Tribe by Sebastian Junger, r. Jun. 2017

p. xvi Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word "tribe" might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with.

p. 65 To some degree the sexes are interchangeable - meaning they can be easily substituted for one another - but gender roles aren't. Both are necessary for the healthy functioning of society, and those roles will always be filled regardless of whether both sexes are available to do it.

p. 109 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 the 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 howe we evolved to exist, and it obviously works.

p. 112 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.

p. 127 The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs - and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative though - will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.