Houston Southard

Freedom - Sebastian Junger

Freedom is a mirage: the closer you get, the closer you are to danger and the more you realize you've just traded obeying your own rules instead of the government’s. Outrunning the law, rail patrol, and land owners, Junger experiences freedom on a 400 mile trek along east coast railways and thinks about what it means to be free.

Civilizations necessitate organized labor forces. The stronger the society, the more need for that obedience. Patriots arouse themselves on our status as the freest place on earth in the same breath they bitch about that freedom being stripped by government oversight, but that idea that we can enjoy the benefits of a society like that while giving nothing back is molded in the mind of those who don't understand sacrifice.

Granted, it's hard to feel loyalty to a society so huge it hardly even knows we’re here and yet makes sure we're completely dependent on it. The problem with freedom is that groups that are organized enough to defend themselves are organized enough to oppress themselves. Soldiers are indoctrinated gatekeepers of freedom. Belonging to a group dedicated to its own survival usually means pledging your life to it, and that pledge feels so wildly liberating its indoctrinates forget it's the most oppressive form of government around.

The supply chain utopia of modern democracy has replaced survival tasks for subservient ones. To be truly free would mean being able to refine your own gas, perform your own surgery, make your own ball bearings, grind your own eyeglass lenses, and manufacture your own electronics from scratch.

This book, short as it is, also covers the selective adaptivity of male aggression, the conception of natural law, our unconscious ability to make thin-slice judgments on brief facial expressions, the economics of warcraft, the physiology of soldiers, why insurgents historically dominate larger enemy armies, christianity's quid pro quo allying with military campaigns in the middle ages, the measure of societal income distribution (gini coefficient), why America's wealth gap has doubled in the last 30 years and the thorough genocide of native americans to connect cities via our 140k miles of railroad.