On Sunday, the Libertarian Party selected former New Mexico Republican Governor Gary Johnson to run for president with former Republican Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld as his running mate.
Just a day later, families spent the day gathering for picnics, visiting cemeteries, and posting social media tributes to our veterans and the servicemen who have died serving our country since the Revolutionary War.
What do the military and libertarians have in common?
Nothing.
In fact, the mentality of dog-eat-dog survival-of-the-richest Libertarianism stands in direct conflict with the fundamental idea of group sacrifice that defines service in the U.S. Military.
In Sebastian Junger's recent book "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging", Junger draws on his experiences as a war reporter and the intense feeling of belonging that he's noticed that soldiers feel at the platoon level.
What he describes leads to the startling conclusion that PTSD might have less to do with the trauma that soldiers experience in the military and in combat, and more to do with trauma they experience coming back to an increasingly Libertarian (my phrase, not his), individualistic, civilian society.
A recent analysis from the
New York Times provides strong evidence that Junger is onto something.
According to Benedict Carey, for the approximately 90,000 Army veterans who have served multiple tours of duty, their "risk of committing suicide actually drops when they are deployed and soars after they return home. [...] The idea that these elite fighters can adapt solely by addressing emotional trauma, some experts said, is badly misplaced. Their primary difficulty is not necessarily one of healing emotional wounds; they thrived in combat."
Proving this is the statistic that it's not just combat veterans who experience PTSD, in fact, nearly half of the military has applied for some form of disability based on PTSD, even though only 10 percent of the military was actually engaged in combat.
But what Junger points out, and what the two of us discussed at length on
The Big Picture recently, is that the human need for tribalism goes far beyond the military.
Noting the importance and benefits of tribal-based tight communities, like existed among American Indians in his time, Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1753 that, "When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural [to them] merely as Indians, but as men."
On the other hand, even when white settlers were taken prisoner and ransomed for their freedom, Franklin noted that "in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them."
So, what was so appealing about the native's society that white Europeans were constantly fleeing to live with the Native Americans?
