Humans hate being told what to do. That’s probably been the case for at least 300,000 years.

Can we respect individual autonomy while also promoting equity and protecting the most vulnerable?

I keep saying that I am done writing about politics and then I keep coming back to it. I am going to blame this on you (yes, you, dear reader) because you share and comment on my political articles more than anything else. I get it! Political stuff seems to occupy some 99% of most people’s brain space these days and I am grateful that you appreciate my take. 

Lately it seems that my newsfeed is dominated by RFK Jr. Even when people are not talking directly about RFK Jr they are talking about raw milk, fluoride and vaccines (in other words, they are talking about RFK Jr’s proposed policies). The New York Times can’t stop talking about him. The Atlantic can’t top talking about him. The Free Press can’t stop talking about him. Even Emily Oster is suddenly writing about raw milk. 

I am not here to take a position on any one of these issues. What I am here to point out is this: most of RFK Jr’s policies are focused on giving people more choice and individual autonomy. Like raw milk? You should be able to drink it. Don’t like fluoride? You shouldn’t have to drink it. Don’t like vaccines? You shouldn’t have to have them (or give them to your children). 

I think a lot of people were surprised when RFK Jr, an environmentalist, lined up with Donald Trump, who is decidedly not an environmentalist and who never seemed to give a damn about America’s health problems either. But the more I think about it, the more I realize they are two peas in a pod. They have both positioned themselves as leaders who want to buck the system and protect individual freedom, and this is a highly appealing message to a lot of people. 

There have been hundreds (maybe thousands? millions?) of pieces written on why Donald Trump swept this election, but one take I have not yet seen is this: people are incredibly sick and tired of living in a highly coercive society. 

Think about the number of times that you’ve been told to do something this week by someone who has power over you: your boss, a traffic cop, maybe even your entitled toddler. Sometimes this is framed nicely and so passively that you don’t even realize it’s an order (I love Bess Kalb’s “Passive Aggressive Work Emails With My Toddler,” which mocks both our inability to stand up to our children these days as well as the thinly disguised aggression of corporate email culture). It’s funny because we live in a democracy and yet individual freedom is still far more constrained than it was for all f human prehistory. Coercion, whether implicit or explicit, has become an integral part of our existence. If your boss is abusive, forbidding you to rest or care for your family or do anything that does not put the company goals first, then society will tell you that you have a “choice”: just quit! But most Americans are one paycheck away from insolvency. Often that same boss is himself the victim of coercion: operating in a stressful environment where unrealistic quarterly goals have been set by executives who are in turn incentivized to optimize shareholder value at any cost. In other words, free-market capitalism begets structures of coercion and control, even while it’s touted as being the best system for promoting freedom and choice. 

One of the things that fascinates me most about hunter-gatherer societies is the emphasis on individual autonomy as a core cultural value. “Respect for an individual’s autonomy is a core cultural value and foundational schema,” Barry Hewlett writes of the Aka, “One does not coerce or tell others what to do, including children. Men and women, young and old, do pretty much what they want. If they do not want to hunt that day, they do not do it; if an infant wants to play with a machete, she is allowed to do so.” What amazes me the most about hunter-gatherer societies is that there is this intense respect for individual freedom, but the social structure in these societies is highly egalitarian and interdependent. Hewlett says, “A giving or sharing way of thinking also pervades hunter-gatherer life; Aka share 50% to 80% of what is acquired while hunting and gathering, they share it with everyone in camp, and they share every day. Sharing of childcare is also extensive; for instance, 90% of Aka mothers reported that other women nursed their young babies.” We are taught in the West that these things - freedom and equity -  are antithetical, but are they really?

In the US today, neither political party is doing a very good job of respecting people’s individual autonomy. The Right, for all of its bluster about freedom, is the party that repeatedly denies women the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. As Donald Trump famously said, “I will protect women whether they like it or not.” I can tell you that in hunter-gatherer society, if a woman does not want to keep a baby, there is no one who can stop her from doing what she needs to do. At the same time, I think you could make a pretty compelling argument that those who elected Donald Trump did so largely because they are sick and tired of being told what to do, what to say, and how to think by the political Left. As Mike Pesca put it in a recent piece for the Atlantic, “For so many Americans, the stultifying small-bore, rules-bound persnicketiness of the Democratic Party became a huge turnoff” (what a sentence). Somehow, Trump successfully positioned himself as the anti-establishment candidate, capitalizing on people’s frustration with the status quo. Joe Rogan summed it up in his interview with Trump when he said, “the rebels are Republicans now.” People ate it up. 

What’s most upsetting about all of this, to me anyway, is that it feels like there’s no way out. If you’ve read (or listened to) my series on “introducing the hunter-gatherers” then you know that the reason that the free and egalitarian lifestyle of hunting and gathering has disappeared is that hunter-gatherers are unable to defend themselves, or their land rights, against more organized, hierarchical societies. We all lived happily as hunter-gatherers for the vast majority of human history, but the second someone decided to settle down and start planting crops the game was up. Sedentism allowed for resource accumulation. Resource accumulation led to increasing levels of inequality and to the rise of hierarchical, patriarchal societies. Unfortunately, having an organized military with a top-down command structure seems to be a winning formula in the modern world. Never mind that for hundreds of thousands of years before, decisions were made by group consensus. 

We can’t snap our fingers and go back, but we do know that our hierarchical, coercive society is making people ill. Evolutionary psychologists have shown that the higher the levels of inequality in a given society, the higher the rates of depression and mental illness. I talk a lot about how absence of social support predicts a woman’s risk for postpartum depression, but at the country level, the best predictor of national rates of postpartum depression is inequality: the higher the GINI index, the higher the rates of PPD. 

