CALLING HOME FROM MARS

BECAUSE MY FATHER GREW UP IN EUROPE, I WENT there a lot when I was young, first with my family and then on my own. In my early twenties I wound up in Pamplona, Spain, for the festival of San Fermin, the infamous running of the bulls. One night I found myself in a small bar with sawdust on the floor talking to two young Spaniards who were so drunk they could barely stand up. One wore a white T-shirt and was drinking red wine out of a leather bota. Every time he squirted wine into his mouth, most of it went all over his shirt. He was also wearing a plastic Viking helmet with fake gemstones around the rim that he seemed to have completely forgotten about, though it was impossible to ignore if you were talking to him. He was drinking and grinning like a fool and had his arm around his buddy, and everything was going fine until three Moroccan guys walked into the bar. They were as drunk and happy as everyone else until the biggest one spotted the Viking helmet on my friend’s head. He strode right up and grabbed it. “That helmet’s mine!” he shouted in French. “You stole it!”

I translated because I was the only person who spoke both French and Spanish. My friend managed to get his hands on the helmet and shouted, “That’s not true, the helmet’s mine!” And so it began. Suddenly all five men had their hands on the helmet; they weren’t throwing punches because no one wanted to let go, but it was clearly headed that way. The men lurched around the room grunting in two languages and gradually deforming the helmet until my friend yelled, “Para! Para! Para!” and everyone stopped. “It’s starting to rip!” my friend said, pointing to the helmet.

They were destroying the thing they all wanted, but no one would let go. It got very quiet. They all stared at each other. Finally my friend turned to me and asked, in his most elegant and formulaic Spanish, if I would take his place at the helmet and defend it with the full honor of my family and my name. I was still calculating how long you have to know someone before you have to back them up in a bar fight—hours? Minutes?—but I told him that I would. My friend withdrew his hand from the helmet and replaced it with mine. Now I was in the ring facing three drunk Moroccans, and my friend was over at the bar conferring with the bartender. It had all the hushed formality of a sidebar conference at a criminal trial.

After a moment the bartender straightened up and pulled a screw-top jug of red wine out from under the bar and handed it to my friend. Complete silence now, and a kind of theatrical slowness to things, as if we were all acting roles that had been scripted long ago. My friend approached the absurd little circle and filled the helmet with red wine. I remember it reaching my fingertips and staining them red. Then with great fanfare the Spaniard placed one hand under the helmet and told everyone to let go. We all looked at each other and one by one released our grip. Now my friend stood with the helmet in his upturned hand, red wine slopping over the brim. He turned and addressed the most aggressive of his adversaries: “You are a guest in my country,” he said, as I translated. “So you drink first.”

He offered the helmet to the Moroccan, who accepted it and drank from the brim, wine running down his neck, and then passed it to his left. Each man drank and passed the helmet clockwise, and when it came to me, I did the same. The helmet went around and around, and when it was empty it got filled up with more red wine. The other patrons started to go back to their drinking and their conversations, and eventually the former combatants skipped the helmet and started passing around the jug itself. Pretty soon the jug was empty and another one was sent for, and that was passed around as well. I got drawn into other conversations and an hour or so later I looked over to see all five men standing in a line with their arms around each other, singing songs in their two languages. The helmet was forgotten under a table at their feet.

What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of male conflict and male closeness can be. It’s almost as if they are two facets of the same quality; just change a few details and instead of heading toward collision, the men head toward unity. There seemed to be a great human potential out there, organized around the idea of belonging, and the trick was to convince people that their interests had more in common than they had in conflict. I once asked a combat vet if he’d rather have an enemy in his life or another close friend. He looked at me like I was crazy.

“Oh, an enemy, a hundred percent,” he said. “Not even close. I already got a lot of friends.” He thought about it a little longer. “Anyway, all my best friends I’ve gotten into fights with—knock-down, drag-out fights. Granted we were always drunk when it happened, but think about that.”

He shook his head as if even he couldn’t believe it.

There’s no use arguing that modern society isn’t a kind of paradise. The vast majority of us don’t, personally, have to grow or kill our own food, build our own dwellings, or defend ourselves from wild animals and enemies. In one day we can travel a thousand miles by pushing our foot down on a gas pedal or around the world by booking a seat on an airplane. When we are in pain we have narcotics that dull it out of existence, and when we are depressed we have pills that change the chemistry of our brains. We understand an enormous amount about the universe, from subatomic particles to our own bodies to galaxy clusters, and we use that knowledge to make life even better and easier for ourselves. The poorest people in modern society enjoy a level of physical comfort that was unimaginable a thousand years ago, and the wealthiest people literally live the way gods were imagined to have.

