THE MEN AND THE DOGS

PERHAPS THE SINGLE MOST STARTLING FACT ABOUT America is that, alone among the modern nations that have become world powers, it did so while butted up against three thousand miles of howling wilderness populated by Stone-Age tribes. From King Philip’s War in the 1600s until the last Apache cattle raids across the Rio Grande in 1924, America waged an ongoing campaign against a native population that had barely changed, technologically, in 15,000 years. Over the course of three centuries, America became a booming industrial society that was cleaved by class divisions and racial injustice but glued together by a body of law that, theoretically at least, saw all people as equal. The Indians, on the other hand, lived communally in mobile or semi-permanent encampments that were more or less run by consensus and broadly egalitarian. Individual authority was earned rather than seized and imposed only on people who were willing to accept it. Anyone who didn’t like it was free to move somewhere else.

The proximity of these two cultures over the course of many generations presented both sides with a stark choice about how to live. By the end of the nineteenth century, factories were being built in Chicago and slums were taking root in New York while Indians fought with spears and tomahawks a thousand miles away. It may say something about human nature that a surprising number of Americans—mostly men—wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and on some occasions even fought alongside them. And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society. Emigration always seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal, and it left Western thinkers flummoxed about how to explain such an apparent rejection of their society.

“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”

On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home: “Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”

The preference for tribal life among many whites was a problem that played out in particularly wrenching ways during the Pennsylvania frontier wars of the 1760s. In the spring of 1763, an Ottawa Indian leader named Pontiac convened a council of tribes along a small river named the Ecorces, near the former French trading post at Detroit, in what is now the state of Michigan. The steady advance of white settlements was a threat that unified the Indian tribes in ways that no amount of peace and prosperity ever could, and Pontiac thought that with a broad enough alliance, he might push the whites back to where they had been a generation or two earlier. Among the Indians were hundreds of white settlers who had been captured from frontier communities and adopted into the tribes. Some were content with their new families and some were not, but collectively they were of enormous political concern to the colonial authorities.

The meeting of the tribes was coordinated by runners who could cover a hundred miles in a day and who delivered gifts of shell wampum belts and tobacco along with the message of urgent assembly. The belts were beaded in such a way that even distant tribes would understand that the meeting was set for the fifteenth day of Iskigamizige-Giizis, the sap-boiling moon. Groups of Indians drifted into Riviere Ecorces and encamped along the banks of the river until finally, on the morning of what English settlers knew as April 27, old men began passing through the camp calling the warriors to council.

“They issued from their cabins: the tall, naked figures of the wild Ojibwas, with quivers slung at their backs, and light war-clubs resting in the hollow of their arms,” historian Francis Parkman wrote a century later. “Ottawas, wrapped close in their gaudy blankets; Wyandots, fluttering in painted shirts, their heads adorned with feathers and their leggings garnished with bells. All were soon seated within a wide circle upon the grass, row within row, a grave and silent assembly.”

Pontiac was known for his high oratory, and by the end of the day he’d convinced the assembled warriors that the future of their people was at stake. Three hundred warriors marched on the English fort, with 2,000 more fighters waiting in the woods for the signal to attack. After initially trying to take the fort by stealth, they withdrew and attacked naked and screaming, with bullets in their mouths for easy reloading. The attempt failed, but soon afterward, the entire frontier erupted in war. Virtually every out-fort and stockade from the upper Allegheny to the Blue Ridge was assaulted simultaneously. Le Boeuf, Venango, Presque Isle, La Baye, St. Joseph, Miamis, Ouchtanon, Sandusky, and Michilimackinac were overrun and their defenders massacred. Scalping parties fanned out through the woodlands and descended upon remote farms and settlements up and down the eastern escarpment, killing an estimated 2,000 settlers. Survivors fled eastward until the Pennsylvania frontier basically started at Lancaster and Carlisle.

The English response was slow but unstoppable. The remnants of the 42nd and 77th Highlander Infantry, recently returned from military action in Cuba, were mustered at the military barracks in Carlisle and prepared for the 200-mile march to Fort Pitt. They were joined by 700 local militia and 30 backwoods scouts and hunters. The Highlanders were supposed to protect the column’s flanks but were taken off the job almost immediately because they kept getting lost in the woods. The commander was a young Swiss colonel named Henri Bouquet who had seen combat in Europe and joined the English to advance his career. His orders were simple: march across Pennsylvania, with axmen clearing the way for his wagons, and reinforce Fort Pitt and other beleaguered garrisons on the frontier. No prisoners were to be taken. Native women and children were to be captured and sold into slavery. And bounties were to be paid for any scalp, male or female, that white settlers managed to carve from an Indian head.

