The typical human living group was 40 or 50, 60 people. that you knew extremely well. Of course it's exactly like a platoon in combat, the exact same size of community. Because your safety and your place in the world flows from your inclusion in this small community.

That is the thing you would risk dying for. Because without them, you're dead anyway. Humans do not survive alone in nature. They don't survive psychologically. and they don't survive physically they die in every sense so the natural answer to what would you risk your life for who would you who would you die for the natural answer as well for my people, for my community. I depend on them, and they depend on me when the chips are down. And in some ways, the tragedy of modern life.

is that, I mean the blessing and the tragedy is that modern society is so stable and safe. that we don't need our immediate community around us to survive. Right. There's a great liberation in that. That's wonderful. but we lose that sort of core sense of who we are and what we would die for, it disappears. And when that disappears, some part of your identity disappears. You don't know quite who you are.

Well, isn't that what patriotism is supposed to be for? That I will die for my country. My country is my tribe. And yet, we are living in such divided times that it feels like there are multiple tribes within the tribe that is supposed to be the United States. Yeah, I mean, theoretically, it's very hard to die for an abstract notion.

like a nation, like patriotism. I mean, the soldiers that I was with, they were risking their lives all the time, but they weren't risking their lives for a concept like freedom or the flag. They were risking their lives for each other. They all depended. on each other's courage to survive this terribly difficult deployment. But yet if you ask them, they say, I'm fighting for my country.

You know, they would say I joined the military for my country. I'm actually fighting for my brothers on either side. That's actually what they would say. They joined, they became soldiers because they believe in this country, because their father fought in Vietnam, they wanted to know what combat was like, they're a proud American, whatever, all kinds of abstract and wonderful ideas.

But in the trenches, when you're getting shot at, when bullets are going over your head, and I've been in that situation, you are functioning in terms of those around you. I mean, that's your foremost concern. But what I would say is that there are plenty of, quote, patriots in this country who dodged the draft during Vietnam. I mean, saying you're a patriot and actually being willing to risk your life or even risk your affluence.

for this country are very very different things and i and i think the word patriot is too easily used too easily assumed to the point where it's actually abused in conversation Well, you also say that when you're fighting, when you're in that foxhole and you're fighting for your brother on the other side, No one asks or cares, your brother or your sister, what your gender is or what your political background is.

Yeah, I mean, it happened to be all men in the platoon that I was with, but that aside, I mean, no one cared who was a Republican or a Democrat or black or white or who was gay or who was gay or Christian or non-Christian. I mean, it just did not matter. What mattered was how you functioned. I mean, how you functioned as a soldier, whether you were willing.

to put the safety and the welfare of the group ahead of your own safety and welfare. If you were hiding behind a rock when people needed you, you were a bad citizen of that platoon. It didn't matter what your skin color was. And what I would like to say is that if only...

Our Congress, for example, could ignore those differences, if only our country could ignore those differences the way soldiers do. I mean, if we could do that, we would have a perfect country, and for some reason we cannot rise to that level of nobility.

Speaking of that, right now, as you say, we're living in a country that feels on many days at war with itself, where people speak about each other with such contempt. And you write in Tribe that contempt is especially corrosive to unity because it implies that one group doesn't deserve society's benefits. So what can we offer instead of contempt?

Well, you know, we live in a country that puts a high value on free speech, freedom of speech, freedom of expressions, and I think that must be preserved. So I would never want to legally limit what people can say. It's a very important principle. But that doesn't mean that action statements that undermine the safety and the unity of this nation should be condoned.

I was asked to testify at a hearing of the full House Committee on Veterans Affairs on PTSD. So I talked about PTSD a bit, but at the end I said, you know, The psychological welfare of soldiers depends on thinking that they're fighting a moral and just war for a nation that believes in itself. And there's a lot of reason to think our nation doesn't sort of believe in itself in a certain way.

I said when, you know, when I'm a Democrat, I said when some of my fellow Democrats say that Trump is not their president, they're undermining the concept of what a democracy is. He was voted in. He is your president. You know, get him voted out if you don't like him, but he is your president.

no matter how much you disagree with them. And I disagree with them a lot. But likewise, on the other side, imagine being a soldier on the front lines and hearing that a major presidential contender for the White House was accusing the current commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, of not even being a citizen of this country.

