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Freedom

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A profound rumination on the concept of freedom from the New York Times bestselling author of Tribe.

Throughout history, humans have been driven by the quest for two cherished ideals: community and freedom. The two don’t coexist easily. We value individuality and self-reliance, yet are utterly dependent on community for our most basic needs. In this intricately crafted and thought-provoking book, Sebastian Junger examines the tension that lies at the heart of what it means to be human.

For much of a year, Junger and three friends—a conflict photographer and two Afghan War vets—walked the railroad lines of the East Coast. It was an experiment in personal autonomy, but also in interdependence. Dodging railroad cops, sleeping under bridges, cooking over fires, and drinking from creeks and rivers, the four men forged a unique reliance on one another.

In Freedom , Junger weaves his account of this journey together with primatology and boxing strategy, the history of labor strikes and Apache raiders, the role of women in resistance movements, and the brutal reality of life on the Pennsylvania frontier. Written in exquisite, razor-sharp prose, the result is a powerful examination of the primary desire that defines us.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published May 18, 2021

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About the author

Sebastian Junger

57 books2,521 followers
Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of War, The Perfect Storm, Fire, and A Death in Belmont. Together with Tim Hetherington, he directed the Academy Award-nominated film Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism. He lives in New York City.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 503 reviews
Profile Image for Diane S ☔.
4,825 reviews14.3k followers
May 3, 2021
3.5 An meandering exposition on what freedom means to different people and cultures. Over a year, off and on, Junger with 8 different people, follows the railroad line from DC to Western Pa. The people he meets, the hardships he encounters, nature, and musing on the freedom sought by the first settlers, the native Americans be others.

Essays really, there is no set format to this book, as he wanders talking about what he sees, encounters, his mind also wanders to history and other things. I enjoy his writing and as you read this, my advice is just to go with the flow of his words. Don't try to figure out where they are from, nor where they're going. Interesting if less cohesive.

ARC from Edelweiss.
514 reviews216 followers
August 17, 2021
3.5 Someone on GR described this short book as more a collection of three long essays than a unified whole. That sounds about right. Junger's a very good writer, no question about it. I'm struggling to find a way to talk about this book. The first thing that came to mind was, think Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" then take away all the humor, slapstick, buffoonery and... never mind. Think of a different book entirely.

No, I'll go with the word "virile." This is a book that feels like parts of it were written in testosterone. I don't say that as criticism, I really don't. "Freedom" is a three-part account of Junger's long walk with some other men -- sometimes only one other, sometimes more: veterans, a combat photographer -- as they follow railroad lines in Pennsylvania and parts of Maryland and Ohio. They cover many miles, sleep in the open, roll their own cigarettes, try to stay out of sight from railroad workers, police, and locals. (There are places along the way where they find lots of brass casings left by people who shoot at the trains as they go by.) Occasionally stopping in a small town for a burger but otherwise roughing it. They call themselves "the Last Patrol."

Ostensibly, the notion of Freedom is what unifies the three sections (called, respectively, "Run," "Fight," and "Think"), and I suppose that is what the book is, though it won't be perceived that way by everyone. Still, it's not at all polemical, and like all Junger's writing, it's smart, honest, and direct. The book brings together the author's experiences walking the miles, meeting people (not many) along the way, meditating on the idea of freedom in all its permutations, throwing in lots of regional history (Indian wars, the hardship of settlers), and warfare. And boxing strategy and primate behavior. And the price of freedom in a modern democracy. "Freedom" is one of those rare books that had a visceral immediacy to me. I found myself feeling grateful as hell that I'm alive now and not in the 17th or 18th centuries. Or before. I would not have fared well. Also, I found myself wondering why the hell anyone would put themselves through something like this. Near the end of the book, we learn why.

Early on, he describes an encounter with an old white guy outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, one very cold morning. When the man asks if he can join them on their trek -- you have the sense he just wants to get the hell out of his life -- Junger says no. As he and his buddies walk away, Junger thinks: He didn't need us in order to walk out his own front door, but lots of things that look like freedom when you're with other people are just a form of exile when you're alone, and vagrancy might be one of them. But the inside joke about freedom -- he would have found out soon enough -- is that you're always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another.

There's nothing cynical intended in his phrasing it this way. To Junger, it's about balance, and honesty beyond the sloganeering and posturing. It's clear that he is writing in response to the political and cultural stresses of our time, particularly the demands for Freedom! in the context of face masks and storming the Capitol and so on. Junger's not having any of it. "For most of human history," he writes, "freedom had to be at least suffered for if not died for, and that raised its value to something almost sacred."

He continues: In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all -- rationing water during a drought, for example -- are forms of tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat. The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing. He backs this up with some rather harrowing stories of settlers who were absolutely reliant upon one another for survival. And equally harrowing stories of people -- men and women -- having to work together to achieve safe conditions in workplaces and on railways.

There is, in fact, a great deal in the book that speaks -- impatiently -- to our time. This in particular: "In any society, leaders who aren't willing to make sacrifices aren't leaders, they're opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They're easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards."

As I said, Junger is a really good writer. "Freedom" would make a really good gift for guys who don't particularly like reading but could use a bit of perspective in their lives -- historical, social, and cultural. I mean this as a compliment. Junger's point is elemental: The things that had to happen out there were so clear and simple -- eat, walk, hide, sleep -- that just getting through the day felt like scripture: a true and honest accounting of everything that underlies the frantic performance of life. "Scripture": that's "the world letting you know where you stood."