And yet.

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.

Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world. The earliest and most basic definition of community—of tribe—would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend. A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly in these ways isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own. Soldiers experience this tribal way of thinking at war, but when they come home they realize that the tribe they were actually fighting for wasn’t their country, it was their unit. It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn’t willing to make sacrifices for you. That is the position American soldiers have been in for the past decade and a half.

There was a period during the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 when a bumper sticker that read NO BLOOD FOR OIL started appearing on American cars. Implicit in the slogan was the assumption that the Iraq War was over oil, but the central irony of putting such a message on a machine that runs on oil seemed lost on most people. There is virtually no source of oil that does not incur enormous damage to either the local population or the environment, and driving a car means that you’re unavoidably contributing to that damage. I was deeply opposed to the Iraq War for other reasons. But the antiwar rhetoric around the topic of oil by people who continued to use it to fuel their cars betrayed a larger hypocrisy that extended across the political spectrum. The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it’s disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.

As great a sacrifice as soldiers make, American workers arguably make a greater one. Far more Americans lose their lives every year doing dangerous jobs than died during the entire Afghan War. In 2014, for example, 4,679 workers lost their lives on the job. More than 90 percent of those deaths were of young men working in industries that have a mortality rate equivalent to most units in the US military. Jobs that are directly observable to the public, like construction, tend to be less respected and less well paid than jobs that happen behind closed doors, like real estate or finance. And yet it is exactly these jobs that provide society’s immediate physical needs. Construction workers are more important to everyday life than stockbrokers and yet are far lower down the social and financial ladder.

This fundamental lack of connectedness allows people to act in trivial but incredibly selfish ways. Rachel Yehuda pointed to littering as the perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in society. “It’s a horrible thing to see because it sort of encapsulates this idea that you’re in it alone, that there isn’t a shared ethos of trying to protect something shared,” she told me. “It’s the embodiment of every man for himself. It’s the opposite of the military.”

In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don’t see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you’re walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors—or somebody else’s friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially. My friend Ellis was once asked by a troubled young boy whether there was any compelling reason for him not to pull the legs off a spider. Ellis said that there was.

“Well, spiders don’t feel any pain,” the boy retorted.

“It’s not the spider I’m worried about,” Ellis said.

The ultimate act of disaffiliation isn’t littering or fraud, of course, but violence against your own people. When the Navajo Nation—the Diné, in their language—were rounded up and confined to a reservation in the 1860s, a terrifying phenomenon became more prominent in their culture. The warrior skills that had protected the Diné for thousands of years were no longer relevant in this dismal new era, and people worried that those same skills would now be turned inward, against society. That strengthened their belief in what were known as skinwalkers, or yee naaldlooshii.

Skinwalkers were almost always male and wore the pelt of a sacred animal so that they could subvert that animal’s powers to kill people in the community. They could travel impossibly fast across the desert and their eyes glowed like coals and they could supposedly paralyze you with a single look. They were thought to attack remote homesteads at night and kill people and sometimes eat their bodies. People were still scared of skinwalkers when I lived on the Navajo Reservation in 1983, and frankly, by the time I left, I was too.

Virtually every culture in the world has its version of the skinwalker myth. In Europe, for example, they are called werewolves (literally “man-wolf” in Old English). The myth addresses a fundamental fear in human society: that you can defend against external enemies but still remain vulnerable to one lone madman in your midst. Anglo-American culture doesn’t recognize the skinwalker threat but has its own version. Starting in the early 1980s, the frequency of rampage shootings in the United States began to rise more and more rapidly until it doubled around 2006. Rampages are usually defined as attacks where people are randomly targeted and four or more are killed in one place, usually shot to death by a lone gunman. As such, those crimes conform almost exactly to the kind of threat that the Navajo seemed most to fear on the reservation: murder and mayhem committed by an individual who has rejected all social bonds and attacks people at their most vulnerable and unprepared. For modern society, that would mean not in their log hogans but in movie theaters, schools, shopping malls, places of worship, or simply walking down the street.

Seen in that light, it’s revealing to look at the kinds of communities where those crimes usually occur. A rampage shooting has never happened in an urban ghetto, for example; in fact, indiscriminate attacks at schools almost always occur in otherwise safe, predominantly white towns. Around half of rampage killings happen in affluent or upper-middle-class communities, and the rest tend to happen in rural towns that are majority-white, Christian, and low-crime. Nearly 600 people have been killed by rampage shooters since the 1980s. Almost by definition, rampage killers are deeply disturbed sociopaths, but that just begs the question why sociopaths in high-crime urban neighborhoods don’t turn their guns on other people the way they do in more affluent communities.