Bouquet’s army lumbered out of Carlisle in July 1763 and within months had defeated the Indians at Bushy Run and reinforced Fort Pitt and several outlying garrisons. The following summer they carried their campaign into the heart of Indian territory. Sometimes covering five miles, sometimes covering ten, Bouquet’s army ground its way through the rich, flat country of the Ohio River basin. They passed through great stands of hardwood and open savannahs fed by innumerable creeks and rivers. Some of the rivers had gravel beaches running for miles that afforded clear passage for the column’s supply wagons. The timber was mostly free of underbrush and could be passed easily by men on foot or on horseback. It was a kind of paradise that they were traveling through, and Bouquet’s journals mention the natural beauty of the land on almost every page.

By mid-October, Bouquet had gained Muskegham River, deep in Shawnee and Delaware territory, and an Indian delegation met with him to sue for peace. Hoping to intimidate them, Bouquet deployed his forces across an adjacent meadow: rank upon rank of men-at-arms with their bayonets fixed; kilted Highlanders arrayed behind their regimental flags; and dozens of backwoodsmen dressed much like the Indians and leaning confidently on their rifles in a way that must have been enormously reassuring to a European colonel in the wilderness.

First and foremost, Bouquet demanded the immediate return of all white prisoners, and any delay would be considered a declaration of war. During the next few weeks around 200 captives were brought in, more than half of them women and children and many too young to remember having lived otherwise. Some had forgotten their Christian names and were recorded in the ledgers with descriptions such as Redjacket, Bighead, Soremouth, and Sourplums. Dozens of white relatives of the missing had accompanied Bouquet’s forces from Fort Pitt, and in addition to the many joyful reunions, there were also wrenching scenes of grief and confusion: young women married to Indian men now standing reluctantly before their former families; children screaming as they were pulled from their Indian kin and delivered to people they didn’t recognize and probably considered enemies.

The Indians seemed universally anguished to give up their family members, and when Bouquet’s army finally decamped for Fort Pitt in early November, many trailed behind the column, hunting game for their loved ones and trying to delay the final goodbye as long as possible. One Mingo brave refused to leave the side of a young Virginia woman despite warnings that her former family would kill him on sight. “It must not be denied that there were even some grown persons who shewed an unwillingness to return,” William Smith, a contemporary of Bouquet’s, admitted about some of the white captives. “The Shawanese were obliged to bind several of their prisoners… and some women, who had been delivered up, afterward found means to escape and run back to the Indian towns.”

The reluctance of Bouquet’s captives to leave their adopted tribe raised awkward questions about the supposed superiority of Western society. It was understood why young children would not want to return to their original families, and it made sense that renegades like the infamous Simon Girty would later seek refuge with the Indians and even fight alongside them. But as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, there were numerous settlers who were captured as adults and still seemed to prefer Indian society to their own. And what about people who voluntarily joined the Indians? What about men who walked off into the tree line and never came home? The frontier was full of men who joined Indian tribes, married Indian women, and lived their lives completely outside civilization.

“Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European,” a French émigré named Hector de Crèvecoeur lamented in 1782. “There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.”

Crèvecoeur seemed to have understood that the intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal that the material benefits of Western civilization couldn’t necessarily compete with. If he was right, that problem started almost as soon as Europeans touched American shores. As early as 1612, Spanish authorities noted in amazement that forty or fifty Virginians had married into Indian tribes, and that even English women were openly mingling with the natives. At that point, whites had been in Virginia for only a few years, and many who joined the Indians would have been born and raised in England. These were not rough frontiersmen who were sneaking off to join the savages; these were the sons and daughters of Europe.

“Notwithstanding the Indian women have all the fuel and bread to procure, and the cooking to perform, their task is probably not harder than that of white women,” wrote a Seneca captive named Mary Jemison at the end of her long life. Jemison, who was taken from her family’s farm on the Pennsylvania frontier at age fifteen, became so enamored of Seneca life that she once hid from a white search party that had come looking for her. “We had no master to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased,” she explained. “No people can live more happy than the Indians did in times of peace… Their lives were a continual round of pleasures.”

