Perhaps the most critical search in all of human history has been and continues to be the search for individual freedom. Freedom scholars find that historically the weapon of distrust has been a vital strategy employed in the quest for freedom. Of course, it helped the people for a time. While freedom-loving people have improved their defenses over the centuries against authoritarian leaders, political rulers have also refined the art of being deceptively coercive. Freedom wins a few.
Crafty politicians win a few more.
The historical tracks of human freedom are obscure. Historians, trained to be alert to evidence of the presence of freedom among human beings, have found only traces of freedom now and then over the last six to ten thousand years. Possibly most glimpses of freedom have arisen briefly only in the minds of persons sensitive to the correlation between wretched living conditions and the lack of freedom, only to go unspoken, unwritten, unnoticed, and undiscovered. There is nothing obscure, however, about the centuries upon centuries of people living with little or no freedom. This fact, unhappily, is easy to track due to the widespread presence of evil, coercive leaders throughout historical time and the trail of crushed lives.