Our Chosen Chains

By Sebastian Junger

Thursday, July 13, 2023

 

The word “freedom” comes from vridom, which means “beloved” in medieval German. In that grim era, only people of one’s own heritage were thought to deserve basic human rights; outsiders, on the other hand, could be killed, tortured, and enslaved at will. This was true throughout the world and for most of human history, and neither law nor religion held otherwise.

 

Since then, modern human-rights law has evolved in Western capitalist societies and spread rapidly through much of the world, though gaping holes have been left in its application. Even in the United States, which codified individual rights in its founding principles, few laws or peace officers protected people on the frontier. That left communities and often individuals responsible for their own safety. I am descended from a young Irish immigrant, Mary Bell, who survived an Indian raid in western Pennsylvania in 1781. A group of Delaware warriors attacked her homestead at dawn and killed two teenage boys — her husband’s younger brothers — who were out gathering firewood. Her husband was in town that day, but the family dog held off the attackers long enough for Bell to grab her infant and four-year-old son and flee into a cornfield. I am a direct descendant of James Carroll, the four-year-old.

 

The problem for a lone woman like Mary Bell was that muzzle-loading rifles took about a minute to load, which meant that after the first shot or two, she would immediately be overrun. That changed in 1831, when the gunsmith Samuel Colt introduced a .36-caliber, six-shot, cap-and-ball revolver that could fire fast enough to help Texas Rangers fight off Comanche warriors rattling off droves of flint-tipped arrows. By the time of the American Civil War, rear-loading “six-guns” were available that could fire, eject, and reload an entire cylinder in seconds. The weapon was small enough to be concealed in clothing and — for the first time in history — deadly enough to kill half a dozen people at a time. An 80-year-old on a barstool could theoretically take out an entire gang of young men.

 

As a result, crimes against ordinary citizens were not particularly common in the Wild West — especially given the near-total lack of law enforcement. According to historian Robert McGrath, robberies and assaults in some of the most violent Colorado mining towns were as low as or lower than in eastern cities, where police officers were very visible. In a broadly ungoverned society, modern firearms greatly increased the ability of the average person to defend himself or herself against criminals and thugs — to be “free,” in other words.

 

Of course, those same weapons enabled young men to kill each other with devastating efficiency. According to 19th-century crime statistics, the more a town population skewed male, the more violence there was. Drunk young men with a chip on their shoulder and few women to distract them blazed away in saloons, streets, boardinghouses, and brothels until the murder rate in the most violent frontier towns such as Julesburg, Colo., and Benton, Wyo., was as much as 20 times higher than in the rest of the country. America would not see such levels of violence again until the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, when New York City began losing 1 percent of its black men ages 15 to 24 every four years to violence — mostly from handguns. A young black man had roughly the same chance of dying from a bullet in New York City as did a soldier deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan during the War on Terror ten years later. Nationally, murder rates for young black men were eleven times higher than they were for their white counterparts. There is no definition of freedom that includes the devastating effect of handguns on the black community.

 

The dual effect of handguns to both protect and threaten is strangely suggestive of a more recent invention: the smartphone, which can also be carried in the pocket and allows people to punch far above their weight, as it were, in their effects on society. As on the frontier, when predators never knew which woman might have a derringer in her petticoat, no one today knows when they will be recorded breaking the law. When a white police officer named Derek Chauvin killed a black man named George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for almost ten minutes, he might never have been brought to justice without video shot by a 17-year-old bystander on her smartphone.

 

But smartphones — like handguns — are also terribly dangerous. Numerous studies have established strong links between social-media use and steeply rising rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide in teenagers — particularly girls. Smartphone use by teenage girls predicts poor mental health more accurately than sexual assault, hard-drug use, and binge drinking do. Since 2012, when social media and smartphones had become widespread, the depression rate for teenage girls has increased by 50 percent — around twice the increase for boys. According to the U.S. surgeon general, suicide among teenagers and young adults rose 57 percent between 2007 and 2018, when social media and smartphones had become ubiquitous.

 

Social-media algorithms are designed to produce an escalating cycle of dopamine rewards in the brain, which make people psychologically dependent on the regular hits of good feeling that come from social recognition. These are the same neurological pathways used by cocaine or compulsive gambling, and they are extraordinarily hard to rewire. Programmers have figured out that by withholding social approval — “likes” — and releasing them in targeted bursts, they can get people to check their devices almost continuously. There is no definition of freedom that includes the effect of addiction on the human brain; whether it is from alcohol, drugs, or social media, addicted people simply have fewer choices and less autonomy.

 

One could say that we’ve been conned except that conning implies deception; this was done in full view. Look down at your hands at any given moment: If you’re holding a smartphone, then the most powerful corporations in the world know your location to within approximately 15 feet, your private email and search histories are being mined to tailor advertising to your personal tastes, and you are statistically likely to spend an average of three hours a day online. If your phone were anything else — a photograph, a wedding ring, a book — staring at it in public as much as people stare at their phones would put you at risk of being diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

 

Not only do smartphones create a kind of digital servitude, they help keep Americans buying things they don’t need or that are downright bad for them. “Some people think their phones are listening to them because they have a conversation with their wife and then get ads online for whatever they were discussing,” a top executive at AOL told me. “The truth is that our algorithms are so good, we don’t need to listen to you talk to your wife. We know what you’re going to say before you do.” (This person recognizes the problem and says he is building a new company “that basically puts the power back to the users and companies, not the platforms.”)

 

Online manipulation helps burden the average American with $6,000 in credit-card debt and $60,000 in overall debt. At the median real income (inflation-adjusted) of $37,500 a year, trying to pay that off requires a lifetime of hard work — and usually fails. The consumer economy could be thought of as a very efficient system for making young people dependent on things that are bad for them and then monetizing those dependencies for a lifetime. Fast food, lack of exercise, compulsive shopping, and excessive social-media use are all associated with poor health, anxiety, and depression. Happily, those disorders can be further monetized by developing costly drugs that allow people to continue their bad habits and addictions without having to die.

 

It’s hard not to wonder whether American corporations deliberately addict people in order to increase profits — or do people seek out the solace of addiction because the American economy can seem rigged against them? Either way, the results are catastrophic. After remaining stable for decades, a measure of income distribution called the Gini coefficient has reached levels of unfairness not seen since the Roaring Twenties. America has one of the most skewed Gini coefficients of the industrialized world, on a par with ancient Rome’s. (Pre-tax, the U.S. Gini coefficient is even worse — on a par with that of wildly corrupt countries such as Haiti, Namibia, and Botswana.) According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 10 percent of Americans now control half of national pre-tax income and over three-quarters of the national wealth.

 

In this context, the vaunted division between liberals and conservatives can be seen for what it is: cover for the real division in America between elites who benefit from this system and the vast majority who don’t. Political rhetoric to the contrary, liberal and conservative elites have far more in common with each other than with their own bases: They go to the same galas, invest in the same stocks, send their kids to the same private schools, and vacation on the same islands. It should be seriously considered whether the power class in this country has deliberately manipulated the debt class into battling itself culturally so that its members can’t collaborate politically.

 

In the face of such powerful forces, how does the average person remain free? In a politically free society — which this most certainly is — loss of freedom is often elective. We do not have to be addicted to smartphones — we can skip them into the nearest pond like flat rocks and buy something simpler — but we spend a month’s pay at the federal minimum wage on a device that addicts us, alienates us, depresses us, and then uses sophisticated algorithms to get us to buy even more things. As a nation, we do not have to watch an average of three hours of television a day, shop beyond our means, consume massive amounts of refined sugar, neglect our bodies, and drink and eat too much — but we do. Poor health, addiction, and unnecessary debt are all very real losses of freedom, and yet many people freely choose them.

 

I once asked a man who’d just completed a 25-year murder sentence whether it was possible to be freer in prison than out. I felt foolish asking the question, but he laughed and said that of course it was. There are almost no distractions in prison, he explained — no phones, no internet, almost no drugs — and eventually you will have an honest conversation with yourself about who you are and what you’re really doing in there. Very few people on the outside ever get to that point, he said, and in some very important ways, they are not free. 

 

And you are.