"When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere." ~Robert Heinlein (1973) Time Enough for Love
Gentlemen, there is no conspiracy.
The loss of freedom that enrages your wild
savage soul is a simple matter of demographics. The more crowded people get, the more laws are necessary and the more hierarchy intensifies.
To live in a crowded
Polis (city) requires the
Polis (city-life enforcers) to enforce the Policy (city rules) of Politics (city business.)
Anthropologists understand this phenomenon very well.
"Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home." ~Stanley Diamond (1981) In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization, p. 1 (first sentence of the book)
The biologist who coined the term "rat race" understood well that crowding leads to a "behavioral sink."
Plumbing the ‘Behavioral Sink’: Medical Historian Examines NIMH Experiments in Crowding. (2008) National Institute of Health Record. Vol. LX, No. 15.
nihrecord.od.nih.gov/newsletters/2008/07_25_2008/story1.htmThomas Jefferson understood the equation
crowded rat race = loss of freedom well.
"When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe." ~Thomas Jefferson, letter to Martha Jefferson Randolph, December 23, 1790
"I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man." ~Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800
The United States has been a bastion of freedom simply because of the New World being uncrowded. Being uncrowded, we rebellious Europeans in the New World could afford to take up some Indian ways; we were a little more wild and free than in city-ized Europe.
Even our Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, is much derived from European settlers observing Indian "free" ways.
Iroquois Gayanashagowa: Influence on the United States Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Law_of_Peace#Influence_on_the_United_State...To "restore" the level of freedom that the US once knew would require restoring sparse population; that just isn't going to happen.
And, just maybe, we'll find another sparsely populated frontier, out in space, as Robert Heinlein had hoped.
"Peace is an extension of war by political means. Plenty of elbowroom is pleasanter--and much safer." ~Robert Heinlein
Unfortunately, I doubt humanity's moving into the frontiers of space is going to happen.
"The moon landing may be our Great Pyramid, an accomplishment never to be equaled." ~Alan Cromer, 1993 [
source]
But I'm not going to give up hope either.