1960s study of !Kung people of Kalahari Desert: they worked 12 hours per week, worked in cooperative jobs: "The members move out each day to hunt and gather, and return in the evening to pool the collected foods in such a way that every person present receives an equitable share." The Kalahari is a harsh environment. Anthropologists believe that the !Kung live much like our hominid ancestors lived for more than one million years before agricultural:
Early humans probably lived in nomadic bands of around 50 people, much like the !Kung. They would have experienced high levels of accidental injuries and deaths. They would have countered domineering behavior by senior males by forming coalitions within the group. They would have been utterly intolerant of hoarding or selfishness. They would have occasionally endured episodes of hunger, violence, and hardship. They would have practiced extremely close and involved childcare. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others. They would have almost never been alone.
Agriculture and then industry changed human life:
The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day -- or an entire life -- mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.
This is overwhelmingly hard on us. Modern society "is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down." There is very little depression-based suicide in tribal societies, whereas in many modern societies the suicide rate is as high as 25 cases per 100,000 people. The WHO reports that people in wealthy countries suffer depression eight times the rate as they do in poor countries. Explanation:
[P]oor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses... but it's much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence. A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Financial independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide.
2015 George Washington Law Review article found that more successful lawyers were not happier; in fact, "public defenders, who have far lower status than corporate lawyers, seem to lead significantly happier lives." Mexicans born in American are wealthier but more likely to suffer from depression than Mexicans born in Mexico. The Amish have lower rates of depression.
Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time (equivalent to other primates), whereas as rate for American mothers in 1970s was 16 percent. In 1980s 85 percent of American young children slept alone, which does not happen among tribal societies. Primates almost never leave infants alone for fear of predators. See Harry Harlow study in which baby rhesus monkeys separated from mothers and given choice of surrogate made of terry cloth or surrogate made of wire mesh that had a nipple for milk; the babies took the milk but then clung to terry cloth surrogate.
In 2007 anthropologist Christopher Boehm published analysis of 154 foraging societies believed to be like our ancestral past: no major wealth disparities, and societies were fairly egalitarian, as "there is always a low tolerance by a group's mature males for one of their number dominating, bossing, or denigrating the others." Hunting large game requires "cooperative band-level sharing of meat." Group approval triggers high levels of "dopamine and other pleasurable hormones [e.g., oxytocin] in their blood." "Subsistence-level hunters aren't necessarily more moral than other people; they just can't get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny" (e.g., people on welfare can cheat without friends knowing, CEOs can cheat without and get away with it,behavior which would be published in tribal society).
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Being in war gives people more purpose, become more involved with their community, and in turn they have improved mental health. London Blitz as an example. The air raids happened daily for a long time, but they failed to cause the anticipated mass hysteria. The Allies then began fire-bombing German cities. Studies found that the cities that the Allies bombed the most (e.g., Dresden) were the cities with the most defiant citizens and the cities with the highest morale.
Charles Fritz found that disasters tend to strengthen social bonds. Men more likely to risk their lives for others. Women more likely to display moral courage (e.g., take positions on social and moral issues). "What catastrophes seem to do -- sometimes in the span of a few minutes -- is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss."
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"[I]n addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness than can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them."
PTSD. War and its aftermath tougher on modern soldiers because war is away from home. "Certainly, some Iroquois warriors must have been traumatized by the warfare they were engaged in -- much of it was conducted at close quarters with clubs and hatchets -- but they didn't have to contain that trauma within themselves. The entire society was undergoing wartime trauma, so it was a collective experience -- and therefore an easier one."
Almost everyone exposed to trauma has short-term PTSD. Almost every rape survivors has short-term PTSD, but they have much faster recovery rates than soldiers. Why? Because "the trauma of combat is interwoven with other, positive experiences that become difficult to separate from the harm." Dr. Rachel Yyehuda: "[R]ape victims don't have this idea that some aspects of their experience are worth retaining. For most people in combat, their experiences range from the best of times to the worst o times. It's the most important thing someone has ever done -- especially since these people are so young when they go in -- and it's probably the first time they've ever been free, completely, of societal constraints."
Soldiers much more likely to get chronic PTSD if they had bad experiences before going into war -- e.g., if they already have psychological issues, suffered abuse as children, have family member with mental health problems. No real relationship between PTSD and suicide. Many people with history of sexual abuse go into voluntary military service (this can be a way for them to escape from home).
During Yom Kippur War, "rear-base troops had psychological breakdowns at three times the rate of elite frontline troops, relative to the casualties they suffered. (In other words, rear-base troops had fairly light casulaties but suffered a disproportionately high level of psychiatric breakdowns.) Similarly, more than 80 percent of psychiatric casualties in the US Army's VII Corps came from support units that took almost no incoming fire during the air campaign of he first Gulf War... The discrepancy might be due to the fact that intensive training and danger create what is known as unit cohesion -- strong emotional bonds within the company or the platoon -- and high unit cohesion is correlated with lower rates of psychiatric breakdown."
"Adversity often leads people to depend more on one another, and that closeness can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to. After World War II, many Londoners claimed to miss the exciting and perilous days of the Blitz... What people miss presumably isn't danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender. There are obvious stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation, so during disasters there is a net gain in well-being... A modern soldier returning from combat -- or a survivor of Sarajevo -- goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good. Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively."
One of the most noticeable things about life in the military, even in support units, is that you are almost never alone. Day after day, month after month, you are close enough to speak to, if not touch, a dozen or more people. When I was with American soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, we slept ten to a hut in bunks that were only a few feet apart. I could touch three other men with my outstretched hand from where I lay. They snored, they talked, they got up in the middle of the night to use the piss tubs, but we always felt safe because we were in a group. The outpost was attacked dozens of times, yet I slept better surrounded by those noisy, snoring men than I ever did camping alone in the woods of New England.
That kind of group sleeping has been the norm throughout human history and is still commonplace in most of the world. Northern European societies are among the few where people sleep alone or with a partner in a private room, and that may have significant implications for mental health in general and for PTSD in particular. Virtually all mammals seem to benefit from companionship; even lab rats recover more quickly from trauma if they are caged with other rats rather than alone. In humans, lack of social support has been found to be twice as reliable at predicting PTSD as the severity of the trauma itself.
Three ways that American society hurts returning soldiers. (1) We're an individualistic society. (2) We treat victims as victims (even though PTSD can be cured), thus excusing them from having to fully function in society. (3) Veterans don't feel that they're "as necessary and productive in society as they were on the battlefield."
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"There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one's way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous loss may be to community. If the human race is under threat in some way that we don't yet understand, it will probably be at a community level that we either solve the problem or fail to. If the future of the planet depends on, say, rationing water, communities of neighbors will be able to enforce new rules far more effectively than even local government. It's how we evolved to exist, and it obviously works."
Veterans Day 2015 in Marblehead, Massachusetts -- goal was to just show ups and hear troops share their stories, which varied greatly.
Today veterans come home to find a country "that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary." Our society is at war with itself, e.g., liberals fighting conservatives. Conservatives are right to be concerned about high taxes supporting freeloaders, but liberals are right to embrace a culture that cares for the vulnerable. Our evolutionary ancestors held both values.
How to we fix our society? We have to stop underscoring the areas in which we're different and instead underscore our shared humanity.
The economic crisis caused numerous deaths. When the unemployment rate goes up, so does the suicide rate. With the recent economic crisis, the suicide rate increased by 5 percent, resulting in 5,000 deaths.
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