In "Freedom," Junger goes a long way in letting us see the world in which we stand. Not by lecturing us but by showing how freedom and responsibility are two sides of a single coin.

By the way, his earlier book "Tribe" is an extraordinary book. I recommend it highly.

My thanks to Simon & Schuster for providing an advance digital copy in return for an honest review.
1,588 reviews21 followers
March 20, 2021
I honestly have no idea what this book was supposed to be about. It was sort of just all over the place. Part of it is Sebastian Junger talking about his experiences walking the railroad lines along the east coast. I actually found that part of interesting and wish the whole book was about doing that and the people he met along the way. That is only a small piece of the book though. The rest of the book is just him writing about seemingly random stuff. I'm guessing in some way everything is supposed to be related to the idea of freedom, but he doesn't really ever connect anything. The kernel of the idea for this book was interesting the execution not as much.
Profile Image for Leftbanker.
875 reviews396 followers
September 28, 2022
“The struggle of any civilization is balancing order and liberty.”*

This was the epigraph from The Story of England: The Age of Chivalry by Arthur Bryant. While I have long forgotten most of the contents to the book, that little aphorism has stayed with me and seems at the heart of Junger’s excellent essay.

*I can’t remember the source or the verbatim quote. I no longer have the book as I lost it in one of my moves. If someone has it, could you please send me the exact quote. Thanks.)

A lot of reviewers here said they didn't "get" this book. Why would a guy and a few pals take off walking along the rail lines cutting through rural Pennsylvania? A better question would be why the fuck not? Why aren't you doing something like that? A better question is why don’t I do it today? We should all be packing right now. It reminds me of something I wrote a long time ago:

Like many people, I often ask myself whether I’m taking enough chances in life, or if I’m avoiding risk at all cost. There must be a middle ground between just going with the flow and the police having to identify your remains by examining dental records.

That’s the first line of my memoir, or one of them, an unpublished account on why I live where I now live. I thought a lot about those lines while reading this book and thinking about freedom.

Freedom by Sebastian Junger is sort of a better-written and hipper update of Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud. A lot of reviews here seem confused by the book and its message. I didn’t have that problem, not at all. I got what he was saying from start to finish. Think of it as Walden except written by a much cooler, better-adjusted male.

He takes a lot of veiled jabs at conservatives and many of their indefensibly silly ideas. They are the ones who go on and on about “our freedoms” and how they are somehow being eroded because of taxes and gun control (really?) and the “government.” Junger points out that we sacrificed most of our freedom for comfort, whether we want to admit that or not. If you don’t like that, head out for the territories or shut up. No amount of guns will make you free.

We called our trip “the Last Patrol,” and it seemed like a long hard weird thing to do until we were actually out there.

We all need to be “out there,” at least once in a while. It’s been a while for me.

I don’t know what book people are reading who rate this book poorly. Just this nugget of wisdom is enough to rate five stars in my book:

…allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all—rationing water during a drought, for example—are forms of government tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat.

This next bit almost stopped me dead in my tracks (I mean that figuratively as I was already sitting on my ass reading):

One night we were cooking dinner and a freight train thundered by with so much noise and power that I tossed out what I thought was an unanswerable question: What would it take to stop something like that instantaneously? I imagined some kind of massive wall, but the answer was more obvious: another train going just as fast in the opposite direction. America could seem like that as well, a country moving so fast and with so much weight that only a head-on collision with itself could make it stop.

I like this bit, and I hope that I would perform like a Marine or an elite athlete:

A study from 2012 put three groups—U.S. Marines, elite athletes, and “ordinary” people—into MRIs and gradually reduced their oxygen supply. While this was happening, the subjects performed cognitive tests. MRIs are loud, intimidating machines that often trigger claustrophobia, and having one’s air supply reduced in such a situation would add enormously to the stress. As expected, the control group performed worse on the cognitive tests as their air supply dwindled, but the Marines and elite athletes performed better.”

From this short passage, it’s obvious he read Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, two other “manly” writers.

We’d moved forty miles in forty hours and felt like wolves. We ordered coffees and a plateful of whatever pastries they had and bagels with cream cheese toasted and wrapped in wax paper and when we couldn’t eat any more we stood ourselves back up on leg muscles that had already set like concrete and hoisted our packs and moved on.

And this:

The surplus of young men, widespread bachelorhood, sensitivity about honor, racial hostility, heavy drinking, religious indifference, group indulgence in vice, ubiquitous armament and inadequate law enforcement were concentrated on the frontier.

This explains most of the world’s problems: the lack of female companionship. Everything on that list boils down to lack of sex.

If you can’t run a mile with all your gear, you’ve got too much gear.

I wrote in a humor essay on travel that if you can't outrun the average cop while wearing your pack, then you have too much gear.

The essence of the book, I repeat, is about the real dangers to our freedom in American society.

The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own.

And then:

Power is so readily abused that one could almost say that its concentration is antithetical to freedom.

If you can’t see that Republicans actively lobbying to deny voting access is a threat to what freedoms we may still enjoy, you definitely need to read this book and head out on a long, contemplative walk.