In an attempt to stem the flow of young people into the woods, Virginia and other colonies imposed severe penalties on anyone who took up with the Indians. The Puritan leaders of New England found it particularly galling that anyone would turn their back on Christian society: “People are ready to run wild into the woods again and to be as Heathenish as ever if you do not prevent it,” an early Puritan named Increase Mather complained in a tract called Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostasy. Mather was an early administrator of Harvard who spent his life combating—and criminalizing—any relaxation of the Puritan moral code. It was a futile battle. The nature of the frontier was that it kept expanding beyond the reach of church and state, and out on the fringes, people tended to do what they wanted.

The Indian manner was clearly suited to the wilderness, and it wasn’t long before frontiersmen began to shed their European clothing and openly emulate people they often referred to as “savages.” They dressed in buckskin and open-backed leggings and had muslin breechclouts strapped between their legs. Some even attended Sunday service that way, which so distracted the girls at one church that their minister accused them of not listening to his sermons. The men smoked tobacco and carried tomahawks in their belts and picked up Indian languages and customs. They learned to track and stalk game and move quickly and quietly in the woods, and they adopted what the Puritans dismissed as a “skulking way of war.” They fought from concealment as individuals, in other words, rather than lining up like tin soldiers.

“The men and the dogs have a fine time, but the poor women have to suffer,” one pioneer wife wrote to her sister about life on the frontier. She complained that her husband—a man named George—refused to make their newborn son a plank cradle, and just gave her a hollowed-out log instead. The boy’s only shirt was woven of nettle bark and his pillow was carved out of wood. When his mother pointed out that he was getting sores and rashes, George said that the hardships would just toughen him up for hunting later in life. “George has got himself a buckskin shirt and pants,” this woman added. “He is gone hunting day and night.”

It’s easy for people in modern society to romanticize Indian life, and it might well have been easy for men like George as well. That impulse should be guarded against. Virtually all of the Indian tribes waged war against their neighbors and practiced deeply sickening forms of torture. Prisoners who weren’t tomahawked on the spot could expect to be disemboweled and tied to a tree with their own intestines or blistered to death over a slow fire or simply hacked to pieces and fed alive to the dogs. If there is any conceivable defense for such cruelty, it might be that in Europe at the time, the Spanish Inquisition was also busy serving up just as much barbarism on behalf of the Catholic Church. Infidels were regularly burned alive, broken on the rack, sawn in half lengthwise, or impaled slowly on wooden stakes from the anus to the mouth. The Protestant Reformation changed a lot of things about Christianity but not its capacity for cruelty, and early Puritan leaders in New England were also renowned for their harsh justice. Cruelty, in other words, was very much the norm for that era, and the native tribes of North America were no exception.

On other levels, however, there seemed to be no competing with the appeal of the Indians. Hunting was obviously more varied and interesting than plowing fields. Sexual mores were more relaxed than in the early colonies (in the 1600s, colonial boys on Cape Cod were publicly whipped if they were caught talking to a girl they weren’t related to). Indian clothing was more comfortable, Indian religion was less harsh, and Indian society was essentially classless and egalitarian. As the frontier marched across North America, from the Alleghenies to the Great Plains to the Rockies and then finally to the West Coast, successive generations of pioneers were subject to being captured and adopted into Indian tribes—or simply ran off to join them.

For all the temptations of native life, one of the most compelling might have been its fundamental egalitarianism. Personal property was usually limited to whatever could be transported by horse or on foot, so gross inequalities of wealth were difficult to accumulate. Successful hunters and warriors could support multiple wives, but unlike modern society, those advantages were generally not passed on through the generations. Social status came through hunting and war, which all men had access to, and women had far more autonomy and sexual freedom—and bore fewer children—than women in white society. “Here I have no master,” an anonymous colonial woman was quoted by the secretary of the French legation as saying about her life with the Indians. “I am the equal of all the women in the tribe, I do what I please without anyone’s saying anything about it, I work only for myself, I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”

Because of these basic freedoms, tribal members tended to be exceedingly loyal. A white captive of the Kickapoo Nation who came to be known as John Dunn Hunter wrote that he had never heard of even a single instance of treason against the tribe, and as a result, punishments for such transgressions simply didn’t exist. But cowardice was punished by death, as was murder within the tribe or any kind of communication with the enemy. It was a simple ethos that promoted loyalty and courage over all other virtues and considered the preservation of the tribe an almost sacred task.

