Margaret

“Anthropologists like Kohrt, Hoffman, and Abramowitz have identified three factors that seem to crucially affect a combatant's transition back into civilian life. The United States seems to rank low on all three. First, cohesive and egalitarian tribal societies do a very good job at mitigating effects of trauma, but by their very nature, many modern societies are exactly the opposite: hierarchical and alienating. America's great wealth, although a blessing in many ways, has allowed for the growth of an individualistic society that suffers high rates of depression and anxiety. Both are correlated with chronic PTSD.
Secondly, ex-combatants shouldn't be seen -or be encouraged to see themselves - as victims... Lifelong disability payments for a disorder like PTSD, which is both treatable and usually not chronic, risks turning veterans into a victim class that is entirely dependent on the government for their livelihood... Perhaps most important, veterans need to feel that they're just as necessary and productive back in society as they were on the battlefield... Recent studies of something called 'social resilience' have identified resource sharing and egalitarian wealth distribution as major components of a society's ability to recover from hardship. And societies that rank high on social resilience...provide soldiers with a significantly stronger buffer against PTSD than low-resilience societies. In fact, social resilience is an even better predictor of trauma recovery than the level of resilience of the person himself.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“To make matters worse, politicians occasionally accuse rivals of deliberately trying to harm their own country—a charge so destructive to group unity that most past societies would probably have just punished it as a form of treason.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn’t willing to make sacrifices for you.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“If there's an image of the apocalypse, I thought, it might be a man in a business suit building a fire in the courtyard of an abandoned high rise.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging