Freedomain Radio

Hey Stef,

Would you mind answering any of the questions that I posed above? I too am looking for a practical solution for living free. I agree that mindset plays a big role but when does that crossover into the realm of merely wishful thinking?

Thanks very much.

Sure, those are essential questions - I'm afraid I am saving them for my next book...

From what I recall from both Archaeology class and Forensic Anthropology class, the majority of human remains found from hunter-gatherer societies either died from extreme cases of bad teeth,apparently non-accidental blunt force trauma to the head, or some other typically accidental bone injury to a lower extremity.  I recall the FA professor specifically talking about how a great number of the human craniums found have evidence of human-caused trauma.  As a side note, we had a pretty cool one in the class that shows evidence of the person actually living through it, as the bone began to regrow.

But yeah, I'm pretty sure hunter-gatherer societies were not full of the "noble savages" oft talked about in late-19th, early-20th century anthropology.  I think they were likely savages, but not any more so than we still are today, as a society.

OK, thank you for replying Stef.

Wow! I just wanted to say how completely fascinating 1114 was for me. Genius theory!  It so beautifully ties so many of the old ideas we've had about the nature of slavery together with this new one- that the desire for freedom was never meant to be fulfilled, that it was the glue that held the most biologically successful societies together. If it were true, it would explain so much of human behavior, political movements, history, and why we've remained enslaved throughout history. It was a goosebump moment of clarity for me. Nice work! I need to think about this one.

So I just thought of a question. I was thinking over the implications of that idea and what it would mean for human nature in the absence of trauma or abuse. Although I certainly agree with the theory that family history is the largest contributing factor to dysfunction, as there is overwhelming evidence of that, but if our ambivalence with freedom was something that was evolutionarily developed, would this not mean that even in the absence of trauma we would have the potential to be drawn towards that kind of relationship with freedom in our personal relationships, in the abstract, and with ourselves? What I mean is, wouldn't this mean that an ambivalence toward freedom was not created in family histoy, but rather is a latent capacity within all of us that is perhaps provoked and stimulated in our histories?