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Jonathan Storment

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Tribe: Freedom’s Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be

Tribe: Freedom’s Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be

Last updated on: September 27, 2016 at 5:05 am by Jonathan Storment

Tribe: Freedom’s Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be 2016-09-25T22:13:48-05:00 Jonathan Storment

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Tribe FNA The best scene in any movie to me, is hands down, the ending of It’s a Wonderful Life. I know it’s sappy and sentimental and overdone, but I still watch the movie every year, and mainly for the last five minutes.

To me it’s a vision of what it would look like to live a sacrificial life for the community around you, and what happens when that community does the same. When I watch it, I ache for that kind of life.

The problem comes when I try to live that kind of life.

So the past few days, I’ve been interacting with Sebastian Junger’s great new book Tribes.

I first heard about this book when the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an article based on it called “The Great Affluence Fallacy”

Brooks said Junger’s book gave him this haunting idea that maybe our entire culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.

People in developed civilization are 8x more likely to suffer depression than people living in poor nations. Tribal culture was communal, people did everything together, and along with that there was a real loss of freedom, but as I wrote yesterday, when colonialist moved to America they faced an epidemic of people from privileged backgrounds running away from the technologically sophisticated colony to live among and as a Native American.

When faced with the choice between living comfortably or living communally people chose the latter.

After reading Tribe, David Brooks writes in his column:

If colonial culture was relatively atomized, imagine American culture of today. As we’ve gotten richer, we’ve used wealth to buy space: bigger homes, bigger yards, separate bedrooms, private cars, autonomous lifestyles. Each individual choice makes sense, but the overall atomizing trajectory sometimes seems to backfire…Every generation faces the challenge of how to reconcile freedom and community — “On the Road” versus “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But I’m not sure any generation has faced it as acutely as millennials.

In the great American tradition, millennials would like to have their cake and eat it, too. A few years ago, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis came out with a song called “Can’t Hold Us,” which contained the couplet: “We came here to live life like nobody was watching/I got my city right behind me, if I fall, they got me.” In the first line they want complete autonomy; in the second, complete community.

But, of course, you can’t really have both in pure form.

In my experience, Brooks is spot on.

I’m a millennial, I want to have deep connections and community…when I want them.

I want to have friends that I can rely on, as long as they don’t need to rely too much on me.

I want the best of both worlds but find myself winding up with a tepid combination of both. A life with lots of acquaintances but almost no true friends, a life of crowds but not really community.

So back to It’s a Wonderful Life.

Brooks uses this analogy in tension with Jack Keourac’s “On the Road” A memoir of rugged individualism. Keourac’s story was the prototype of all the road/journey/freedom stories that have saturated the cultural fabric of the West. It’s a story about the wind in your hair and laying down responsibilities to society so that you can find yourself and lose the weight of other people’s expectations.

Both of these stories are embedded in our cultural imagination, but which one is the best way to live? Brooks ends hopefully:

Maybe we’re on the cusp of some great cracking. Instead of just paying lip service to community while living for autonomy, I get the sense a lot of people are actually about to make the break and immerse themselves in demanding local community movements. It wouldn’t surprise me if the big change in the coming decades were this: an end to the apotheosis of freedom…

But for that to happen, we have to realize that freedom’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

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