Which indeed it was.

The question for Western society isn’t so much why tribal life might be so appealing—it seems obvious on the face of it—but why Western society is so unappealing. On a material level it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it’s possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren’t a good trade for freedom. One study in the 1960s found that nomadic !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert needed to work as little as twelve hours a week in order to survive—roughly one-quarter the hours of the average urban executive at the time. “The ‘camp’ is an open aggregate of cooperating persons which changes in size and composition from day to day,” anthropologist Richard Lee noted with clear admiration in 1968. “The members move out each day to hunt and gather, and return in the evening to pool the collected foods in such a way that every person present receives an equitable share… Because of the strong emphasis on sharing, and the frequency of movement, surplus accumulation… is kept to a minimum.”

The Kalahari is one of the harshest environments in the world, and the !Kung were able to continue living a Stone-Age existence well into the 1970s precisely because no one else wanted to live there. The !Kung were so well adapted to their environment that during times of drought, nearby farmers and cattle herders abandoned their livelihoods to join them in the bush because foraging and hunting were a more reliable source of food. The relatively relaxed pace of !Kung life—even during times of adversity—challenged long-standing ideas that modern society created a surplus of leisure time. It created exactly the opposite: a desperate cycle of work, financial obligation, and more work. The !Kung had far fewer belongings than Westerners, but their lives were under much greater personal control.

Among anthropologists, the !Kung are thought to present a fairly accurate picture of how our hominid ancestors lived for more than a million years before the advent of agriculture. Genetic adaptations take around 25,000 years to appear in humans, so the enormous changes that came with agriculture in the last 10,000 years have hardly begun to affect our gene pool. Early humans would most likely have lived in nomadic bands of around fifty people, much like the !Kung. They would have experienced high levels of accidental injuries and deaths. They would have countered domineering behavior by senior males by forming coalitions within the group. They would have been utterly intolerant of hoarding or selfishness. They would have occasionally endured episodes of hunger, violence, and hardship. They would have practiced extremely close and involved childcare. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others. They would have almost never been alone.

First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.

The evidence that this is hard on us is overwhelming. Although happiness is notoriously subjective and difficult to measure, mental illness is not. Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society—despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology—is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster it.

Suicide is difficult to study among unacculturated tribal peoples because the early explorers who first encountered them rarely conducted rigorous ethnographic research. That said, there is remarkably little evidence of depression-based suicide in tribal societies. Among the American Indians, for example, suicide was understood to apply in very narrow circumstances: in old age to avoid burdening the tribe, in the ritual paroxysms of grief following the death of a spouse, in a hopeless but heroic battle with an enemy, and in an attempt to avoid the agony of torture. Among tribes that were ravaged by smallpox, it was also understood that a person whose face had been hideously disfigured by lesions might kill themselves. According to The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources, early chroniclers of the American Indians couldn’t find any other examples of suicide that were rooted in psychological causes. Early sources report that the Bella Coola, the Ojibwa, the Montagnais, the Arapaho, the Plateau Yuma, the Southern Paiute, and the Zuni, among many others, experienced no suicide at all.

This stands in stark contrast to many modern societies, where the suicide rate is as high as 25 cases per 100,000 people. (In the United States, white middle-aged men currently have the highest rate at nearly 30 suicides per 100,000.) According to a global survey by the World Health Organization, people in wealthy countries suffer depression at as much as eight times the rate they do in poor countries, and people in countries with large income disparities—like the United States—run a much higher lifelong risk of developing severe mood disorders. A 2006 study comparing depression rates in Nigeria to depression rates in North America found that across the board, women in rural areas were less likely to get depressed than their urban counterparts. And urban North American women—the most affluent demographic of the study—were the most likely to experience depression.

The mechanism seems simple: poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses—and certainly isn’t the American ideal—but it’s much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence. A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Financial independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide. This might be a fair trade for a generally wealthier society—but a trade it is.

