Freedom – by Sebastian Junger
Recommendation: 7/10. Date read: 6/25/21.
You can’t go wrong with any of Junger’s books. In Freedom he examines how the ideal of freedom manifests in our lives and throughout human history. As well as the tension it creates as we cling to the illusion of self-sufficiency in a modern world where it’s nearly impossible to achieve. Junger weaves his own story, contemplating these ideas while spending a year walking railroad lines in the Eastern United States, à la Thoreau in Walden. Worth the read, he’s one of the most powerfully succinct writers out there.
See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.
My Notes:
Self-sufficiency:
“If subsistence-level survival were the standard for absolute freedom, the word would mean nothing because virtually no one could pass that test. People love to believe they’re free, though, which is hard to achieve in a society that has outsourced virtually all of the tasks needed for survival. Few people grow their own food or build their own homes, and no one—literally no one—refines their own gasoline, performs their own surgery, makes their own ball bearings, grinds their own eyeglass lenses, or manufacturers their own electronics from scratch.” SJ
“Fit people obviously outperform unfit ones, but their minds are also better adapted to stress.” SJ
Detachment:
“Spanish horseman strapped into armor and backed by cannon might successfully siege a Pueblo town, but they couldn’t hope to run down small bands of Apache in the mountains. It was the very poverty of the Apache—nothing to defend and almost nothing to carry—that made them hard to subdue, and therefore free.” SJ
Sacrifice:
“In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all—rationing water during a drought, for example—are forms of government tyranny.” SJ
“The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.” SJ
“Like warfare, building a railroad is crushingly monotonous when it isn’t absolutely deadly.” SJ