Gang shootings—as indiscriminate as they often are—still don’t have the nihilistic intent of rampages. Rather, they are rooted in an exceedingly strong sense of group loyalty and revenge, and bystanders sometimes get killed in the process. The first time that the United States suffered a wave of rampage shootings was during the 1930s, when society had been severely stressed and fractured by the Great Depression. Profoundly disturbed, violent individuals might not have felt inhibited by the social bonds that restrained previous generations of potential killers. Rampage killings dropped significantly during World War II, then rose again in the 1980s and have been rising ever since. It may be worth considering whether middle-class American life—for all its material good fortune—has lost some essential sense of unity that might otherwise discourage alienated men from turning apocalyptically violent.

The last time the United States experienced that kind of unity was—briefly—after the terrorist attacks of September 11. There were no rampage shootings for the next two years. The effect was particularly pronounced in New York City, where rates of violent crime, suicide, and psychiatric disturbances dropped immediately. In many countries, antisocial behavior is known to decline during wartime. New York’s suicide rate dropped by around 20 percent in the six months following the attacks, the murder rate dropped by 40 percent, and pharmacists saw no increase in the number of first-time patients filling prescriptions for antianxiety and antidepressant medication. Furthermore, veterans who were being treated for PTSD at the VA experienced a significant drop in their symptoms in the months after the September 11 attacks.

One way to determine what is missing in day-to-day American life may be to examine what behaviors spontaneously arise when that life is disrupted.

I talked to my mom only one time from Mars,” a Vietnam vet named Gregory Gomez told me about the physical and spiritual distance between his home and the war zone. Gomez is an Apache Indian who grew up in West Texas. Gomez says his grandfather was arrested and executed by Texas Rangers in 1915 because they wanted his land; they strung him from a tree limb, cut his genitals off, and stuffed them in his mouth. Consequently, Gomez says he felt no allegiance to the US government, but he volunteered for service in Vietnam anyway.

“Most of us Indian guys who went to Vietnam went because we were warriors,” Gomez told me. “I did not fight for this country. I fought for Mother Earth. I wanted to experience combat. I wanted to see how I’d do.”

Gomez was in a Marine Force Recon unit, one of the most elite designations in the US military. He was part of a four-man team that would insert by helicopter into the jungle north of the DMZ for weeks at a time. They had no medic and no air support, and Gomez said that they didn’t dare eat C rations because they were afraid their body odor would give them away at close quarters. They ate Vietnamese food and watched enemy soldiers pass just yards away in the dense jungle. “Everyone who has lived through something like that has lived through trauma, and you can never go back,” he told me. “You are seventeen or eighteen or nineteen and you just hit that wall. You become very old men.”

American Indians, proportionally, provide more soldiers to America’s wars than any other demographic group in the country. They are also the product of an ancient culture of warfare that takes great pains to protect the warrior from society, and vice versa. Although those traditions have obviously broken down since the end of the Indian Wars, there may be something to be learned from the principles upon which they stand. When Gomez came home to West Texas he essentially went into hiding for more than a decade. He didn’t drink and he lived a normal life, except that occasionally he’d go to the corner store to get a soda and would wind up in Oklahoma City or East Texas without any idea how he got there.

He finally started seeing a therapist at the VA as well as undergoing traditional Indian rituals. It was a combination that seemed to work: “We do a lot of sweat lodge ceremonies as part of a cleaning and purification,” he told me. “The vision quest ceremony is normally a four-day ceremony, and you do fasting so your system is pretty cleaned out. You’re detoxified, as it were. You’re pretty high.”

In the 1980s Gomez underwent an extremely painful ceremony called the Sun Dance—a traditional Lakotah ceremony that was banned for many years by the US government. It was finally made legal again in 1934. At the start of the ceremony, dancers have wooden skewers driven through the skin of their chests. Leather thongs are tied to the skewers and then attached to a tall pole at the center of the dance ground. To a steady drumbeat, the dancers shuffle in a circle and lean back on the thongs until, after many hours, the skewers finally tear free.

“I dance back and I throw my arms and yell and I can see the ropes and the piercing sticks like in slow motion, flying from my chest towards the grandfather tree,” Gomez told me about the experience. “And I had this incredible feeling of euphoria and strength, like I could do anything. That’s when the healing takes place. That’s when life changes take place.”

