OUR TRADITIONAL HUMAN life-style, for hundreds of thousands of years, is that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The last mere twelve thousand or so years, which we refer to as "history", are something of an anomaly—a point that I'll get to later, not now.
(Except to say that I will not be suggesting we should return to hunter-gathering.)
Our ancestors, living out the traditional human values, did not have constitutions, or police, or elected officials, so in one way it would be accurate to say that they didn't have a political system at all, in the sense that we would mean that now.
But it's clearly possible to view their lives through our lenses—to ask which of the competing modern political systems is most like what they did have.
Did they have a dictatorship, for example, or a democracy?
How did they go about making group decisions?
For the most part they used consensus.
If they had to decide, one day, whether to migrate now or a week from now, whether to follow that herd or to start the trek to their winter territory, they would talk about it.
Not in any formal way, but in varying groups, one to another, throughout the community, until a consensus was arrived at.
We do something of the same in a modern democracy.
We discuss matters in the press and around the kitchen table, and over time it gets expressed in votes.
We obviously don't have decision making as close to the community as they did.
But it's safe to say that on the question of "power centralized in a small group" vs. "power distributed among the community at large," it was the humans who were closer to democracy, and the apes who were closer to dictatorship.
And, as is the case for modern democracies, our traditional human society provided for as much individual freedom as possible—so long as you didn't try to impose your will on others, nobody told you what to do.
So the natural, traditional, human political system is both free and democratic—probably more free and democratic than any system we have today.
And this was in contrast to the system of our closest animal cousins, the apes, who had a dictatorial hierarchy—something like the government in Libya, or Communist Russia in the sixties, where those with wealth or power call the shots for everyone else.
So much for political systems.
What about the traditional human economic system?
Traditional Human Economics...
