Transcript of "Our Lonely Society Makes It Hard to Come Home from War” | Sebastian Junger
I worked as a war reporter for 15 years before I realized that I really had a problem. There was
something really wrong with me.
00:11
This was about a year before 9/11, and America wasn't at war yet. We weren't talking about
PTSD. We were not yet talking about the effect of trauma and war on the human psyche. I'd
been in Afghanistan for a couple of months with the Northern Alliance as they were fighting the
Taliban. And at that point the Taliban had an air force, they had fighter planes, they had tanks,
they had artillery, and we really got hammered pretty badly a couple of times. We saw some
very ugly things. But I didn't really think it affected me. I didn't think much about it.
00:46
I came home to New York, where I live. Then one day I went down into the subway, and for the
first time in my life, I knew real fear. I had a massive panic attack. I was way more scared than I
had ever been in Afghanistan. Everything I was looking at seemed like it was going to kill me,
but I couldn't explain why. The trains were going too fast. There were too many people. The
lights were too bright. Everything was too loud, everything was moving too quickly. I backed up
against a support column and just waited for it. When I couldn't take it any longer, I ran out of
the subway station and walked wherever I was going.
01:29
Later, I found out that what I had was short-term PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder. We
evolved as animals, as primates, to survive periods of danger, and if your life has been in
danger, you want to react to unfamiliar noises. You want to sleep lightly, wake up easily. You
want to have nightmares and flashbacks of the thing that could kill you. You want to be angry
because it makes you predisposed to fight, or depressed, because it keeps you out of circulation
a little bit. Keeps you safe. It's not very pleasant, but it's better than getting eaten.
02:08
Most people recover from that pretty quickly. It takes a few weeks, a few months. I kept having
panic attacks, but they eventually went away. I had no idea it was connected to the war that I'd
seen. I just thought I was going crazy, and then I thought, well, now I'm not going crazy
anymore.
02:25
About 20 percent of people, however, wind up with chronic, long-term PTSD. They are not
adapted to temporary danger. They are maladapted for everyday life, unless they get help. We
know that the people who are vulnerable to long-term PTSD are people who were abused as
children, who suffered trauma as children, people who have low education levels, people who
have psychiatric disorders in their family. If you served in Vietnam and your brother is
schizophrenic, you're way more likely to get long-term PTSD from Vietnam.
03:00
So I started to study this as a journalist, and I realized that there was something really strange
going on. The numbers seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Every war that we have
fought as a country, starting with the Civil War, the intensity of the combat has gone down. As a
result, the casualty rates have gone down. But disability rates have gone up. They should be
going in the same direction, but they're going in different directions.
03:32
The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced, thank God, a casualty rate about one
third of what it was in Vietnam. But they've also created -- they've also produced three times
the disability rates. Around 10 percent of the US military is actively engaged in combat, 10
percent or under. They're shooting at people, killing people, getting shot at, seeing their friends
get killed. It's incredibly traumatic. But it's only about 10 percent of our military. But about half
of our military has filed for some kind of PTSD compensation from the government.
04:16
And suicide doesn't even fit into this in a very logical way. We've all heard the tragic statistic of
22 vets a day, on average, in this country, killing themselves. Most people don't realize that the
majority of those suicides are veterans of the Vietnam War, that generation, and their decision
to take their own lives actually might not be related to the war they fought 50 years earlier. In
fact, there's no statistical connection between combat and suicide. If you're in the military and
you're in a lot of combat, you're no more likely to kill yourself than if you weren't. In fact, one
study found that if you deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, you're actually slightly less likely to
commit suicide later.
05:08
I studied anthropology in college. I did my fieldwork on the Navajo reservation. I wrote a thesis
on Navajo long-distance runners. And recently, while I was researching PTSD, I had this thought.
I thought back to the work I did when I was young, and I thought, I bet the Navajo, the Apache,
the Comanche -- I mean, these are very warlike nations -- I bet they weren't getting PTSD like
we do. When their warriors came back from fighting the US military or fighting each other, I bet
they pretty much just slipped right back into tribal life.
05:51
And maybe what determines the rate of long-term PTSD isn't what happened out there, but the
kind of society you come back to. And maybe if you come back to a close, cohesive, tribal
society, you can get over trauma pretty quickly. And if you come back to an alienating, modern
society, you might remain traumatized your entire life. In other words, maybe the problem isn't
them, the vets; maybe the problem is us.
06:27
Certainly, modern society is hard on the human psyche by every metric that we have. As wealth
goes up in a society, the suicide rate goes up instead of down. If you live in modern society,
you're up to eight times more likely to suffer from depression in your lifetime than if you live in
a poor, agrarian society. Modern society has probably produced the highest rates of suicide and
depression and anxiety and loneliness and child abuse ever in human history. I saw one study
that compared women in Nigeria, one of the most chaotic and violent and corrupt and poorest
countries in Africa, to women in North America. And the highest rates of depression were urban
women in North America. That was also the wealthiest group.
07:28
So let's go back to the US military. Ten percent are in combat. Around 50 percent have filed for
PTSD compensation. So about 40 percent of veterans really were not traumatized overseas but
have come home to discover they are dangerously alienated and depressed. So what is
happening with them? What's going on with those people, the phantom 40 percent that are
troubled but don't understand why?
08:06
Maybe it's this: maybe they had an experience of sort of tribal closeness in their unit when they
were overseas. They were eating together, sleeping together, doing tasks and missions
together. They were trusting each other with their lives. And then they come home and they
have to give all that up and they're coming back to a society, a modern society, which is hard on
people who weren't even in the military. It's just hard on everybody.
