On The Necessity of Frontiers

or, "What will you do with the people like you? The troublemakers?"

I think there's something crucial to human civilization and the human spirit about a frontier. Somewhere you can go where no one has gone before, a place without rules or restrictions or regulations.

Following are a number of reasons, in no particular order, why frontiers are so valuable to humanity.

Frontiers As Pressure Valves

Some people don’t play well with authority. They don’t want rules and regulations and safety; they want freedom and choice and to be able to deal with the consequences of their own actions, on their terms.

These people can cause problems, in everyday society.

They are the homeless who don’t actually want a home, or the belligerent disaffected, or the grumpy libertarian. The person who would rather live outside the system, without any of the niceties that the system provides, than live within the rules.

Put more generally, if one imagines civilization as a basket of benefits and drawbacks, different people will want different combinations of those benefits and drawbacks. Some people want to live in a city, with easy access to every amenity but also crowded streets and cameras on every corner. Others prefer to live in the wilderness, where if the power goes out it might be weeks before it gets fixed, but they don’t have to interact with other people if they don’t want.

Frontiers can function as a pressure valve for people who want a different tradeoff between civilization and wilderness. Having an open frontier gives such people a place to go to be alone, where they can live under the (much looser) set of rules that they prefer.

Instead of bottling these people up in cities or cooping them in with the rest of us, frontiers allow such people the freedom they want, keeping them from disrupting the way of life others prefer.

Frontiers As Productive Outlets

Historically, humanity has always produces an excess population. This may not be the case anymore, but in the past frontiers have served as an extremely useful outlet for that population excess that didn’t involve war.

One of the biggest problems a population can have is an excess of young men. Without a clear path in life or future to reach towards, with too many young men aiming for too few positions, the competition spirals out of control.

Young men are particularly problematic because young men are the members of our species that most often turn to violence to get what they want. Historical examples abound, but the gist is that a bunch of young men without a future are likely to cause trouble for society. Given that high levels of testosterone correspond to risk-taking, young men are the gamblers of society, willing to take the long shots the rest of us aren’t.

A frontier is a fantastic productive outlet for such a dangerous population: a place where rules are relaxed, where fewer safety nets exist, where strength and bravery and wit are directly rewarded in the face of a natural world to tame.

Instead of overthrowing governments or committing crime waves - both mostly zero-sum activities (where someone’s gain is someone else’s loss), this excess population can be encouraged to do productive work on the frontier (a positive-sum activity, since it increases economic growth).

Frontiers As Hard Problems

Civilizations, societies, and people have to solve different kinds of problems at different points in their lifespans.

Borrowing from Maslow’s hierarchy, there’s a base reality of problems to solve: arranging the physical world in such a way that it can support life.

Once those problems are solved and survival is assured, the problems often become zero-sum status games. More effort is spent by those within a society determining who should rule it than how it should be ruled, more resources going towards fame and popularity over genius and creativity. The further this process goes, the further away people get from the real world, the base physical reality they live in, and the problems it contains.

A frontier can function as a place where all the niceties of society are stripped away and the hard problems of survival are brought back into focus. Who’s in charge matters less than who’s alive tomorrow, which requires working in that base physical reality to innovate and adapt.

Imagine, for instance, if we had a colony on the moon: those people would have to work together and solve difficult problems to survive; they wouldn’t have a choice.

On the frontier, you can’t convince dirt to yield crops; you can’t persuade the weather to behave and there is no social safety net. You either solve the problems or perish, and while that’s harsh it can be a place in society where hard problems get solved.

Frontiers As Experiments

Frontiers allow for a kind of experimentation that can't take place in established societies: namely, experimentation on the nature of society itself. Societies, especially wealthy, stable ones, have too much to lose to tolerate risky gambles via experimenting with their own structure. A frontier, lacking structure of any kind, has a far larger return on risk, with much less to lose.

As societies and civilizations age they calcify, rules and laws and regulations increasing slowly over time like fungus or mold or algae, creeping up on everyone until eventually no aspect of life is left untouched by government fiat. This slows (and eventually strangles) innovation, the lifeblood of economic growth.

Furthermore, the structure of a society - monarchy, republic, communist, etc. - is more or less set in stone, barring revolution, which means there’s little room for experimentation in governance. Different kinds of democracy can’t be tried; it’s difficult to test different kinds of voting or alternative government structures in places with already-functioning governments.

A frontier is a place with very little in the way of existing governance or law, making it the ideal place to experiment with different kinds of societies, laws, regulations, and ruling structures. There aren’t hundreds of years of preexisting rules to overturn; it’s a fresh start, a blank slate upon which new ideas can be tried.

This is, after all, where American democracy was founded: on the frontier.