Assuming we all want a less coercive, more free and more equitable society (and I think most of us do) then the question we have to ask ourselves is this: is there a way to return to a more equitable social structure (like the one humans lived in for most of prehistory) without deploying control and coercion as the means to get there? 

Let’s look more closely at how this actually works in hunter-gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherers typically lived (and in some places, continue to live) in bands of about 25 or 30 people of all ages and genders. People often assume that these groups are organized around kinship and that most individuals are related, but this is not true. In most hunter-gatherer groups, the majority of the individuals are not related. And yet, they are cooperative and egalitarian. Why? 

There are many theories, but what they all have in common is the idea that group cooperation is simply an optimal survival strategy for humans in the wild. From a woman’s perspective, being able to “creche” her weaned children together with other children in a group care setting enables her to gather more efficiently. From a man’s perspective, hunting success is largely a question of luck, and pooling risk with a group of other men helps ensure that no one goes hungry on any given day (the same way that investing in an index fund is less risky than buying individual stocks). Everyone is motivated to hunt and gather, because everyone wants to eat, but no one forces anyone else to do their work.

If someone is short on calories (or any other necessity) they will ask someone who has more resources to give them some of what they have. Anthropologists call this “demand sharing,” because it’s driven more by the insistent requests of those in need than by the altruism of those with the goods. Nancy Howell said of the !Kung that “it was not altruism and saintliness that reinforced sharing, but the unending chorus of na, na, na (gimme, gimme, gimme).” Those with more are motivated to share in part because they know that they might need a reciprocal favor in the future and in part because it is socially unacceptable to refuse a person in need. Because of this, private property is basically nonexistent. Possessions, chores and childcare responsibilities are shared among the group just like food. The right to equal leisure time is militantly protected in the same way that the right to an equal share of meat is. People often try to cheat, and they are often caught and shamed. If someone in hunter-gatherer society starts thinking too highly of themselves, they will quickly be put in their place through ritualized mockery and belittling. This is also true of the balance of power between the sexes: there is an active process of pull and tug, a celebration of the tension, and a system of established checks and balances that keeps everyone in line. 

The take-away is this: hunter-gatherer societies are structured in such a way as to both protect individual autonomy while also promoting collaboration and equity. Hunter-gatherers never force anyone to do anything, but they do strongly pressure one another to share. Some anthropologists believe this causes hunter-gatherers to be much less productive than they otherwise could be, because people know that putting in extra effort will not always result in direct benefits for themselves and their family…but does that matter? Hunter-gatherers rarely go hungry and consistently score better than Westerners on measures of psychological well-being. Meanwhile, in Western society, many people see paying taxes - the main form of income redistribution and “sharing” in modern society - as a form of unacceptable government coercion. Perhaps the issue is that the funds go to all manner of programs that may have nothing to do with reducing inequality. Perhaps it's because, historically, the wealthy have been so good at tax evasion (largely because our system taxes income more than wealth) that increasing taxes has actually harmed the working class more than the rich. Perhaps it also has to do with the fact that redistribution, when it does happen, is both impersonal and inefficient. As a result, most working class Americans would apparently rather have an extra dollar in their pocket than pay into a tax pool that would supposedly benefit them more than the wealthy. We know that lowering inequality would benefit the majority of Americans, but most people can’t accept the coercion that requires us to get there.

With regard to public health initiatives like pasteurizing milk, fluoridating water, and mandating vaccines, we face the same issue. There are measurable public health benefits associated with all of these things, but people absolutely hate that they are requirements. That reaction may not be logical, but it’s natural. Humans have been highly allergic to others telling them what to do for at least 300,000 years. 

I believe that in order to get people to accept policies that truly benefit the majority of Americans, they need to be grassroots. In hunter-gatherer societies, the pressure to share comes from the bottom-up and group decisions are made by consensus. Pressure to conform comes from the group, not from mandates passed down by the higher-ups. Consensus isn’t practical in a society with 320 million people, but could there be a better way than top-down mandates (even in a state of emergency)?

I also believe that if America could solve its inequality problem, people might be more willing to accept other beneficial government mandates. It’s like a giant game of tit for tat. If people feel that they are well taken-care of, they might be more willing to accept some level of government coercion. People in hunter-gatherer societies give in to the pressure to share because they know they will benefit from this same system in the future, even if it costs them something in the present. And because they have real autonomy when it comes to the most important things - like how they spend their time or use their bodies, whether they go out foraging on a day when they don’t feel up to it, whether they stay with one group or move to another  - they are not bothered by the requirements of equitable group living. In fact, it is the equity and sharing that protect many aspects of their individual autonomy. Without the protection of the group, life would be much harder. They would have less leisure time, less to eat, and more pressure to work long, hard hours.

I’d like to see an American presidential candidate run on a single-issue platform: take money from the rich and give it to the poor (OMG! She’s a COMMUNIST!). Make it so that anyone who works a 20-hour workweek (as was probably the norm in our evolutionary past) has everything they need to survive. Make it so that working a reasonable amount of weekly hours allows anyone to lead, if not a comfortable existence, then a dignified one. The way we do this, in my opinion, is by literally transferring money between people, thereby cutting out all of the inefficiency of the modern system. Is this coercive? Yes. But if there were broad popular support, it might become acceptable.

People will say: it’s impossible! The rich will just take their money overseas! America will lose out on all of that allegedly essential innovation that the billionaires bring us! 

Boo fucking hoo. I say: where there’s a political will there’s a way! Efficient redistribution of income would do more to quantifiably improve the well-being of the American people than any other policy. The rest is sound and fury.