About Humans: Individuals adapt via autonomy

37. Individuals and subgroups adapt by exercising autonomy.

Finally, we adapt to varying environments and situations through use of individual autonomy (which is also exercised by subgroups within groups).

Some might refer to this as free will.

Differing cultures may allow, encourage or discourage varying degrees of individual autonomy.

But all of us take advantage of it to some degree.

Our genetics and our group culture(s) provide valuable frameworks for our decision-making, but we humans like to reserve the right to make final decisions for ourselves.

Like a quarterback calling an audible at the line of scrimmage, we need the freedom to respond to emergent situations as they unfold before and around us.

And it is generally this third means of adaptation that enables the second — adaptation via cultural change — since most changes in culture start with the exercise of autonomy by individuals.

Words from Others on this Topic

Maybe bees and ants don’t mind being thralls to group instincts but people, I feel, do. And so the question that human beings must ask is, “How do I live my own life and survive, even prosper, while sharing the load of the greater culture?”

Walter Mosley, 2016, from the book Folding the Red Into the Black: Developing a Viable Untopia for Human Survival in the 21st Century

Jazz is the most flexible art form ever because it believes in the good taste of individuals. It believes in our ability to make reasonable choices. It takes a chance on our decision-making skills instead of legislating our freedom away with written restrictions and restrictive hierarchies. In jazz, the size of your heart and your ability to play determine your position in the band. The philosophy of jazz is rooted in the elevation and enrichment of people, plain ol’ folks.

Wynton Marsalis, 2008, from the book Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life

But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

David Foster Wallace, 2005, from the speech “2005 Commencement Address at Kenyon College”

But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’). Over the course of these pages we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021, from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.

E. M. Forster, 1936, from the book Abinger Harvest