What emerges from this discussion is that a lot of social policy exists simply to punish people for not conforming to cultural norms -- and that we are willing to spend huge amounts of material wealth to enforce those norms.  But there's a tension between our desire to enforce those norms (and to enjoy punishing people who defy them), and the social costs of that cruelty and controlfreakery.  And also a tension with the conflicting values of forgiveness and altruism, which are just as important to our survival as humans as the enforcement of cultural patterns.

Can we imagine a society which didn't punish anyone?  in which anyone's child was everyone's child, and there was no such thing as "illegitimate" or "undocumented"?

But then we'd have to imagine a society without patriarchy (without men's obsessive need to control female sexual and reproductive behaviour to ensure that "their" women only bear "their" children) and without nationalism (the obsessive need to control which people are allowed to live inside which imaginary lines drawn on inaccurate and irrelevant maps).  Huge steps.

Is there any relationship between draconian cultural norm-enforcement and resource scarcity?

And yet, what of the overwhelming evidence that suggests there is more charity and reciprocal-altruistic sharing among people living in relative resource poverty than in relative abundance... that is, until a certain level of bankruptcy, or the "Ik threshold" at which humane behaviour disappears entirely and survival is an individual obsession (we revert from pack animals to solitary scroungers)...

head hurts.  must get out in fresh air...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...