I have lambasted some of Malcolm Gladwell’s books here, but I find that Gladwell and Junger have a very similar story-telling style and they both do it very well. They take other great stories from history and make them their own. I think the true talent is finding the right stories to retell. Where Gladwell often goes off the rails, in my opinion, is when he tries to shoe-horn these stories to fit some kooky theory he has hatched. Freedom isn’t abut a theory, it’s about an essential aspect of our existence.
Profile Image for Rajiv S.
107 reviews6 followers
May 24, 2021
If you read this book purely as literal nonfiction, you will miss its value. Junger is reviving a form of descriptive commentary I used to love from the likes Wendell Berry or Thoreau. Reading this book with a poet's eye for metaphor creates some striking images that force us all to understand what Freedom really is.
Is Freedom the absence of oppression? The maximization of options? Money? Power? Or is poverty perhaps the ultimate form of freedom? In a world when most of our survival needs are outsourced to a currency & labor framework, we are irreversibly tied to a common good. It is not an option to avoid our mutual dependencies. Those who grip tightly onto individual liberties at the expense of social good must come to terms with the limits of this ideology. I ended believing that Freedom is not actually a function of government intervention or wealth. In many ways, Freedom is a mentality, a feeling that is arrived at through various paths, but different for us all. A degree of empathy for those on another path to freedom would do us all well.
This is by far the best of his major releases. Don't let the length fool you. Each word carries a punch, and should challenge our definition of a crucial word we can often take for granted.
Profile Image for Leigh Ann.
226 reviews26 followers
May 14, 2021
Overall, not a fan. I liked the idea of the book but feel it was not executed well. The narratives aren't woven together as the blurb claims; rather, it's a stream of consciousness at best and rambling at worst. As I was reading, I kept wondering whether the author is having a midlife crisis--which it seems he is!

Much of the history presented throughout this book is shockingly oversimplified, misinterpreted, and even downright incorrect. Even some of the correct facts are taken out of context and serve to reinforce white Western superiority and authority. The writing is often idyllic, and although Junger doesn't necessarily romanticize America's bloody history, his language occasionally veers in that direction (e.g., "white immigrants" rather than invaders or conquerors).

As I mention above, there's a lot of oversimplification of history. Some claims are factually incorrect (the gendered division of labor is most certainly *not* universal). He relies on colonialist narratives to describe "frontier life," choosing to ignore how the settlers extirpated the indigenous people already living there, burning their homes and fields and stealing their livestock, etc., and that the indigenous were retaliating. It was more of a back-and-forth bloodiness instigated by the colonizers.

At the end of the book he lists many of his sources, and I find that a great many of them are outdated, which accounts for some of the issues in the book. It would have been better if he sought indigenous historians rather than repeating what are often exaggerated and biased works written by outsiders of the language and culture being written about. For a better overview of indigenous history, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortíz and Andrés Reséndez have both written extensively researched books.

A couple of other things bother me throughout the book:

Junger usually terms indigenous peoples collectively as "Indians," sometimes "Natives." I noticed that often he will refer to indigenous peoples during conflict as "Indians," which I assume is because the colonists writing about them used that term, and when referencing peaceful traditions and indigenous healing practices, he uses "Natives." It just rubs me the wrong way.

Also, he shockingly decides to praise "Western society" for deciding that all human brings have the right to freedom. A) That is not even true (in that if we as a collective society truly valued freedom, we would not allow many of the Western capitalist-perpetrated atrocities we do), and B) the reason we have international law is largely due to colonialism and the demands of emancipation and independence in our recent history. The Western world wanted in part to maintain authority over less developed countries (underdeveloped thanks in no small part to colonialism!).

He just seems to be picking and choosing things out of context that best seem to suit his argument at any given point. For example, Junger claims the Pueblo peoples were easily defeated due to their being sedentary (as opposed to nomadic Apache peoples), but later goes on to discuss how the Montenegrins, in small guerilla groups, were able to rout an increasing army. The Montenegrins were also sedentary peoples, but Junger does not explain why one group was more disposed to ward off invaders than the other. His lack of depth in recounting these histories insinuates that while the Montenegrins chose to fight back against invaders, the Pueblo passively awaited their dooms.

Argument-wise, it's often difficult to see where he's going or how he got there, or how some of this fits into the larger picture. The discussion on testosterone and aggression seems unrelated to freedom, and more related to conquering, which he ends with what amounts to: "if it weren't for people who oppressed others and for the oppressed who fight the oppressors, we wouldn't know what freedom is."

I'm just not sure what he hoped to accomplish with this work.
Profile Image for Matt.
456 reviews
October 10, 2021
America claims to revere it, political parties all claim it, and Mel Gibson’s William Wallace yells it, but Junger seemingly just wants to sense it. Freedom is a meandering mix of vagabond tourism, historical references, and sociology. It has almost a deliberate lack of structure possibly mimicking the freedom theme itself. Contrasted with the irony of being literally railroaded down a path.

Junger walks the rails in Pennsylvania with a small group of others. In these lanes of corporate ownership, he finds some of the few solitary spaces left in industrialized America. Policed sparingly and traversing often unpopulated areas. He purposely avoids mentioning where he was in his personal life until the final pages so we don’t get distracted doing our armchair psychology and we can just travel with him. His walk leads to observations that segue into connections to the stories of people seeking to be free and oftentimes stories of indigenous people displaced by the early Americans.

This slim book is divided into three general themes he titles Run, Fight, and Think. He loosely ties in stories of those fleeing authority, fighting authority, and those ideologically opposing authority. If the book was longer, I would probably take exception to the structure of the book, but it is such a quick read with some fascinating anecdotes, that it was over before a I could get frustrated.

