In a real political forum, where you have honest discussion of issues rather than just defusing shitbombs lobbed in by hyperpartisan trolls, I could see this being a good time to talk about how freedom is defined, and how the Social Contract affects absolute freedom. Only a solitary Hunter-gatherer can do whatever they want... and they pay the price of no constraints in terms of danger, possible starvation, loneliness, and having life stripped down to bare survival mode. The rest of us face constraints, for the sake of the community good and buffers against danger. America has a disturbing large number of ignorant toddlers who have never understood conditional freedom.
No reason we can't have that discussion, Barton.
One of the fairly regular arguments is that society increases some freedoms, while restricting others, rather than solely restricting them - or at least that it has the potential to do that.
There are three primary constraints on the hunter/gatherer as I was taught it: environment, health, and other people. The first two align with your danger/starvation. The third one is not about loneliness, but competition for those scarce resources.
OTOH, we have sufficient evidence of barter for better tools for those hunter/gatherers to suggest that the "constraints" of society go back a ton further than anything that resembles most of today's world.
Yes, thanks for your optimism, Josh. You are right about constraints going way back -- I actually had to imagine an outcast H-G in order to picture less constraint. But, yes, most of them (as I understand anthropology lit) had fairly strict social rules that kept the band together, fostered shared beliefs and rituals, and allowed some leisure time. I recall reading a study of HG in remote areas that found that they actually had more leisure time, with as little as 20 hours per week devoted to subsistence activities.
To have a complex high tech society where we can, for example, sit in a chair up in the sky and go from Seattle to Boston in a few hours, or access millennia of accumulated human knowledge from a small rectangle in our hand, we make many tradeoffs.
The Whitmer plot sounds like raw material for a Coen Brothers script.
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