Author/political analyst Thom Hartmann concurs with the idea that democracy isn’t just one of many human social governance models sussed out over the course of human civilization, but is in fact the default model of societal organization – not just for human beings, but for other higher animal species – and that it is much, much older than civilization.[1]
“Democracy is in our genes,” Hartmann has written. “The grand experiment of American democracy didn’t come out of thin air, and it was only marginally based on the experience of the Greek democracies and the Roman Republic, contrary to what most people believe.
“The one great universal impulse that animates humans working toward self-governance the world over is freedom: an escape from bonds laid on one people by another, by the powerful over the powerless, by the rich over the poor.”
Hartmann points out that the Founders’ conceptualization of democratic self-rule, the antithesis of the authoritarian governance models prevalent in Europe, was inspired by the remnant of pre-civilization societies that persisted in the Americas many thousands of years after their African-European cousins had developed agriculture, city-states, wealth, and the concept of social dominance and stratified societies. Native Americans essentially lived in the same egalitarian communities that the common ancestors of all 18th century humans had enjoyed in the Paleolithic past.
“Stories spread of these extraordinary people – these Indians – who governed themselves without prisons, chains, or even police. Native Americans who’d become fluent in English or French traveled to Europe and challenged inequality, theocracy, and royalty to its face.”
Isn’t that remarkable? Is it any wonder that this stark confrontation between such wildly disparate worldviews was so stimulating and clarifying to the minds of men like Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, James Madison and their peers?
“As the philosophers of the European Enlightenment were struck by these novel ideas contradicting their biblical and historical notions of the evil nature of humankind,” Hartmann goes on, “the notions of equality and fraternity flowed back across the Atlantic to inflame the minds of 18th-century American colonists.
“While there’s not a one-to-one correlation between the governing principles of, for example, the Iroquois Confederacy and the US Constitution, the core principles animating both were nearly identical: equality of citizenship; Government is legitimate only with the consent of the governed. Men who claim power through hereditary lineage or a direct line to the gods must be limited in the power they can acquire or possess. Greed and unbridled power are evils. Society’s highest obligation is to care for all its people, not merely to serve those with the highest status or wealth.
“Our Founding Generation integrated these concepts into a coherent governing philosophy and then, after independence, crafted them into a clumsy attempt at constitutional self-governance.”
Jefferson in particular was enamored of the ideas he gleaned about human community from Native America, which harmonized nicely with his own research into his distant European ancestors in the British Isles, who were likewise tribal and unspoiled by the authoritarian.
“Virtually every ethnography of tribal people living the way humans did for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture and the rise of modern warlord kingdoms describes them as egalitarian,” Hartmann proceeds, “be they the ancient San of southern Africa, the seafaring people who populated the South Pacific, or the tribes of Central America before they were conquered by the Aztec and Mayan empires.
“Democracy, it turns out, is the default state of virtually every animal species on Earth, and humanity is no exception,” he concludes. “Only with the power of great wealth, control of media, or the force of arms and technology is it overcome by dictators, popes, and kings.”
[1] See his book The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2024
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