08:39
And we keep focusing on trauma, PTSD. But for a lot of these people, maybe it's not trauma. I
mean, certainly, soldiers are traumatized and the ones who are have to be treated for that. But
a lot of them -- maybe what's bothering them is actually a kind of alienation. I mean, maybe we
just have the wrong word for some of it, and just changing our language, our understanding,
would help a little bit. "Post-deployment alienation disorder." Maybe even just calling it that for
some of these people would allow them to stop imagining trying to imagine a trauma that
didn't really happen in order to explain a feeling that really is happening. And in fact, it's an
extremely dangerous feeling. That alienation and depression can lead to suicide. These people
are in danger. It's very important to understand why.
09:31
The Israeli military has a PTSD rate of around one percent. The theory is that everyone in Israel
is supposed to serve in the military. When soldiers come back from the front line, they're not
going from a military environment to a civilian environment. They're coming back to a
community where everyone understands about the military. Everyone's been in it or is going to
be in it. Everyone understands the situation they're all in. It's as if they're all in one big tribe.
10:02
We know that if you take a lab rat and traumatize it and put it in a cage by itself, you can
maintain its trauma symptoms almost indefinitely. And if you take that same lab rat and put it
in a cage with other rats, after a couple of weeks, it's pretty much OK.
10:23
After 9/11, the murder rate in New York City went down by 40 percent. The suicide rate went
down. The violent crime rate in New York went down after 9/11. Even combat veterans of
previous wars who suffered from PTSD said that their symptoms went down after 9/11
happened. The reason is that if you traumatize an entire society, we don't fall apart and turn on
one another. We come together. We unify. Basically, we tribalize, and that process of unifying
feels so good and is so good for us, that it even helps people who are struggling with mental
health issues. During the blitz in London, admissions to psychiatric wards went down during the
bombings.
11:18
For a while, that was the kind of country that American soldiers came back to -- a unified
country. We were sticking together. We were trying to understand the threat against us. We
were trying to help ourselves and the world. But that's changed. Now, American soldiers,
American veterans are coming back to a country that is so bitterly divided that the two political
parties are literally accusing each other of treason, of being an enemy of the state, of trying to
undermine the security and the welfare of their own country. The gap between rich and poor is
the biggest it's ever been. It's just getting worse. Race relations are terrible. There are
demonstrations and even riots in the streets because of racial injustice. And veterans know that
any tribe that treated itself that way -- in fact, any platoon that treated itself that way -- would
never survive. We've gotten used to it. Veterans have gone away and are coming back and
seeing their own country with fresh eyes. And they see what's going on. This is the country they
fought for. No wonder they're depressed. No wonder they're scared.
12:43
Sometimes, we ask ourselves if we can save the vets. I think the real question is if we can save
ourselves. If we can, I think the vets are going to be fine. It's time for this country to unite, if
only to help the men and women who fought to protect us.
13:07
Thank you very much.
13:08
(Applaus
The Fringe Benefits of Failure,
and the Importance of
Imagination
6.5.08
J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her
Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the
Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni
Association. For more on the 2008 Commencement Exercises,
read "University Magic."
Text as delivered follows.
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of
Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all,
graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard
given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I
have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have
made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take
deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at
the world's largest Gryffindor reunion.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I
thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The
commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British
philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped
me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't
remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to
proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to
abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy
delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've
come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first
step to self improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you
today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation,
and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have
expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are
gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to
talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold
of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial
importance of imagination.
These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly
uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half
my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I
had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write
novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished
backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that
my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would
never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes
with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study
English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied
nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my
parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched
German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they
might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the
subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one
less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an
executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my
parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your
parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old
enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I
cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience
poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I
quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty
entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand
petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own
efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty
itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I
had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little
time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for
years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and
well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and
intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates,
and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an
existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you
are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of
failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of
failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so
high have you already flown.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but
the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it
fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my
graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived
marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it
is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that
my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come
to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That
period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to
be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I
had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any
light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure
meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself
that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my
energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really
succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to
succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because
my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a
daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And
so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is
inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you
live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which
case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing
examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have
learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more
discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose
value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks
means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will
never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both
have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it
is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever
earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal
happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or
achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you
will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is
difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the
humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of
imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is
not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories
to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader
sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision
that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation.
In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power
that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have
never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry
Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those
books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs.
Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the
rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at
Amnesty International's headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of
totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment
to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw
photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty
by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture
victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eyewitness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and
rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been
displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the
temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices
included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out
what had happened to those they had left behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I
was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in
his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video
camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I
was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him
back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had
been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and
wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor
and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and
horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the
researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink
for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news
that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime,
his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how
incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically
elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the
rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on
their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have
nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and
read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty
International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or
imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power
of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees
prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are
assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know,
and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the
most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and
understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into
other people's places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally
neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as
much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to
remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never
troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they
are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close
their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them
personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do
not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in
narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its
own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They
are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters.
For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude
with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down
which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then
define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve
inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every
day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the
outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by
existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch
other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the
education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and
unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great
majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way
you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to
bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is
your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf
of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the
powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine
yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it
will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but
thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change.
We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need
inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that
I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have
been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to
whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been
kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At
our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared
experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the
knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be
exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And
tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine,
you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I
fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of
ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very much.
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