Junger’s walk to get back to basics and sense some freedom gives us a moment to pause and reflect on our own unnecessarily complicated lives. This is not political pamphlet or sociological study. It’s a retreat. A brief escape to reflect on what freedom means and what it may mean to him.
Profile Image for Jim.
2,857 reviews66 followers
July 24, 2022
An interesting, though not completely satisfying, rumination on freedom as a group of men hike (though not continuously, but over time and in different arrangements) through the northeast along railroad lines (mostly through Pennsylvania), from the coast to the mountains. The walking seemingly a framework for commentary on the merits of smaller, egalitarian societies as opposed to larger, more-settled countries. Lots of information to digest. It seemed odd that the group was so paranoid, as if a group of men on a trek were some sort of threat to society, although hiking where they were was illegal. For the most part I don't think most people cared. I wonder if he and his companions could not have just hiked the Appalachian Trail, and therefore felt more freedom.
Profile Image for Laura Hoffman Brauman.
2,726 reviews41 followers
August 21, 2021
In this collection, Junger explores the idea of freedom and community - how we value independence and individuality, but rely on others for many of our needs. Junger, a fellow war journalist, and 2 vets from the Afghan war, spend time walking the railroad lines of the East Coast, their days drilled down to walk, eat, hide, and sleep. This journey provides the framework for Junger's reflections on freedom. The book essentially consists of 3 essays - Run, Fight, and Think. In each, he looks at these particular aspects of freedom bringing in history, politics, and culture. Junger is an especially strong writer, able to distill complex concepts into sentences that resonate and make me pause and reflect. For such a short book, there were a lot of quotes that really stood out - I'll share a couple at the end. My only complaint is with what I felt was missing - I would have appreciated an essay either at the beginning or the end that tied everything together. Each of the 3 essays in here was excellent in it's own right, but seeing how Junger tied these concepts together would have made this a 5 star read instead of a 4 star read for me. I found out after reading this that there is a documentary, The Last Patrol, that he did about this experience and I am looking forward to watching that.
And a couple of quotes:
"He didn't need us in order to walk out his own front door, but lots of things that look like freedom when you're with other people are just a form of exile when you're alone, and vagrancy might be one of them. But the inside joke about freedom -- he would have found out soon enough -- is that you're always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another."

"In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all -- rationing water during a drought, for example -- are forms of tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat. The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing. "
Profile Image for Donald Powell.
559 reviews35 followers
September 18, 2021
Five stars for its unique story and the connections he draws from it for his expose on "Freedom". This very short book, really an essay, is so unique I would think everyone would enjoy it but for the most curmudgeonly. He really made me think about the concept of "Freedom" in profound depth. It is a story of hiking along rail lines mixed with political philosophy.
Profile Image for David Quijano.
288 reviews8 followers
July 18, 2021
I heard Sebastian Junger on the Joe Rogan podcast, and found him to be fairly interesting. Junger has written several several books, some of them rather well known, though I haven't read any of them. In his most recent book, Freedom, Junger plays with the ideas of individualism vs community and freedom vs oppression. He uses some rather obscure anecdotes to show how humans, unlike other animals, can defeat larger and more powerful individual or groups and how that is necessary for freedom.

I listened to the audiobook of Freedom after listening to the Joe Rogan episode and honestly I found the podcast to be more compelling than the book which seemed a bit disjointed and incomplete. The book starts off with Junger on a walk with some buddies along various railroads in the northeast. He uses this experience as analogy for the ideas presented in the book. It kind of works, but I also thought basic information about the trip and his companions were missing. I don't think the tie-in with the rest of the themes of the book was explicit enough. I felt like he started the book expecting every reader to know exactly who he was, what he was doing, and why it was significant. Without listening to the Joe Rogan podcast first, I think I might have been completely lost.

Junger has two main themes in this book, the first being the idea of community vs the individual. He has some interesting things to say on this, although most of it wasn't particularly original. He notes that no one is truly independent of others despite people acting as if they were. As an example, few people grow their own food, make their own clothes, or build their own houses. No one builds their own cars, refines their own gasoline, or makes their own TV. Yet, despite our dependence on each other, individual rights are what really separate modern society from our not too distant ancestors.

The other idea he plays with is how individuals or groups, can defeat a larger and/or stronger oppressive person/group. Junger distills the various strategies to running, fighting, and out-thinking the oppressor. This was by far the more interesting aspect of the book and Junger presents a few interesting anecdotes of examples where underdogs defeated superior forces in various ways.

He talks about how a smaller fighter can defeat a larger one, something that really irked Rogan during his podcast. Rogan argued that there were weight classes which proved size does matter. This is a perfect example of how this book could have been a lot better had a little more thought gone into it. The existence of weight classes doesn't disprove Junger's point. All it means is that all if all things are equal, significant size differences can be a huge advantage or disadvantage. The obvious retort to this is that humans don't fight fair. The closest thing we have to a fair fight is in the relatively sterile environment of organized sports. In a real fight, a small woman could pull a gun and kill the strongest man who ever lived.

Where this argument is most interesting is where he talks about it at a larger scale. Junger notes that superior armies often lose to underfunded, undermanned, ragtag forces. He doesn't get into too much detail about any particular conflict, but I think he still makes his point.

