Others

"Does all of that take hunter/gatherer children into account? 'Cause from what I've heard about the respect for personal autonomy among hunter/gatherer societies doesn't fit with all the stuff you say about an ownership paradigm."

No.

While ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, I don't see evidence that we carry all previous social arrangements within us. ;p

I am more concerned with the legacies that effect us to this date. Often times what passes for liberty is simply the inconsistent application of tyranny rather than the removal of actual obstacles to freedom. Sometimes that itself is a good start. Refusal to follow criminal orders is often the precursor of the revolution that removes both the criminal order and the criminal regime. But we ought not confuse an imperfectly executed tyranny with freedom.

As for present-day hunter-gathers, while variation can show that certain compromises are neither universal nor necessary; there is enough of a tradition of freedom within our own history that I believe that simply putting our values into action without hypocrisy will bring us a lot farther than adopting something we have no historical experience of in our culture.

There is far too much room for utopian projection when one seeks only those things one is unfamiliar with. That sort of syncretization is one of the things I tend to disagree with in both the 60s counter-culture and the present new-age. Stealing only the appealing bits of Hinduism shows both a lack of respect for the other, and far too high a regard for one's own tradition as the bestest framework for the stolen bits. I prefer to let the others exist as a counter-example within their own context.

Dante