~1.5~ Reimagining Civilization: What does a free society look like?

Sometime ago, @sagescrub challenged us to define what freedom means to us. As I thought about this question I couldn't help gravitate to a broader picture of what a free society would look like. As I've been working through a lot of these questions with my Reimagining Civilization series, I thought it would be useful for me to define what I envision to be the end goal experience for an individual living in this reimagined world. I also am a strong believer that freedom isn't an isolated experience, and unless the people around me are free, my freedom is sharply stunted.

It’s said that small-band hunter gatherers walked around 20 miles a day. These walks were to me, the definition of freedom: moving through a beautiful untamed landscape populated by a massive array of species of fauna and flora; looking for food; gathering sustenance with friends that you live with, eat with, sleep with, share life with; making rituals of all the things that deeply matter in life (becoming an autonomous adult that the community can depend upon, the hunt, the moon cycles, the seasons, the harvests); having a body that is strong and capable of navigating the landscape; knowing what is dangerous, what is safe, what is bitter and tasty, what is beautiful and hideous; experiencing all of these with your own will and hands directly from their source, with little manipulation, with no middle man to extract from the raw visceral whole experience. For 99% percent of human history this is how we lived. In my opinion SBHG (small-band hunter gatherer) societies were the most long lasting, resilient, and free, by far.

Time in natural landscapes

Before agriculture, humans spent all of their waking hours deep within nature. It’s proven that forest bathing has profound benefits to our physical and mental health. Existing outside of nature confines our bodies and minds. I believe spending extended periods in isolated states of nature transforms the psyche in ways we haven’t yet measured. It frees the mind from the powerful displays of man’s force and influence on the earth and connects us with something ancient, mysterious, and liberating.

Varied diet with wild foods

The average western diet consists of such a small variety of foods. While it may seem like we have limitless options with our grocery stores and fast food chains, the pseudo variety usually boils down to a few food types. Corn, Wheat, Chicken, Cow, Pig, Potato, and Tomato, make up most of our diet, with some lettuce, and splashes of fruit here and there. Early humans lived off of a much broader range of foods, thousands of herbs, plants, fruits, mushrooms, seeds, nuts, tubers, across vast distances, and always in season. To be free is to experience the true abundance of food the earth has to offer.

Mobility within natural landscapes

Humans are born to move. The ability to move through a landscape, climb, jump, run, tumble, swim, swing, dance is freedom manifested in its most potent form. Through millions of years our ancestors evolved these mobility tools to survive and thrive in an ever changing and adventurous landscape. We have used movement in our most sacred traditions. We use movement to tell stories, celebrate moments, and communicate emotions. Our sports, and past times revolve around acrobatics and movement. From the time we can move, we are drawn to obstacles and physical challenges. This is what we are designed to do, and allowing ourselves to express this through our bodies is freedom.

Autonomy to migrate

I believe we humans have a desire to see new scenery which is ingrained into our DNA. We started as a small anomaly in the African savannas and found our way across the entire world. Migration was defining factor of SBHG society. Today we try to supplement this need with vacations, while they do refresh us, they are no replacement for a real migratory adventure. Who isn’t inspired by people who travel the entire Apalachian trail, or backpack across Europe? There is a reason travel vlogs are so popular, we long for adventure, and travel. Prepackaged family vacation pseudo adventures with tour guides, hand rails, and walking paths cannot satisfy our appetite for adventure and travel. As people become more attuned to their nature, we are seeing more interest in migratory lifestyles. The tiny home and converted school bus are becoming symbols of this revival of our origins.

Small community centered around survival and abundance

Our modern “freedoms” have given us the ability to live as individuals, dependent not on our community for survival, but on the State and the large corporations that power it. Humans used to live in small bands, where their survival and success were dependent on one another. The constant resonance between band members gave meaning, wholeness, and happiness to their lives in ways we can’t fully understand. It’s well known how shared intense experiences build lifelong bonds. Working together for survival and abundance with a close knit community allows relationships to deepen and openness to flourish.