The psychological effect of placing such importance on affluence can be seen in microcosm in the legal profession. In 2015, the George Washington Law Review surveyed more than 6,000 lawyers and found that conventional success in the legal profession—such as high billable hours or making partner at a law firm—had zero correlation with levels of happiness and well-being reported by the lawyers themselves. In fact, public defenders, who have far lower status than corporate lawyers, seem to lead significantly happier lives. The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status.

Bluntly put, modern society seems to emphasize extrinsic values over intrinsic ones, and as a result, mental health issues refuse to decline with growing wealth. The more assimilated a person is into American society, the more likely they are to develop depression during the course of their lifetime, regardless of what ethnicity they are. Mexicans born in the United States are wealthier than Mexicans born in Mexico but far more likely to suffer from depression. Like corporate lawyers, they may have a harder time achieving the three pillars of self-determination—autonomy, competence, and community—and wind up with a higher rate of depression. By contrast, Amish society has an exceedingly low rate of depression because, it is theorized, many Amish remain utterly unassimilated into modern society—to the extent that they won’t even drive cars.

“The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment… that maximize[s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being,” a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders concluded in 2012. “In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.”

The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates: a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates—including humans.

In America during the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room—a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered “well educated.” Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them.

The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them “self-soothing,” but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates—we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees—and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala: “Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night.” Another study notes about Bali: “Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities.”

As modern society reduced the role of community, it simultaneously elevated the role of authority. The two are uneasy companions, and as one goes up, the other tends to go down. In 2007, anthropologist Christopher Boehm published an analysis of 154 foraging societies that were deemed to be representative of our ancestral past, and one of their most common traits was the absence of major wealth disparities between individuals. Another was the absence of arbitrary authority. “Social life is politically egalitarian in that there is always a low tolerance by a group’s mature males for one of their number dominating, bossing, or denigrating the others,” Boehm observed. “The human conscience evolved in the Middle to Late Pleistocene as a result of… the hunting of large game. This required… cooperative band-level sharing of meat.”

Because tribal foragers are highly mobile and can easily shift between different communities, authority is almost impossible to impose on the unwilling. And even without that option, males who try to take control of the group—or of the food supply—are often countered by coalitions of other males. This is clearly an ancient and adaptive behavior that tends to keep groups together and equitably cared for. In his survey of ancestral-type societies, Boehm found that—in addition to murder and theft—one of the most commonly punished infractions was “failure to share.” Freeloading on the hard work of others and bullying were also high up on the list. Punishments included public ridicule, shunning, and, finally, “assassination of the culprit by the entire group.”

A cave painting from the early Holocene in Spain shows ten figures with bows in their hands and a lone figure prone on the ground with what appear to be ten arrows sticking out of him. The configuration strongly suggests an execution rather than death in combat. Boehm points out that among current-day foraging groups, group execution is one of the most common ways of punishing males who try to claim a disproportionate amount of the group’s resources.

Boehm’s research has led him to believe that much of the evolutionary basis for moral behavior stems from group pressure. Not only are bad actions punished, but good actions are rewarded. When a person does something for another person—a prosocial act, as it’s called—they are rewarded not only by group approval but also by an increase of dopamine and other pleasurable hormones in their blood. Group cooperation triggers higher levels of oxytocin, for example, which promotes everything from breast-feeding in women to higher levels of trust and group bonding in men. Both reactions impart a powerful sensation of well-being. Oxytocin creates a feedback loop of good-feeling and group loyalty that ultimately leads members to “self-sacrifice to promote group welfare,” in the words of one study. Hominids that cooperated with one another—and punished those who didn’t—must have outfought, outhunted, and outbred everyone else. These are the hominids that modern humans are descended from.

It’s revealing, then, to look at modern society through the prism of more than a million years of human cooperation and resource sharing. Subsistence-level hunters aren’t necessarily more moral than other people; they just can’t get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny. Modern society, on the other hand, is a sprawling and anonymous mess where people can get away with incredible levels of dishonesty without getting caught. What tribal people would consider a profound betrayal of the group, modern society simply dismisses as fraud. Around 3 percent of people on unemployment assistance intentionally cheat the system, for example, which costs the United States more than $2 billion a year. Such abuse would be immediately punished in tribal society. Fraud in welfare and other entitlement programs is estimated to be at roughly the same rate, which adds another $1.5 billion in annual losses. That figure, however, is eclipsed by Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which is conservatively estimated at 10 percent of total payments—or around $100 billion a year. Some estimates run to two or three times that figure.

