The Pursuit of Freedom as a Psychological Necessity

Humans do not come out of the box in a group, with one of its kind the ruler over the others. There certainly is anthropological argument regarding tribes, groups of humans fending for each other and all that. Evolutionary biology and anthropology tell us our ancestors banded together for survival—safety in numbers against predators, cooperative hunting of big game that no lone wanderer could take down, sharing food and child-rearing duties so the group could thrive instead of merely scraping by. Small bands of twenty to fifty souls, nomadic, following the game and the seasons. It wasn’t about some grand hierarchy; it was practical. A singular human roaming the jungle or savanna was easy pickings—predators, starvation, isolation. But the group? That was insurance.