In the end, the material presented in this book was more suited for an essay or a single podcast. Had he done a deeper dive in a few of these anecdotes and expanded on his personal journey, I think this could of have been a great book. As presented, it is more of an outline or a rough draft. Two stars. Skip this and listen to Joe Rogan's podcast with him instead.
Profile Image for Maureen.
634 reviews
April 2, 2021
Probably closer to 4.5 stars but I am an acolyte of Junger’s and am always thrilled to read his every written word.
Profile Image for Charles Haywood.
519 reviews861 followers
July 5, 2021
This slim book, a companion of sorts to Sebastian Junger’s earlier book Tribe, is about philosophy derived from life. Junger has made a career out of undergoing risks and hardships, then distilling his experience to insight based in reality. It doesn’t really work here, though; Freedom is too unfocused. It’s quite interesting in spots, but rambles and jumps around, even more than Junger’s earlier offerings. If you’re going to get anything substantial out of this book, you’ll have to do the heavy lifting yourself.

Junger never makes any real attempt to define freedom, which is probably smart, given the path of abstraction on which that would take the book. He wants the reader to view freedom as an emergent property, something that reveals itself through his combination of anecdote and history. Certainly, there is very little new to say about the definition of freedom that has not been said. Let’s take the question of freedom from a different angle, though. What should be the goal of humans having freedom, however we choose to define it? The flourishing of our kind, naturally. If something named “freedom” leads to the opposite, what is the point? Nothing. If we first realize this, Junger’s book helps us advance our thought.

The author examines the effect when life strips away many of the encrustations and obfuscations of our modern ideological and technological civilization. His frame is himself, along with a handful of other men, walking four hundred miles along railroad tracks in central Pennsylvania. They haven’t abandoned civilization—they stop in small towns and buy food, for example. But by modern standards, they are not under the thumb of anyone. “[M]ost nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.” This rambling journey is not meant as a test of manhood—all these men had already proven that in combat—but as a very partial and very temporary retreat from civilization, to rediscover what that implies for a man.

By the way, I found the description of travelling on railroad rights-of-way of technical interest to me for practical reasons—because I’m an apocalyptic paranoid, I already know that railroads have a purpose unrelated to trains, of which Junger took advantage. Thus, a few years past, I used to work some days a hundred miles from home. I carried a detailed railroad map (which are surprisingly difficult to find), figuring that the rails would be a much easier and safer way to return home on foot, in some kind of societal catastrophe, than using the roads. Junger confirms this; not only are railroads easy to traverse (most have walkable maintenance roads running along them, though walking on the ties themselves he says is difficult), they are usually completely free of people, in part because it’s illegal to walk on or along them. So if you ever find yourself needing to move around in the apocalypse, there you go, you’ve gotten a hot tip.

Also interesting, I think, is that Freedom is profoundly subversive of today’s verities; the coded seditious nature of this book probably accounts for the mixed and confused reception it has received among the cognoscenti. Most of all, this is a book about and for men. If you are a purple-haired “feminist” or ludicrous “gender non-binary,” your head will explode if you read this book, because Junger implicitly rejects that men and women are or can be the same, or change their essential selves. In fact, although the writing style is entirely different, Freedom has more than a little in common with Bronze Age Mindset, even though I am sure Junger would resist that parallel. It has, or should have, the same audience—Junger is in his fifties, but it’s not men his age to whom this book really should appeal, or matter. After all, most men in their fifties today who might buy this book are locked into the professional-managerial elite, with rising waistlines and falling testosterone, and absent some societal catastrophe, they will never get out of that trap. Rather, young men should read this book, because they are all sold a siren song that promises freedom, but they still have options. They are told, just get a college degree, check the right boxes, ensure you curb and bridle your masculinity, obtain a BS job in the professional-managerial elite, and then you too can lead a life of unlimited license, consumerism, and atomization. Never mind you will have no meaning in your life and die alone. If a young person reads this book, he might get off this destructive track, and he will at least know there is another way to look at life.

The core of man’s freedom for Junger is, as the first part of the book is titled, the ability to “Run.” You are not free if you cannot leave where you are and go somewhere else. As he relates, this was how much of Pennsylvania was settled—by men and their families moving west, up the rivers and past the rapids, risking gruesome deaths at the hands of Indians. Junger follows their path, without the same dangers, to be sure. When you run, though, you do not obtain the atomized, abstract freedom so cherished by the modern world. “The inside joke about freedom is that you’re always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another.” Outside of the comforts of civilization, reality must be obeyed, as well as one’s obligations to the group, and almost everyone has a group. No matter how far you run, unless you leave society altogether, you owe something to others, and this is not tyranny, but in fact the nature of freedom.

Junger’s historical and factual lessons are often obscure and therefore particularly interesting, at least to me. He contrasts the defeat in the early sixteenth century of the Pueblo Indians, settled town dwellers, with the inability of Europeans to defeat the Apache, nomadic warriors, for hundreds of years. He points out that, especially in heat, human beings can cover long distances on foot better than any animal. This is a physical area in which women perform at up to eighty percent of men’s performance, as opposed to the normal fifty percent or so, making societal nomadism possible, by not requiring sexual differentiation during travel, unlike fighting and childcare, which are biologically dictated to be performed by men and women respectively. This ability to literally run has made many people and groups free—American settlers; American slaves; nomads throughout history.

