What Plenty Coups Can Teach Us About Loneliness

Afghanistan, Plenty-Coups, and a Crow mode of mind

Léon-François Comerre. Le Déluge. 1911.

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I was never more alone in my life than living amid millions in Manhattan, and I was never less alone in my life than living in a canvas tent with a dozen stinking men in the sparsely populated tribal lands of Afghanistan, that violent “graveyard of empires.”

We were so un-lonely that we cut our parachutes into millimeter thick walls and hung them between our sleeping bags to pretend we were alone. This togetherness felt natural due to the grimy, bright-eyed enemy combatants who planted their flags on the hilltops surrounding our tents in the middle of the night to remind us they, too, found some savage pleasure in the togetherness of having an enemy.

One of the central themes of What then? is that we were molded by nature for primal forms of hardship and in the absence of this hardship we witness all too many breakdown from the inside.

My sense, however, is the solution is not to hide in hardship, but to fight in ease. So what does this look like?

Let us take isolation, a plague at present.

The wise have always sought bouts of isolation: "In solitude, the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself."¹ There are few things that define our age better than isolation, but we are not witnessing the isolation of contemplation—we are witnessing the isolation of loneliness, which is not merely being alone, but the feeling of being alone. Following in the wake of loneliness is a vacuum: emptiness, meaninglessness, despair, an uneasiness with existence.

We can see a breakdown of community everywhere we look. We rarely find neighborhood doctors and grocery stores; rarely does religion bring two or three rows of homes together at the end of the block; rarely do remote workers see, smell, or hear other life forms in the flesh throughout an eight-hour work day. We see fewer people having children, spending less time with friends, and moving further from their families. And we hear loneliness is the result of these changes.

But loneliness is merely an effect—what caused the decline of all these things? Why are they declining despite the growing plague of loneliness that we might think would bring us together? Why, even when the lonely are around other people, do they rarely feel with them? And why do we find some of the most lonely people on earth living in cities of millions?

It is time to ask why our institutions came to be in the first place. It was not due to law, tradition, or because “that is what we have always done.” The lofty founding stories usually miss the ancient truth.

I believe the most ancient cause of community has been stripped from our lives, and this cause is shared danger.

A Crow warrior named Plenty-Coups gives further depth on this ancient mode of life in his autobiography. Sioux warriors were raiding his horses, so he and a friend launched one of their much beloved twilight raids on a Sioux camp. After returning to their own camp, Crow scouts reported a Sioux war-band far outnumbering the Crow camp was about to attack. The Crow did not have the time to break their tipis down and move the women and children to safety. They had to hold their ground. They had to fight.

“Iron-bull and Sits-in-the-middle-of-the-land were our head chiefs. They rode through the village, each on his war-horse, each speaking… There was no rushing about, no loud talking… Men did not hurry; and, because there was now no chance for surprise, caught their best horses and stripped their own bodies to die fighting. While we painted ourselves the drums kept beating, and our women sang war-songs. No man can feel himself a coward at such a time. Every man that lives will welcome battle while brave men and women sing war-songs. I would have willingly gone alone against our enemies that day.”²

This was the worst case scenario—a massacre beneath the moon. And yet he felt so un-alone in this moment of shared danger he would have “gone alone” to his death and still felt more togetherness than those lying on therapist couches in cities around the world. Danger sows a blood-bond so deep a death in solitude need not feel lonely.

If we take one man and one woman suffering from loneliness in the state and dropped them in Plenty-Coups’ camp that night in the pre-state, what would they see and feel?

When they see tribal elders leathered from sun and snow slow marching their horses and giving words of strength and fortitude; when they see fathers and mothers setting their shoulders back and radiating command from their toes to fingertips, obeying the ancient truth that panic breeds panic and calm breeds calm; when they see warriors stripping and painting their skin and wrapping quivers of arrows and belts of bullets around their waists to own on their slab of earth until either life or death; when they feel the rhythm of the war-drums and the resonance of the war-chants in every cell of their bodies and feel as if for the first time in their lives a profound sense of gratitude for the gift of ears and hearing; when they see this, they too may utter the words of Plenty-Coups when the fateful moment arose: “I had never seen a more beautiful sight than our enemy presented.”

If we polled the lonely after this bit of time travel, how many would choose immortality and loneliness in the safety of the state over sixty seconds of togetherness with the Crow if it meant they might die? It may be that a life of loneliness is a far more wretched fate than a risk of death-by-arrow.

We unearth something noble of the human condition in this awkward truth. We can only be crippled by emptiness when we do not have to paint ourselves for an enemy whooping in the hills around our tents. We can only be crippled by despair when we do not have to project self-command with every cell and neuron we possess for the sake of the children rolling about at our feet and gazing up at us for assurance. We can only be crippled by meaninglessness when others are not dependent on us, when we are not called on to die for them, and when our deaths are not crucial to their survival. Our worth grows—and declines—in direct proportion to our usefulness to our tribe, and nowhere is usefulness more crucial than in danger.

In sum, there were specific forms of danger that solidified pre-state bands, and these exact forms of danger are what the state has eliminated. In the absence of danger, we invite the breakdown of community; in the breakdown of community, we invite the onset of loneliness; and in the onset of loneliness, we invite an existential pit of meaninglessness.

What then?

Do we have to choose between the dangers of the pre-state which bring us together but kill us from the outside, and the safety of the state which drifts us apart and attacks us from the inside?

No. There is a third path we may walk.

Up to now, the lonely have labored under a false premise: they think safety is constant, a right, a certainty. But states are novel, safety is even more novel, and both are as impermanent as water in the desert. And so we find a cure for loneliness sitting in the palm of our hand—we cannot drop the lonely into the fire-lit twilight and rolling drums of a Crow camp as it comes together for war, but we can drop a Crow mode of mind into the State.

We can choose to remember enemies still exist. Those gazing back at us from the night—murderers, terrorists, and tyrants. As well as those gazing back at us from the abyss—meaninglessness, uselessness, and loneliness.

What, then, is left but to unearth this Crow mode of mind? Where is the stand-and-fight mentality that bow, claw, and snow once stoked? Where is the savage Yes and No? Where is the bristling wrath in defense of kith and kin against the “beautiful sight” of our enemies? Where is the blood-bond forged in readiness for hardship? Where is the rage against an inauthentic existence? Where is the shattering of the lie that merely surviving to old age is what makes a good life?

Loneliness is now a matter of choice.

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1. Laurence Sterne

2. Linderman, Frank B. Plenty-Coups, Chief of the Crows: The Life Story of a Great Indian. University of Nebraska Press, 1962.