Personal Autonomy and the Loss of Freedom
Created: 2025-10-31 | Last edited: 2025-10-31
I recently finished reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graber and David Wengrow. My intentions on reading this were to understand the origins of inequality and loss of freedoms and finally put to bed the entanglement of ideas that I have been pondering on. While the book did not directly solve this for me, it, alongside my other research on the topic, led me to come to a conclusion that I believe is sound.
We will start with a brief discussion of two different viewpoints in anthropology, materialism and idealism, as these will be important later. Materialism is the belief that ones physical environment and conditions are what play the largest role in culture and related topics while idealism is the belief that ideas and symbols are what shape this. From what I have seen it often seems that a person is usually in one camp or another, this is something that in and of itself is important to consider when reading anthropological works as biases can be present. The Dawn of Everything heavily leans towards idealism as they state humans have basically always had the capacity to choose their social arrangements throughout our entire history, regardless of our material conditions. Regardless of your beliefs, I recommend reading this book or at least reading its main points and criticisms. For full disclosure I personally lean more towards materialism.
I will start by stating my overall conclusion on how freedoms get lost, and how we get stuck with that, and then move onto the explanation. It is simply as follows: a loss in personal autonomy is possible once one loses the ability to be self-sufficient.
The reasoning behind this is that when one is fully self-sufficient they are in complete control. Lets say one is living a hunter-gatherer style of subsistence and is living in a band society. Lets also say that, since this person (and by extension their family unit), is self-sufficient that they and their family are all able to provide all of their own means of survival (food, tools, etc). If another person, family or group within this band attempts to exert force or makes a collective decision that this person does not agree with, they can simply leave. They have no (or at least very little) reliance on their band for their survival. They can leave to another band that does not have those same negative qualities, or if one does not exist then they can go out on their own.
Now often agriculture is blamed for this loss of freedom and rise of inequality due to the fact that it generates a surplus. But lets bring the concept of surplus to our previous example. So now our example person and their family, as well as all other families in the band, generate a surplus. This means that they can provide for themselves with extra left over to share with others or they could choose to dedicate less time to procuring food to only acquire what they need. This only makes it even easier for our example person and their family to leave and go out on their own if the band is not working for them or if it is trying to oppress them. This almost makes them "more" self-sufficient.
What does end up leading to a loss of self-sufficiency is specialization. A surplus is still very related though, specialization cannot occur without it. If everyone is only providing enough for themselves, then everyone has to focus on food procurement and is unable to take up another specialization. If a subset of the population is able produce enough food for the remainder of the group, then specialization is possible. Those who specialize in something other than food procurement will then not have the necessary skills to provide their own food and will therefore be reliant on their society to provide it for them. In some situations even those who specialize in food procurement are unable to be self-sufficient as they themselves rely on other specialists, take for example modern farmers and their complex machinery and fertilizers.
My conclusion relies on materialism as its backing, though idealism is also important. Specialization is inherently an idea and is most likely chosen, but for it to occur there needs to first be a material surplus. Therefore I believe that idealism has no backing until material demands have first been met.
This issue mainly started once agriculture began because of the ability for a large surplus to be generated by a subset of the population (at a cost to the health of the members of the society). Thought it is possible in select hunter-gatherer societies. Groups that live in highly productive environments, such as ones in the pacific northwest who have access to rivers overflowing with salmon, have access to a surplus large enough to support specialization without needing agriculture or other advanced technology.
This issue is exacerbated in our modern world due to the high level of technology creating, once again, even more highly specialized people who often have little knowledge outside of their specialization. The argument could be made that in our modern world that one could learn these skills and go out on their own. While this is possible, it is difficult to get to the level our distant ancestors would have been at as they grew up living and learning what was required. Also with all land being owned, it is illegal to just go out and "live in the woods", and with our modern technological system, enforcement of these rules get easier with each passing day. Though this is a side tangent and could be the topic of a future essay.
So to sum up, once a surplus occurs this opens the door to specialization, once people stop directly providing for themselves they lose their self-sufficiency. Once this happens if there are attempts to oppress them they are unable to leave their society as they are reliant on it for their survival. This means that they have fully lost personal autonomy as they are no longer able to fully make their own decisions. If they had retained their self-sufficiency their personal autonomy would have remained intact as they would have been able to leave the oppressive environment.