But let’s ask, does running lead to human flourishing? Temporary running, followed by settling, is different than a permanent life of movement, and temporary running certainly can lead to freedom from oppression. Those permanently on the move, nomads and hunter-gatherers, may be happier than those settled, but their lives are riskier. Or are they? It’s not clear, really. Many, like James C. Scott in Against the Grain, would argue that hunter-gatherers are happier, and healthier. And a risky life can be a flourishing life, too—as we have seen during the Wuhan Plague, excessive reduction of risk is extremely destructive of human societies. In practice, those given a choice often choose running. As Junger discusses at greater length in Tribe, history shows many examples of members of settled society fleeing to join nomads, including quite a few American settlers joining Indian tribes by choice. You won’t get civilization that way, nor glory, but you may get much more satisfied people. Regardless, certainly, our civilization today has neither glory nor satisfaction, which suggests that what freedom we have is not to our benefit.

The other two parts of the book are titled “Fight” and “Think.” I’m honestly not sure why. Really, both parts are about fighting, as is much of the first part. That may not be surprising—Junger made his name writing books about fighting, either nature (The Perfect Storm) or man (War; and his documentaries about our endless war in Afghanistan). His point seems to be, though it’s implicit, that fighting is inherent in freedom. Not just against direct threats, which exist in all human times and places, but more broadly, in order to live as one chooses in one’s own society, within the strictures that society necessarily imposes. He goes on at considerable length about the Irish Easter Rising of 1916, which, by sheer coincidence, also occupies an important place in a different book I was simultaneously reading, Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Junger’s point seems to be that freedom isn’t free, though as with all potentially controversial thoughts in this book, he never makes it explicit.

Thus, the theme of Europeans fighting Indians permeates this book, with no detail spared and not hiding the extreme brutality of Indian warfare, on both sides, and the constant warfare among the Indians themselves (the Iroquois and their allies had, shortly before the white man arrived, exterminated most of the other Indian tribes in this area). On the frontier, everyone had to be prepared to fight. In all human societies and times before modern times, refusing to fight meant slavery. What is more, choosing to fight against great odds often led to success, either quickly, if the attackers found the cost of conquering not to their liking, or over time, as the initially-bearable cost mounted for the attackers—and here Junger returns to the mobility that is inherent in freedom as a tool of war, used by those in Afghanistan and Iraq defending their lands against invading Americans; “Western troops struggle to corner and defeat even lightly armed insurgents.”

But again, it’s not entirely clear what Junger’s point is. He doesn’t seem to making any comment on the divisions in America today, although in one of the more evocative metaphors he uses, he muses about a massive freight train barreling through the night, what “would it take to stop something like that instantaneously? I imagined some kind of massive wall, but the answer was more obvious: another train going just as fast in the opposite direction. America could seem like that as well, a country moving so fast and with so much weight that only a head-on collision with itself could make it stop.”

Junger seems to think that stopping would be bad. He doesn’t say what he thinks of today’s America. Although here he carefully takes no political positions, his own real-life politics skew left (he recently wrote an astoundingly ignorant article on the Spanish Civil War for what remains of Time magazine, an article that appears based mostly on Communist propaganda fed to him by his father, the point of which is that Americans who won’t unhesitatingly and completely comply with all Left demands are very, very bad people). Yet he also recognizes, not being actually dumb at all, that “At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with—and may even hate.” But as is indisputable, every modern ideological civil war in the West has been caused by the inherent inability of the Left to do precisely this, and we see the exact same pattern nearly completely formed in America today (and it would have been completed had Donald Trump been recognized as the winner of the 2020 election). We have seen the future because we have seen the past. So when Junger says, repeatedly, that every man must earn his freedom, I doubt if he’s thought about what that means for the oppressed majority of Americans today, even as he talks at length about the Easter Rising. With freedom, he says, comes responsibility—including the responsibility to do what is necessary to maintain that freedom, for oneself and one’s children. He doesn’t follow that thought down the logical rabbit hole.

So back to freedom and human flourishing. This is, despite its interest to philosophers, really not a complicated question, and it is even more simple for us, given the stark choice we face. The entire power system of the West today tells us, and thus propagandized, we often tell ourselves, that we are free, because we have unlimited license to be slaves to our unreasoning passions. But that was, for thousands of years, not the definition of freedom, but the definition of slavery, because every man knew such license led to the opposite of flourishing.

Worse, we only have such license, which at least feels good as we load ourselves with chains, only so long as we do not dare to suggest, much less place, any limit on our fellow citizens choosing slavery. The evil Siamese twins of our federal government and the Lords of Tech, both having penetration into our lives completely unprecedented in human history, ensure compliance. At every turn, what we are allowed to do, what we are allowed to say, and increasingly what we are allowed to think, is minutely examined, categorized, and allowed or disallowed. We are caught in a net, and it is being tightened around us, and yet we reflexively call it freedom, even as it strangles us.

We should remind ourselves that real freedom, the freedom that leads to human flourishing, is that brought by William Tell, hero of Swiss independence, to his people. (In fact, I think reading Ernst Jünger’s The Forest Passage, which discusses Tell and freedom, or for that matter my own thoughts on Tell in reviewing the children’s book The Apple and the Arrow, more profitable than reading this book.) Tell was embedded in his society; he was not atomized and separated from civilization as was Junger’s small group of men on the rails. Even more importantly, he took far greater risks. He brought true freedom to his community by resisting Habsburg tyranny. Tell defeated tyranny not only by refusing to bow to a hat, the short version of the story usually actually remembered, but by then starting a rebellion, beginning by assassinating the Habsburg representative. There is a crucial lesson here.