American tribes varied widely in their cultures and economies and so had different relationships to war. The nomadic horse cultures of the Northern Plains, such as the Lakotah and the Cheyenne, considered war to be a chance for young men to prove their honor and courage. The Apache avoided face-to-face combat in favor of raiding expeditions that relied on stealth and endurance. The sedentary Papago, whose economy was based largely on agriculture, considered war to be a form of insanity. Men who were forced into combat by attacks from other tribes had to undergo a sixteen-day purification ritual before they could reenter society. The entire community participated in these rituals because every person in the tribe was assumed to have been affected by the war. After the ceremony, the combatants were viewed as superior to their uninitiated peers because—as loathsome and crazy as war was—it was still thought to impart wisdom that nothing else could.

Following both world wars, Indian veterans turned to traditional ceremonies on their reservations to ease the transition to civilian life. The Kiowa Gourd Dance, in particular, was popularized across tribal boundaries in an attempt to heal the psychic wounds of war. During the 1980s, the Vietnam Era Veterans Inter-Tribal Association began holding a yearly summer powwow in Oklahoma that was open to veterans of all races. When they performed the Gourd Dance, captured Vietcong flags were dragged behind them in the same dirt their predecessors had dragged American flags in during the Indian Wars. “Warriors had to be recognized and were charged with the responsibility to take care of others, to practice self-discipline, and to provide leadership,” one anthropologist observed about these ceremonies. “The social contract was assumed now as wichasha yatapika (‘man’ plus ‘they praise’).”

Contemporary America is a secular society that obviously can’t just borrow from Indian culture to heal its own psychic wounds. But the spirit of community healing and connection that forms the basis of these ceremonies is one that a modern society might draw on. In all cultures, ceremonies are designed to communicate the experience of one group of people to the wider community. When people bury loved ones, when they wed, when they graduate from college, the respective ceremonies communicate something essential to the people who are watching. The Gourd Dance allowed warriors to recount and act out their battlefield exploits to the people they were protecting. If contemporary America doesn’t develop ways to publicly confront the emotional consequences of war, those consequences will continue to burn a hole through the vets themselves.

I once took part in a panel discussion about war with the author Karl Marlantes. Karl is a good friend of mine, and I know that he draws an enormous amount of pride from having led a Marine platoon through some of the heaviest combat of the Vietnam War. At one point a very agitated man stood up and started screaming that he was a Vietnam vet as well, and that Karl and I didn’t understand the first thing about war—it was all obscene, down to its smallest detail. Then he stormed out.

“That,” Karl finally said into the stunned silence, “is one of the things that’s going to happen if you truly let vets speak their mind about the war.”

It’s entirely possible that that gentleman saw little or no combat and simply harbors strong feelings about war. Or he might have done three tours in the heaviest combat there was and remains enormously affected by it. Either way, he is clearly in need of some way to vent his feelings to the wider community. Modern society rarely gives veterans—gives anyone—opportunities to do that. Fortunately, freedom of speech means that, among other things, veterans are entitled to stand on street corners with bullhorns and “disturb the peace.” More dignified might be to offer veterans all over the country the use of their town hall every Veterans Day to speak freely about their experience at war. Some will say that war was the best thing that ever happened to them. Others will be so angry that what they say will barely make sense. Still others will be crying so hard that they won’t be able to speak at all. But a community ceremony like that would finally return the experience of war to our entire nation, rather than just leaving it to the people who fought. The bland phrase, “I support the troops,” would then mean showing up at the town hall once a year to hear these people out.

On Veterans Day 2015, the town hall in Marblehead, Massachusetts, was opened up to just such an event. Several hundred people filed into the hall and listened for more than two hours as veteran after veteran stepped forward to unburden themselves of the war. One of the first to speak was a Korean War vet who had tried to join the Marines at age fifteen. They turned him down but took his three friends, who were all killed in combat and buried next to each other on Okinawa. A couple of years later he paid his respects at their gravesites on his way over to Korea. An older woman stood up and said that she’d fought in Vietnam as a man and then had come back and had a sex change. Another Vietnam vet simply read quote after quote from Bush administration officials who—in his opinion—had lied about the Iraq War. My friend Brendan O’Byrne talked about meeting the mother of his friend Juan Restrepo, who had been killed two months into their deployment to Afghanistan. Restrepo’s mother asked Brendan if he’d forgiven her son’s killer, and he said that no, he hadn’t. She told him he had to.

“That’s when I began to heal,” Brendan told the room. “When I let go of the anger inside me.”

Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it. It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life, and rampage shootings happen so regularly that they only remain in the news cycle for a day or two. To make matters worse, politicians occasionally accuse rivals of deliberately trying to harm their own country—a charge so destructive to group unity that most past societies would probably have just punished it as a form of treason. It’s complete madness, and the veterans know this. In combat, soldiers all but ignore differences of race, religion, and politics within their platoon. It’s no wonder many of them get so depressed when they come home.

