Joe Rogan & Sebastian Junger - Modern Society Makes People Depressed

hello freak [ __ ] so while I've been reading your book man tribe I really enjoy it it's really good and it's so it resonates it's very interesting I will into the first chapter I wanted to move in with the Native Americans that was it was such a I mean it was a one more interesting aspects of it was something that I didn't know about which was the European settlers that had been kidnapped and we're living with the Native Americans and then when they were rescued many of them wanted to go back yeah where they would go into hiding so they wouldn't have to be repatriated to colonial society they wanted to stay with their adopted tribes and there in there was also a lot of a lot of young white people particularly white men with young women too who basically absconded across the frontier into tribal society and they fled white society they didn't like it and and as Benjamin Franklin pointed out we have lots of callin colonial uncle young Colonials fleeing to the Indians and we have not one example of an Indian as they were called fleeing to what society yeah that was one of the more fascinating aspects of it I didn't anticipate that I thought that there would be a lot of Native Americans that would be like wow this is a way better look at all the food look at the houses and I mean they had plenty of food you know whatever there was success because I was very successful Society in fact they were they had better nutrition than the whites did a more varied diet and a much much more egalitarian society than colonial society that was also interesting about it when you were talking about the women that had moved in with the Native Americans and were expressing how much more freedom they experienced yeah I mean the Indian society native society wasn't crushed by Christian morality so you could divorce you could marry as a woman you could marry whom you wanted you could get divorced you could do whatever you wanted it was very very gallant Arian what they've shown is that the in societies where everyone is necessary for food production everyone more or less equal and in agrarian societies agricultural societies industrial society you have large segments of the population often women who are not involved in food production they're involved in reproduction and so their equality goes down Wow it's just it's almost like society as we've created over the last couple of hundred years is almost totally incompatible with with human genetics or with the human body or the the human spirit or whatever well if you look at I mean genetics are complicated I mean obviously on some level industrials modern societies very successful we have seven billion of us but as wealth goes up into society as modernity goes up in a society the suicide rate goes up the depression rate goes up schizophrenia goes up in urban environments they're not good for the human psyche we are designed we evolved to live in groups of 3040 people in a harsh environment totally into reliant on one another for survival that creates a huge amount of equality within a group and loyalty within a group that's what we are designed for genetically modern society allows the individual to be independent from the group which is in some ways a great liberation in other ways it can lead to a profound alienation and depression yeah it's a it's just a very confusing thing it seems for people to be amongst so many people but to be alone yeah I mean we're not wired to be confronted with strangers all day long and I live in New York City and I love New York City but all day long you you encounter strangers and you don't and you know recognize anybody so you can be alone in a crowd which is not something that human beings have experienced until quite recently in their history yeah that was I think one of the more disturbing parts about this idea that these people were kidnapped by the Native Americans and wanted to stay with them was that whatever that Native American life was like however they were living that just seemed to just resonate with them it seemed to it seemed to be what was right well we're wired to want to feel like we belong to a room Native American society was sexually quite relaxed I was quite a gala terian in a hunter-gatherer society you really can't accumulate wealth very well because he these societies are often nomadic so you can only accumulate as much wealth as you can carry which isn't much and in ultimately in societies like that as in the platoon in combat which is another part of my book obviously you're you're primarily value valued for your contribution to the group and that has been lost in modern society people are enormous ly self-serving capitalism basically instructs us to do so that's a whole other evolutionary imperative which is also important but in our society is way out of whack so we are wired to serve ourselves and we are wired to serve the group and in a healthy society those two those who are in a dynamic tension with each other and in ballots in modern society there really is no group to serve and it leads to a really profound sense of meaninglessness for a lot of people yeah I also found pretty fascinating that when you were really young you when you when you were working I think you said you were working construction so what it was I'm trying to remember the story you're about you were talking to oh you were just saying that you were talking to someone you work with and they were telling you to slow down because some of us some of us have to do this for a lifetime but ya forgot about that story yeah yeah I was on a construction crew it was a highway department of my town and you know a lot of these guys were kind of lifers and yeah our department not a particularly challenging job in a sense but you were on your feet all day long in the Sun or whatever and and so that you know I was a young guy and you know I wanted to sort of prove my mettle or whatever I was I was we were digging a trench and I was digging like crazy and and an older guy came up to me he's probably in the 60s he came up he and clapping on the shoulder he said son you want to slow down there you know some of us are going to have to do this job our whole lives and he knew I was a college kid he knew I wasn't going to write and I said just slow down you know yet no one needs to work this fast it's just it was a really interesting that you were longing for something you were saying like almost to go wrong so everybody had a band together where there was a hurricane or something and that that mundane life of just work and doing things you don't really want to do well I mean the irony about modern society is that it is removed hardship and danger from everyday life and it's in the face of hardship and danger that people come to understand their value to their society and theirs and they get their sense of meaning from that and so what you have is when you know during the Blitz in London for example 30,000 people were killed by German bombs it was a horror show over the course of six months it was ghastly but people were sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder in the tube stations and putting out fires with bucket brigades and digging people out of rubble and and they were acting as a unified society and the English government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties because as a civilian population getting bombed to bits and the opposite happened admissions to psych wards went down during the Blitz and then back up after the bombing stop and and then afterwards there was an enormous nostalgia in England for the Blitz for those days as tragic as they were because English society felt people felt like they were together later I was I went back to Sarajevo where I'd been during the siege of Sarajevo in the early 90s and civilians would tell me you know this is 20 years later 20 years after the war he would say you know a lot of us missed the war because we were better people back then we took care of each other I've talked about that with September 11th I went to New York City about I guess it was maybe six months after September 11th and I was there a couple times and the the before September 11th and after September 11th there was a very clear difference in the way people were behaving people seemed to be more more friendly more open they were really appreciative of first responders I was there once in a friend of mine she fainted and so they called the fire department came to check her out and and when the firemen showed up man you would think [ __ ] superhero showed up it was amazing everybody was so happy to see him and it was in stark contrast to the way people used to behave and treat each other and it was directly because of having experienced this horrific men well adversity produces pro-social behaviors in people they may adversity makes people act well the lack of adversity safety and comfort allow people to excel fish Li so after 9/11 the suicide rate went down in New York the violent crime rate went down in New York Vietnam vets reported that their PTSD symptoms went down after 9/11 what happens is people suddenly feel that they're needed by their society by their people and if you feel needed you are able to ignore your own personal troubles as one someone in England and an official and English official said during the Blitz in London he said it's amazing we have the chronic neurotics of peace time driving ambulances and if you think about it in terms of evolution if adversity in danger produced bad human behaviors we wouldn't be here today another way to say that is we are the descendants of the individuals hundred thousand years ago who acted well in a crisis the people that acted badly to crisis and just took care of themselves and didn't take care of their people their group those those peeps died out it's people as groups that encourage a altruism of self-sacrifice of individuals for the group during a crisis those groups survive that DNA gets passed on to us you

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 553,216

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, MMA, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, JRE, clip, favorite, best of, Joe Rogan, Sebastian Junger, depression

Id: R04K0jLMZ1Y

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2017