Heroism and freedom are closely linked. In very many human times and places, heroism such as that of Tell is necessary to achieve freedom—the freedom not of license, but ordered freedom, the freedom to choose rightly, to the benefit of oneself and one’s people. Yes, our ruling classes have completely lost this conception of freedom, and Junger only seems vaguely aware of it, though it is implied in the realities he describes. That doesn’t mean we can’t adopt it ourselves, and through heroic action, the specifics of which are difficult to foresee, restore it society-wide.
Profile Image for Barnabas Piper.
Author 11 books1,004 followers
August 7, 2023
I really enjoy Junger’s writing, and normally he weaves together immersive experience with a narrative point. This one seemed to lack that point, though. The portions that were travel me our were wonderful. The portions that were history/societal reflection were aimless and uninteresting.
Profile Image for Erin.
52 reviews3 followers
May 15, 2023
I loved Junger’s “Tribe,” so I jumped at the chance to read this title as soon as it came out. The reviews have been quite critical of its seeming lack of focus and meandering style, but I thought that was partly the point. Who knows what freedom is? How do you even define such a concept? To find out, Junger spends an unspecified amount of time wandering through undeveloped lands along the nation’s eastern railroad tracks and making camp wherever he finds himself. It’s a literal exercise in freedom, as well as a figurative one. He’s only partially successful in finding answers, but that’s to be expected. Any other conclusion would feel inauthentic.

Not a neat and tidy package, but lots of lyrical and thought-provoking passages to brew on for those interested in understanding society and culture from a philosophical lens.
Profile Image for GeneralTHC.
358 reviews15 followers
June 8, 2021
2.5 stars

I think Sebastian Junger's an interesting guy who writes about some interesting topics, but I think a person would be wise to take anything you read from him with a grain of salt. Check and double check anything you think you may have learned from him before you repeat it. I mean, that's always a wise thing to do, but I think it would be particularly apt in his case. He had a pretty interesting appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast recently and it was clear to me multiple times that he's mostly winging it. But he also talked about a real interesting near death experience he had that he plans to write a book about next. I will be reading that one too. This wasn't bad. It's worth reading. I'm just real wary of how well he actually knows the content he's writing about.
Profile Image for Tim Joseph.
540 reviews7 followers
April 2, 2021
More of a collection of 3 essays looking at Freedom from different perspectives, Junger outlines the way freedom has shaped humanity's movements, their fighting spirit, and the way we think.
Profile Image for Kathy Eiferle.
287 reviews6 followers
June 23, 2021
I really love Junger's other books, Tribe, especially. I just didn't get the point of this one. I think I understand what he wanted to accomplish but it didn't work for me.
Profile Image for Geir Ertzgaard.
219 reviews7 followers
August 7, 2022
Det er få sjangre jeg liker å lese bedre enn typen menneske på reise skriver om et spesielt emne. Bruce Chatwin skrev om nomader i The Songlines, Annie Dillard om nærhet til naturen i How to teach a stone to talk, osv. Sebastian Junger og åtte venner vandrer langs togskinnene fra Baltimore til Pennsylvania mens han reflekterer over makt og demokrati, om jaktere og samlere og jorddyrkere, om små gruppers styrke i kampen mot de store (Ukraina vs Russland?) der det nesten alltid er de små og raskt bevegelige som vinner. Sånne bøker får meg til å tenke, blant annet på det pussige i at kolonimakt og imperie oppsto omtrent samtidig med det vestlige demokratiet. Hvorfor? Noen syns boken er usammenhengende og rotete, jeg syns den er akkurat passe av det den vil være og jeg vil den skal være.
Profile Image for Bob Mayer.
Author 168 books47.9k followers
January 27, 2022
An interesting story of a year spent wandering the modern wilderness along rail lines on the east coast. What is freedom, after all? Of course, it's easier to just take off from civilization when the day-to-day worried about responsibilities such as family or working a job where you can't write about wandering about. Still, a lot to digest and I recommend the read. I find I have to get out in nature- and not the park, but deep woods, every so often, of I start to lose touch with life.
Profile Image for Steve.
1,035 reviews59 followers
August 6, 2021
A bit of an odd book, very short, partly a memoir of hiking and camping with a group of friends along railroad tracks in Pennsylvania, partly mini essays about freedom, politics, history, anthropology, war and violence, and railroads. I’ve enjoyed other books of his, but part of me holds back a bit, I don’t always trust what I’m reading. But it’s interesting and thought provoking. I guess some of this was turned into an HBO documentary but I think the book and the documentary aren’t exactly parallel: https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/the...
Profile Image for Ginni.
363 reviews34 followers
May 2, 2021
This book. This little book is as grand, ambitious, poetic, and pretentious as Walden, and as maddeningly meandering as Stargirl's mesmerizing "I Might Have Heard a Moa" speech:

Like a butterfly, her words fluttered from image to image [...] She touched on silver lunch trucks and designer labels and enchanted places [...] It was a jumble, it was a mishmash, and somehow she pulled it all together, somehow she threaded every different thing through the voice of a solitary mockingbird singing in the desert.

Freedom is a string of vignettes and musings that may or may not be related to the purported theme of freedom, or to an aimless illegal hiking trip down the nation's train tracks, but somehow always make sense together. I don't quite know what to make of this book and I like that.