Well, Mr. Trump is free to say that. I mean, we have free speech in this country, but the GOP doesn't have to accept it. And imagine being a soldier and watching the GOP not immediately repudiate those absurd claims. That is a form of contempt. That is an action that undermines the understanding of the democracy that we enjoy and the wonderful country we live in. And so what I said to this committee was, you are charged with the welfare of veterans.

and in some ways you're also in a position to help the welfare of the entire country when politicians on either side say things that are antithetical to a kind of basic national unity, a basic respect for everyone in this country. When they do that, when they exploit those different... It's up to you to declare in a bipartisan way that that is not acceptable and to reject the sentiment.

And I don't care if it's the president, I don't care if it's a janitor in the White House, whatever. I mean, if it's a public figure saying something that erodes the national trust in our democracy in that way. you must reject it publicly in a bipartisan way. I think there are ways to...

take that kind of speech and put it in the little box it belongs in and repudiate it. And I think that will feel good as a nation. It will return confidence to everyone that we actually have something that's coherent and that loves itself.

Well, it reminds me what you're saying of that. Remember that poem about first they came for the socialists and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist. And then they came for the trade unions. And then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak out. And then they came for me and there was no one left to speak. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, when you talk,

about divisions like that, when you exploit divisions within the country you're hoping to lead. And listen, Democrats do it too sometimes.

When you do that, you're actually destroying the thing that you're hoping to be elected by. I mean, it's a really profound irony. And I think in the long run, when we accept politicians who demonize other people in order to get elected... we are racking up a huge sort of psychic debt in this nation that will eventually have to get paid in a sort of horrible way.

Well, don't you think we're in debt right now? I do. I mean, we're one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We also have one of the highest... I mean, psychic debt, yes. Yes. No, I mean, we're an amazing country. My father emigrated to this country. He was a war refugee, actually. And he emigrated to this country, and he loved this country. He died a few years ago.

But if you look at the sort of human metrics, right, the incredibly high suicide rate, depression rate, PTSD rate, incredibly high child abuse rate, poverty rate. opioid addiction, and finally mass shootings in the streets. I mean, every country has crazy people in it. Lots of countries have as many guns as we do and fewer controls on them. But we are the only country.

where people take military-level weapons and go down into the street or up into a building and kill as many of their fellow citizens as they can before they die. We're the only country that does that. That is a kind of spiritual... illness that um no amount of religion will fix it no amount of patriotism will fix it there's something else wrong and we have to figure Well, you say on page 116 that it may be worth considering whether middle class American life for all its material good fortune.

has lost some essential sense of unity that might otherwise discourage alienated men from turning apocalyptically violent. What do you mean by that?

Well, it's interesting that mass shootings, again, more or less unique to this country, at least in their consistency, have never happened in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods. Typically, they happen in middle class communities that are often very low crime, often quite religious, usually perpetrated by people who are completely middle class. And I'm just hypothesizing here, but it seems to be.

that being embedded in a close community buffers people from their psychological problems, even if that community is a poor community. And the problem with middle-class affluence is that people can suffer alone. from whatever their psychological demons are. And that might be one of the reasons that these killers come out of extremely comfortable.

You say on page 109 in Tribe that there are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one's way down to its toll on the human psyche. But the most dangerous loss may be to community. If the human race is under threat in some way that we don't yet understand, it will probably be at a community level that we either solve the problem or fail to. Do you think we will solve the problem the way we are headed?

I mean, there are so many problems that have to be solved. I mean, there is a rising risk of pandemic that will kill a lot of people, almost certainly at some point in the future. I'm pretty convinced by the data on climate change. Before we reach a crisis point with climate change, there's going to be a lot of forced migrations, which causes a lot of wars, a lot of poverty. I mean, the human race is facing a tough century.

But we're also an extraordinarily innovative and amazing species. And we've walked on the moon. We might cure cancer. I mean, there's almost nothing we can't do.

But, you know, I think if there is a... But with technology, you know, I know you speak about technology too, but with technology being offering all the gifts that it has to us and being able to be connected, I think there's this false sense of connection. That's not really real. I mean, your Facebook friends aren't really your friends. And I'm just curious as to do you think things will get better?

in terms of moving towards a more united community, or are they going to get worse? I think we're more and more disconnected. Even you just go out to a restaurant, you see people sitting at dinner, and everybody at the table is on their phone.