Governance within a community of recognized faces

There is a biological limit to the number of people we can maintain healthy relationships with. That number, dubbed Dunbar's Number, is roughly 150. What this means to me, is our societies degrade and require institutions, hierarchy, and rules to maintain order when the population rises above this. When there are people deciding our fate that do not know us by name and face, our individuality becomes lost in the statistics and we become subject to the masses. We have politicians and institutions making decisions that deeply affect our lives. They will never know our face, our story, our essence, yet they can imprison us, break apart our families, fire us, poison us, raid us, and send us to war. Freedom is living in a tribe where the only things that can influence our fate are nature and the people that know us deeply.

Heritage and ritual

We are completely out of wack from the natural cycles of life, and continue to delay and confuse ourselves as our biology and our societies move against each other with a competing meter and cadence. We desire to be grounded in a deep meaningful history that is honorable, mythological and legendary in nature. We have a need to celebrate the earth’s cycles, and have rites of passage to ground and affirm us in life’s transitions. Our modern equivalents of ritual (baby showers, birthdays, graduations, weddings, and funeral) are shallow and rational. They have become an industry, and do little to prove and affirm our transitions. There needs to be a revival of non-commercial community ritual and celebration that occur on moments grounded in biology and astronomy.

Danger and Adventure

Without danger there can be no adventure. If everything has a safety net the most exhilarating experiences we can have are gambling, and sky diving. There is nothing like coming face to face with natural dangers and rising up to the challenge. Our society continues removing all forms of danger and neutralizing risk, especially for our children. But studies have shown risky play is crucial to our cognitive and social development and play an evolutionary role in mammals. Watch any child, and you will know we are drawn to danger from near birth. Risk is part of the human experience, and a life with little risk has little freedom.

Replace tribal warfare with tribal collaboration

War has been a part of human societies since the beginning. Although war in the 20th and 21st century has been “perfected”, it is not a modern invention. Whether we are fighting for resources, revenge, fear, or beliefs, people have been killing other people since forever. To truly be free, the fear, threat, tendency and reality of war need to be replaced with an eagerness to interact, trade, and collaborate with other peoples and tribes.

I don’t want to use the stereotype of the "noble savage", there were deep flaws in many of these societies, brutality, hate, slavery, and warfare existed in many forms from our origins. As a whole however, small-band hunter gatherers were extremely egalitarian. They were born and raised in freedom, without coercion or structure that intruded on their biology. These societies, to me, represent the most pure model of human freedom.

We citizens of a modern democracy claim to believe in equality, but our sense of equality is not even close that of hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer version of equality meant that each person was equally entitled to food, regardless of his or her ability to find or capture it; so food was shared. It meant that nobody had more wealth than anyone else; so all material goods were shared. It meant that nobody had the right to tell others what to do; so each person made his or her own decisions. It meant that even parents didn't have the right to order their children around; hence the non-directive childrearing methods that I have discussed in previous posts. It meant that group decisions had to be made by consensus; hence no boss, "big man," or chief.

If just one anthropologist had reported all this, we might assume that he or she was a starry-eyed romantic who was seeing things that weren't really there, or was a liar. But many anthropologists, of all political stripes, regarding many different hunter-gatherer cultures, have told the same general story. There are some variations from culture to culture, of course, and not all of the cultures are quite as peaceful and fully egalitarian as others, but the generalities are the same. One anthropologist after another has been amazed by the degree of equality, individual autonomy, indulgent treatment of children, cooperation, and sharing in the hunter-gatherer culture that he or she studied. When you read about "warlike primitive tribes," or about indigenous people who held slaves, or about tribal cultures with gross inequalities between men and women, you are not reading about band hunter-gatherers.

~ Peter Gray Ph.D. How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways

The question we need to ask ourselves is how do we augment this social and "governmental" structure with our modern technology? I believe our path up to this point has been necessary exploration into what's possible. Like a rebellious youth finding his own way, large State societies have been a prodigal son of sorts. We've made a mess of ourselves and the earth, and need to return. But we do not need to throw away what we have learned in our short 10,000 year experiment. Rather, can we integrate all we are and were, and move forward into a peaceful, confident, autonomous young adulthood?

Reimagining Civilization Series

₁ Reimagining Civilization: Self governing, decentralized, autonomous, collaborative, micro communities