Her logic—backed by startling new data—runs as follows: humans from time immemorial have forged their identities within elemental structures of kinship. Today, following decades of social shocks like family shrinkage and widespread breakdown, generations of people have been deprived of the building blocks of identity itself. This dispossession, argues Eberstadt, propels the increasingly frantic flight to membership in identitarian groups. The seemingly constant fury is, in fact, a primal scream for the familial root system of which many have been deprived.