Fraud in the insurance industry is calculated to be $100 billion to $300 billion a year, a cost that gets passed directly to consumers in the form of higher premiums. All told, combined public- and private-sector fraud costs every household in the United States probably around $5,000 a year—or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months’ worth of food would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused that hardship would be immediate and probably very violent.

Westerners live in a complex society, and opportunities for scamming relatively small amounts of money off the bottom are almost endless—and very hard to catch. But scamming large amounts of money off the top seems even harder to catch. Fraud by American defense contractors is estimated at around $100 billion per year, and they are relatively well behaved compared to the financial industry. The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent. In the decade prior, almost 90 percent of corporate fraud cases—insider trading, kickbacks and bribes, false accounting—implicated the company’s chief executive officer and/or chief financial officer. The recession, which was triggered by illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion dollars in stock value losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half. Total costs for the recession have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion—or about $45,000 per citizen.

Most tribal and subsistence-level societies would inflict severe punishments on anyone who caused that kind of damage. Cowardice is another form of community betrayal, and most Indian tribes punished it with immediate death. (If that seems harsh, consider that the British military took “cowards” off the battlefield and executed them by firing squad as late as World War I.) It can be assumed that hunter-gatherers would treat their version of a welfare cheat or a dishonest banker as decisively as they would a coward. They may not kill him, but he would certainly be banished from the community. The fact that a group of people can cost American society several trillion dollars in losses—roughly one-quarter of that year’s gross domestic product—and not be tried for high crimes shows how completely de-tribalized the country has become.

Dishonest bankers and welfare or insurance cheats are the modern equivalent of tribe members who quietly steal more than their fair share of meat or other resources. That is very different from alpha males who bully others and openly steal resources. Among hunter-gatherers, bullying males are often faced down by coalitions of other senior males, but that rarely happens in modern society. For years, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission has been trying to force senior corporate executives to disclose the ratio of their pay to that of their median employees. During the 1960s, senior executives in America typically made around twenty dollars for every dollar earned by a rank-and-file worker. Since then, that figure has climbed to 300-to-1 among S&P 500 companies, and in some cases it goes far higher than that. The US Chamber of Commerce managed to block all attempts to force disclosure of corporate pay ratios until 2015, when a weakened version of the rule was finally passed by the SEC in a strict party-line vote of three Democrats in favor and two Republicans opposed.

In hunter-gatherer terms, these senior executives are claiming a disproportionate amount of food simply because they have the power to do so. A tribe like the !Kung would not permit that because it would represent a serious threat to group cohesion and survival, but that is not true for a wealthy country like the United States. There have been occasional demonstrations against economic disparity, like the Occupy Wall Street protest camp of 2011, but they were generally peaceful and ineffective. (The riots and demonstrations against racial discrimination that later took place in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, led to changes in part because they attained a level of violence that threatened the civil order.) A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America’s fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society.

That is ironic, because the political origins of the United States lay in confronting precisely this kind of resource seizure by people in power. King George III of England caused the English colonies in America to rebel by trying to tax them without allowing them a voice in government. In this sense, democratic revolutions are just a formalized version of the sort of group action that coalitions of senior males have used throughout the ages to confront greed and abuse. Thomas Paine, one of the principal architects of American democracy, wrote a formal denunciation of civilization in a tract called Agrarian Justice: “Whether… civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested,” he wrote in 1795. “[Both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized.”

When Paine wrote his tract, Shawnee and Delaware warriors were still attacking settlements just a few hundred miles from downtown Philadelphia. They held scores of white captives, many of whom had been adopted into the tribe and had no desire to return to colonial society. There is no way to know the effect on Paine’s thought process of living next door to a communal Stone-Age society, but it might have been crucial. Paine acknowledged that these tribes lacked the advantages of the arts and science and manufacturing, and yet they lived in a society where personal poverty was unknown and the natural rights of man were actively promoted.

In that sense, Paine claimed, the American Indian should serve as a model for how to eradicate poverty and bring natural rights back into civilized life.