5 Feet of Fury

Steve Sailer on Sebastian Junger’s “The Tribe”

Sailer writes:

Similarly, Junger notes, humans living under seemingly catastrophic conditions, such as London during the Blitz, his father’s hometown of Dresden under RAF raids, and the besieged Sarajevo he visited as a young reporter, seem to enjoy better overall mental health than peacetime Americans.

The American plague of rampage shootings, Junger observes, a bizarre modern phenomenon that seemed to emerge about a half century ago, stopped for a couple of years after 9/11, perhaps due to greater feelings of solidarity. A “community of suffering, a brotherhood of pain” tends to incline people to treat their neighbors better than times of prosperity and status competition.