When European settler colonists first encountered the indigenous communities of northeastern North America, many things surprised them about the indigenous communities.

Among these, the Europeans were surprised to discover how restrained and personally responsible the people in these communities were. They very, very rarely engaged in interpersonal violence. They didn’t insult each other; they didn’t lose their tempers around each other.

The Europeans were also surprised to discover that the people in these communities rarely, if ever, disciplined their children. They were, the Europeans believed, impossibly indulgent with their children, allowing them immense personal freedom.

I think it would surprise many contemporary readers that those two things don’t conflict with each other. People living in contemporary state-capitalist modernity tend to assume that children require quite rigid discipline, the routinized order of mass schooling, and fairly constant coercion to keep them out of trouble and turn them into civilized, responsible adults.

It turns out that lots of things we assume to be self-evidently true are not actually true at all.