(I received this book for free through a Goodreads giveaway.)
Profile Image for Ron Welton.
261 reviews6 followers
September 14, 2021
Sebastian Junger's Freedom is a well written and engrossing extended essay on the concept and history of freedom interspersed with an equally interesting accounting of a long trek, which he referred to as "the Last Patrol", through Pennsylvania.
The book is extremely well researched and, except for the trek, well documented. Many bits of information are stunning: "...it was the Apache's ability to cross terrain quickly and invisibly that allowed fourteen generations to remain outside the control of white society."
Some points he makes are truisms we would, until 2001, expect every American to understand and accept as incontrovertible: "...accepting an election loss may be the ultimate demonstration of how free you want to be." Maybe more to the point: "An important part of freedom is not having to make sacrifices for people who don't have to make sacrifices for you."
Profile Image for Rolandas.
11 reviews
May 25, 2021
Good, short book which explains what it takes to be free, how much man can be free and what freedom meant in many parts of the world. I didn't understand lyrical part of this essay, but I feel it's more a play on American heart of free spirit, so I didn't mind it. Ofcourse it's not comprehesive book about this topic, but writing which is more friendly to reader and I enjoyed it even if it's guilty pleasure.
Profile Image for Tom Walsh.
683 reviews16 followers
May 30, 2021
Fascinating survey of the meanings and quests for Freedom.

By setting his tale in a harsh 400 mile trek his small group of combat-hardened men slogged through unforgiving terrain and worse weather, Junger creates a metaphor for the undying human attempt to define Freedom and build a Society built on it.

His examples running through the book range from Scythian Nomads, Indian Tribesmen and Irish Rebel Women to Immigrant Steelworker Union Workers striking for better treatment. By telling their stories in the context of his own quest, he has created not an academic work of scholarship, but rather an account of what Freedom feels like at its base: a simple but fundamental desire, wired into the Human Spirit, to live decently on a fair and equal playing field with fellow members of Society. It’s not a screed, but rather a plea for the only kind of life worth living: one free from oppression and bathed in decency. It’s a plea that has rung out for thousands of years.

It’s a plea worth heeding and one worthy of Five Stars.
Profile Image for Zach Busick.
75 reviews9 followers
July 6, 2021
Just like Tribe, this book is full of cold, hard wisdom. It’s so easy to forget how oppressive and tyrannical so much of human history is, how rare, precious, and costly freedom is. And yet Junger paints a portrait of the human spirit that leaves you with the hope that tyranny and oppression don’t always have the last word. Sometimes freedom wins, and therefor it’s worth fighting for.
Profile Image for Rob Schmoldt.
70 reviews8 followers
Read
June 6, 2021
Somewhere between 2 and 5 stars for me depending on the drifting, non-linear topic of any given page. I liked many of the selected historical themes on freedom, often zoomed out and abstract, intermingled with a first-person narrative as he and a small group wander through different settings.
Profile Image for Melody.
19 reviews1 follower
April 28, 2022
I received an ARC of this book via Goodreads giveaway. This is a meandering treatise on freedom, what it is, what it means, and why it matters; interspersed with historical details and personal introspection. It’s a small volume, yet surprisingly not a quick read. If you are a fan of his other works, you’ll no doubt enjoy this novel.
Profile Image for Alex Deakin.
28 reviews3 followers
June 4, 2021
I've been a fan of Junger for a very long time, his book 'Tribe' is one of my all-time favorites and one I'd recommend to everyone. This work though just seems to fall rather flat.

'Freedom' never seems to find it's true footing. While it is certainly littered with very captivating stories such as the portion dedicated to Michael Mallin and the other write up on the Vice Lords but it never truly seems to "go" anywhere. It's almost as if each story brings you right up to the point where you think something is going to happen and he transitions to some innocuous story of him at a small town on his railroad road trip.

By these trips I mean the book is split roughly 50% into his ideas on freedom and 50% on his trip when he decided to walk a portion of America's railroads, he transitions as he sees fit.

These portions dedicated to the trip actually have the right idea. I believe they actually properly contextualize Junger's notion of freedom which he defines as the right to not be oppressed by a higher power. The idea that you could walk alongside these tracks for days and days on end without so much as getting questioned does illustrate his point quite well, the only problem being each of these stories sound exactly like the last one. Small town in here, ate burgers at this diner, talked to this Vietnam vet, etc.

A major issue I have with the book is with chapter 2: Fight. In this chapter Junger states that a big reason as to why freedom is possible is because of the fact that a smaller opponent can beat a larger one, in this he cites stories of wars that do prove this point. Although he keeps on going back to the fact that this is played out in 1 on 1 combat, specifically MMA. He states that 50% of the time a smaller opponent beats a larger opponent. I watched an interview with Junger where he was questioned on this topic and the interviewer asked a simple question "How did you get this data when there are weight classes in fighting?" and Junger failed to respond with even one rebuttal. He had absolutely no reply and he said he didn't even ask when he received this data from an ESPN statistician. If you were basing your entire chapter off of this point and you didn't deem it necessary to ask one follow up question how am I supposed to believe anything else you wrote in the book? It was disappointing to say the least.

I still like Junger, I believe he does have knowledge that is very valuable in this world. He's a very good speaker, should you be interested in his thoughts on freedom but you're put off by this I'd heavily suggest listening to him speak long form, preferably on a podcast. You'll get a lot of value out of that, quite sad I can't say the same about this book.
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