Oh, yeah, it's awful. I mean, you know, I just have a flip phone. I don't have a smartphone, partly because I've never had one, partly because I just don't want to look like the people that I see walking around on those things. I just don't want to look like a zombie, and everyone looks like a zombie.

So I've sort of resisted that. I don't think it makes people happier. And one of the things I'm worried about, I mean, this whole conversation about children on smartphones and what's it going to do to them.

But what about infants whose mothers are on smartphones and fathers are on smartphones? I mean, and I've watched infants in you know in babes in arms trying to get the attention of their mother or father who is completely checked out because they're texting someone and uh i mean i'm not a child psychologist but i don't think you have to be to understand that that must be incredibly frightening and unsettling to an infant to not have the attention of their parents.

Right. The mother's there but not there. Yeah, exactly. You're there but not there. Right. There but not there. I think it would actually be less traumatic to the child if the mother or father were actually in another room doing their thing. But the idea that you're in your parents' arms, but they don't seem to care, must be really, really disturbing to an infant. And we have no idea how those people will be as adults.

Wow, I never thought of it. Oh, I just had an aha. I never thought of that before. We don't know yet. Even though I've seen it. I've seen it. Oh, of course, yeah. And I think, I mean, to answer your question, I'm just still taking that in for a moment. How disconcerting that must be if you're an infant, you're in your mother's arms,

And she's there, but she's not really there because infants, as we know, they're literally just working on vibration. They're just working on... feeling the energy that's coming from that person as much as what they're saying because you don't even understand the language. Absolutely. I watched this one mother with a little boy who was trying to get her attention, and he was getting more and more annoying as she remained fixated on her phone.

And she started to get angry at him for wanting her attention. I mean, what kind of message does that send? Well, finally, this poor little boy started trying to figure out what was so fascinating about the phone. And he turned his attention from his mother to this little iPhone.

And I thought, oh, my God, there it is right there. That's the start. I mean, that kid's doomed. And now the iPhone is going to represent what he needs emotionally from his parent. I mean, it's going to be coming out of it. I think that's a big aha for everybody listening because I can't tell you how many times I've seen it and just thought, wow. I told this story once I was watching his mother.

On her phone, she was on one of those carriage rides with her children, and I watched them come down an entire block. and the kids were just looking bored and distracted, and the mother was on the phone the whole time, and I thought, she will go back to wherever they came from and say, oh, we took this wonderful carriage ride when she really wasn't there.

Absolutely. And there you have the fracturing, the social fracturing at its final stage. I mean, you have the political fracturing on a national level, which I think is horrifying and dangerous. You have people, many people living in single-family homes and communities where they do not depend on or really relate to their neighbors. So now you have the immediate community isn't functioning as a community. It's just a collection of homes. And then within the home...

You have all the children and the parents on different devices, sleeping in separate bedrooms, not relating to each other. I mean, that's a complete fracturing of the human bond from top to bottom. There's nothing in our evolutionary past that suggests that that's a workable idea and will turn out forever.

What is the real hunger of humanity right now, do you think? The real hunger of humanity is what it has always been, which is for safety and meaning, a sense of meaningful life. and connection to one's community. I mean, that is what has sustained humans for hundreds of thousands of years. And when you give those things to people, they become deeply content.

So we were talking a moment ago about the effects of technology. You know, we can't turn back the clock on technology and our splintered, distracted lives. It's all a part of us now, and our global economy is actually rooted in technology, and our culture rewards individualism over community. We can see that. So where do we go from here? What are the choices?

I mean, at the individual level, what I would say is that we want to be very careful of things that reduce our human connection to others and others in the room right facebook friends does not count you certainly don't want to be more focused on your facebook friends than the person sitting next to you on the couch

I mean, this is an act of will, right? I mean, you can't legislate this. You can't organize it. But I have a moment in the public right here right now. And what I would say to people who are listening is just be conscious. of prioritizing relations other than the ones immediately around you, because those are the most profoundly human relations of the people sitting next to you, in your family, in your community.

the people who live across the street. Try to prioritize those and not just disappear into your phone. I think at the communal level, I mean, I said that if there's a crisis in this society, it will be solved at the communal level. Look what happened in Houston during the flooding. It was at the community level.

just local people on boats saving other people. And I know, because I heard the testimony from them, nobody cared who was white, who was black, who was rich, who was poor. They were all Americans, they were all human beings, and they all were worth saving. And so... So that community idea is exceedingly important, and I don't think you need a flood to proactively try to reinforce it. And then finally, finally, I think we, the public, the citizenry, must insist.

that people in Washington change the tenor of their discourse. change the way they talk about each other, about their opponents and about the nation. And we start asking for some kind of basic level of respect and dignity from our politicians.