I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I’ve done it so many times. First there is a kind of shock at the level of comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about—depending on their views—the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president, or the entire US government. It’s a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime, except that now it’s applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.

So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place? I put that question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Yehuda has seen, up close, the effect of such antisocial divisions on traumatized vets. “If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?”

The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America’s ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively—that should be encouraged—but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.

In 2009, an American soldier named Bowe Bergdahl slipped through a gap in the concertina wire at his combat outpost in southern Afghanistan and walked off into the night. He was quickly captured by a Taliban patrol, and his absence triggered a massive search by the US military that put thousands of his fellow soldiers at risk. The level of betrayal felt by soldiers was so extreme that many called for Bergdahl to be tried for treason when he was repatriated five years later. Technically his crime was not treason, so the US military charged him with desertion of his post—a violation that still carries a maximum penalty of death.

The collective outrage at Sergeant Bergdahl was based on very limited knowledge but provides a perfect example of the kind of tribal ethos that every group—or country—deploys in order to remain unified and committed to itself. If anything, though, the outrage in the United States may not be broad enough. Bergdahl put a huge number of people at risk and may have caused the deaths of up to six soldiers. But in purely objective terms, he caused his country far less harm than the financial collapse of 2008, when bankers gambled trillions of dollars of taxpayer money on blatantly fraudulent mortgages. These crimes were committed while hundreds of thousands of Americans were fighting and dying in wars overseas. Almost 9 million people lost their jobs during the financial crisis, 5 million families lost their homes, and the unemployment rate doubled to around 10 percent.

For nearly a century, the national suicide rate has almost exactly mirrored the unemployment rate, and after the financial collapse, America’s suicide rate increased by nearly 5 percent. In an article published in 2012 in The Lancet, epidemiologists who study suicide estimated that the recession cost almost 5,000 additional American lives during the first two years—disproportionately among middle-aged white men. That is close to the nation’s losses in the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. If Sergeant Bergdahl betrayed his country—and that’s not a hard case to make—surely the bankers and traders who caused the financial collapse did as well. And yet they didn’t provoke nearly the kind of outcry that Bergdahl did. Not a single high-level CEO has even been charged in connection with the financial collapse, much less been convicted and sent to prison, and most of them went on to receive huge year-end bonuses. Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products—known as “Mr. Credit-Default Swap”—led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees—including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment.

Neither political party has broadly and unequivocally denounced these men for their betrayal of the American people, and yet they are quick to heap scorn on Sergeant Bergdahl. In a country that applies its standard of loyalty in such an arbitrary way, it would seem difficult for others to develop any kind of tribal ethos. Fortunately, that’s not the case. Acting in a tribal way simply means being willing to make a substantive sacrifice for your community—be that your neighborhood, your workplace, or your entire country. Obviously, you don’t need to be a Navy SEAL in order to do that.

In late 2015, while finishing this book, I saw a family notice in the New York Times for a man named Martin H. Bauman, who died peacefully at age eighty-five. The notice explained that Mr. Bauman had joined the army in the 1950s, contracted polio while in the service, graduated college under the GI Bill, and eventually started a successful job placement firm in New York City. The firm found people for top executive positions around the country, but that didn’t protect it from economic downturns, and in the 1990s, Bauman’s company experienced its first money-losing year in three decades.

According to the Times notice, Mr. Bauman called his employees into a meeting and asked them to accept a 10 percent reduction in salary so that he wouldn’t have to fire anyone. They all agreed. Then he quietly decided to give up his personal salary until his company was back on safe ground. The only reason his staff found out was because the company bookkeeper told them.

Bauman obviously felt that true leadership—the kind that lives depend on—may require powerful people to put themselves last, and that he was one of those people. I contacted the office manager, Deanna Scharf, and asked her what Mr. Bauman had thought about the behavior of Wall Street executives during the financial collapse of 2008. “Oh, he was very angry,” she said. “He was a lifelong Republican, he was a poor kid from the Bronx who made some money, but he was furious with what happened. He didn’t understand the greed. He didn’t understand if you have a hundred million dollars, why do you need another million?”

Bauman voluntarily served his country, served his employees, and served other handicapped people by establishing a scholarship fund in his name. He clearly understood that belonging to society requires sacrifice, and that sacrifice gives back way more than it costs. (“It was better when it was really bad,” someone spray-painted on a wall about the loss of social solidarity in Bosnia after the war ended.) That sense of solidarity is at the core of what it means to be human and undoubtedly helped deliver us to this extraordinary moment in our history.

It may also be the only thing that allows us to survive it.