A brief history of autonomy

The ideal of self-sufficiency has re-emerged on a mainstream scale as global crises expose the fragility of interconnected systems and increase the desire for autonomy.
States are striving to bolster their self-sufficiency, while trust between countries and political alliances is being reassessed in an increasingly tense geopolitical climate. At the same time, public confidence in institutions and their ability to manage these crises is declining. Particularly in the United States and Europe, individuals are seeking alternative ways to secure their futures.
In times of uncertainty, acquiring skills and knowledge that support self-sufficiency helps regain a sense of agency — a feeling of control, at least to some extent. While not offering full autonomy, these actions strengthen a sense of independence and alleviate the distress of being tied to unreliable systems.
This movement also carries a broader societal critique and resistance to a modern way of life that is seen as unsustainable for both individuals and the environment. However, unlike the anti-capitalist economic experiments of the ‘60s and ‘70s or the deeply communal self-sufficient societies that have existed for most of human history, today’s self-sufficiency movement is largely shaped by individualism.

For hundreds of thousands of years, self-sufficiency was not an ideological choice but the default condition of human life. Like all species, early humans had no choice but to rely on their immediate environment for survival. While cultures and systems have varied widely, communities were generally small, tightly interwoven, and operated on principles of reciprocity and resource sharing. Economic life was communal rather than individualistic.
The advent of agriculture shifted this dynamic. Settled life increased food security, enabled surplus production, and allowed specialization. This new system supported more complex societies, often marked by growing hierarchies as wealth and property accumulated unevenly. As small communities grew into city-states and eventually into civilizations, centralized governance gained importance, making societies increasingly dependent on overarching political and economic structures.
The Industrial Revolution accelerated these changes. Urbanization deepened reliance on external markets as local self-sufficiency declined. Global trade networks and financial markets expanded, embedding individuals within systems far beyond their control. The conveniences of modern life came at the cost of an increasing dependence on complex supply chains, making societies vulnerable to disruption.

In hunter-gatherer societies, self-sufficiency was inherently collective. As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argues in Stone Age Economics (1974), Stone Age hunter-gatherer societies were built on collectivism, cooperation, and reciprocity. For most of human history, survival was, and had to be, grounded in trust within the group rather than in competition or maximizing self-interest.
As societies grew more complex, the nature of trust changed. Instead of relying on a familiar group of relatives and friends, modern industrialized societies require people to place their trust in a vast range of governments, corporations, and institutions to ensure their well-being. At the same time, we have become increasingly detached from the fundamental processes that sustain us. Most of us do not know where our food comes from or how electricity is generated, yet we function comfortably within this ignorance — as long as the fridge remains stocked and the lights turn on.
Crises, however, expose the vulnerabilities of this dependence. Disruptions force individuals to develop expertise in alternative energy, food cultivation, and other self-sufficiency strategies as a backup plan. However, access to the necessary knowledge, skills, and materials is not evenly distributed. Dropping off the radar is both radical and practically challenging in a bureaucratic modern society. At the same time, achieving comfortable self-sufficiency within the system requires money — not everyone can afford solar panels and private land.
As it stands, individual self-sufficiency is often a privileged solution — and a short-term one at that. Whether we like it or not, we remain deeply interconnected, a reality climate change continues to remind us of. Still, crises, as breaches of trust, offer us opportunities to challenge the ideas we organize our lives around.

The self-interested individual is a Western concept rooted in Enlightenment philosophy
The contemporary idea of self-sufficiency is heavily influenced by Western individualism, where people are expected to be responsible for their own survival. This viewpoint assumes that, in the worst-case scenario, people will act primarily out of self-interest. It is reflected in popular culture, such as zombie apocalypse movies, which portray a Hobbesian vision of human nature: without a governing order, people turn into rivals, and life becomes nasty, brutish, and short.
Yet history contradicts this assumption. Human survival (let alone prosperity) has always depended on cooperation and trust. The challenge today is that trust and collaboration must operate on a global scale, something unprecedented in human history. However, exploring past societies organized around different ideas of human potential may help us recognize alternative narratives of both human history and possible futures.

There is hardly a return to small, self-sufficient communities, and perhaps there does not need to be. Our common narratives about history often imply that development follows a single, linear trajectory — from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to hierarchical agricultural societies to modern industrial states. However, as anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow argue in The Dawn of Everything (2021), hierarchies were not an inevitable outcome of agriculture, nor have all cities been governed through centralized power. In fact, many early urban centers functioned through decentralized, participatory structures.
Signs of a more community-based self-sufficiency are already emerging in various forms, from villages and neighborhoods to housing cooperatives organizing for greater autonomy. These initiatives strengthen resilience in an era of global uncertainty without abandoning individuals to fend for themselves or severing ties to the broader community.
As we seek new, more sustainable ways of organizing our lives, perhaps the greatest challenge is to critically assess the assumptions about human nature and societies that underlie these efforts; assumptions that ultimately define the limits of our imaginations. What solutions would become available if we viewed humans first and foremost as beings who care for one another, rather than solely pursuing their own advantage? What if we believed that the survival of this species depended on trust in the group? How could we imagine rebuilding trust on a human scale, while also enabling cooperation on a global level?