One of the things that resonated profoundly with me in Tribe was when this phrase where you talk about the loss of our shared public meaning. What is our shared public meaning? That was from my wonderful philosopher friend, Austin Dacey. And if I recall correctly, we were talking about a sort of interesting phenomenon in Israel.

there's a very low rate of PTSD. It's around 1% in the military. And In the United States, in American forces, it's around 25%, which is higher than even the percentage of soldiers in combat. So there's something gravely wrong in the system. And one of the reasons seemed to be that there was national service in Israel, that there's obligatory military service. so like it or not everyone is sort of part of this big project of running Israeli society.

And as a society, Israel is running itself quite well, and I think you can see that in the low rate of PTSD. And one of the things that that does, when you have everyone participating at least a little bit, in the sort of common good in the common project

you have this shared public meaning. And of course, any small-scale society, any hunter-gatherer group of the sort that we evolved in of 40, 50 people, scrabbling to survive in the kalahari desert or wherever of course they all have enormous shared public meaning because their survival depends on But the more modern the society, the more you have to proactively go out of your way to develop a shared public meeting so people feel like they are all part of the same thing.

I think one of the losses in America is that you can be an American and not sacrifice anything, not do anything for the country. You have to pay it. That's about it. But America does not actually ask its citizens for anything. It doesn't even require that you vote. In fact, it's making it increasingly hard.

And when you don't sacrifice for something, you don't value it. I mean, psychologists will tell you that. And so I think one of the things to create shared public meaning, one of the things the nation really should do, is asked for things from its citizens. When there's a war, ask them to pay a war. you know after 9 11 you know let's charge a little bit more for gasoline so we're not dependent on the saudis and beholden to that whole cartel over

What about national service? I mean, amazing if you, between 18 and 24, who had to spend a year or two working for this country in some capacity, you know, with a military option, it would be an amazing thing. And it would mix the country racially, culturally, economically. It would be an incredible thing. What an interesting idea that you have to offer public service, not just when you've committed some misdemeanor or crime, but that it's a part of our system.

Absolutely. I got that idea from my father. He was a war refugee twice over. He grew up in Spain. They fled the fascist forces under Franco when they overran Madrid. They went to Paris. His father was Jewish. So when the Nazis rolled into Paris, they had to leave again. They wound up in this country.

He was very, very lucky to get here, and we were lucky to get him. He was a physicist, an amazing man, and he was an implacable pacifist. And I grew up during Vietnam, and when I got my Selective Service card in the mail in 1980, I was 18 years old. you know every every adult i knew was against vietnam and so i got this thing in the mail and i showed it to my father

And I was like, you know, I thought the draft was over with. I'm not signing this thing. Like, I don't trust my government to send me to a moral necessary war. And he said, no, you're definitely signing. I was shocked because he's such a pacifist, right? And he said, you know, there's the graves of thousands of young Americans like you in Europe. They died liberating the world from fascism.

And you don't know that the next war will not be one that needs to be fought. You don't know that it won't be a just war. where a grave threat to the world has to be confronted. And he said, if your government sends you to a war that you think is not necessary, then it's your moral duty to protest. But you don't know that yet. And this is the part that really stuck with me. He said, you live in this amazing country and you don't owe your country nothing.

You owe it something, and you may owe it your life. So sign that card. And when he put it that way, I signed it with this enormous pride that I was actually part of something good, and then if it was used to bad ends, well, then I would protest it, and I would go to jail.

But I was part of something noble. And let's not wait for a war to allow young people to feel like they're part of something noble. Let's give them national service. I think it would do an incredible thing for those people and for this nation. Well, I've really enjoyed talking to you. I thank you for writing Tribe. It really opened up a new way of thinking about

who we are as individuals and as a collective community. So I thank you so much once again, Sebastian Junger, for writing and inspiring us. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you too. I'm Oprah Winfrey. you've been listening to Super Soul Conversation. You can follow Super Soul on Instagram. subscribe. Join me next. another Super Soul Conversation.