## Metadata - Author: [[David Graeber]] - Full Title: The Dawn of Everything - Category: #books ## Highlights - As we will soon be discovering, there is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian – or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or even bureaucracies. Statements like these are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even as laws of history. ([Location 301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=301)) - ‘Security’ takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is. ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=498)) - all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify. ([Location 514](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=514)) - Jean-Jacques Rousseau left us a story about the origins of social inequality that continues to be told and retold, in endless variations, to this day. It is the story of humanity’s original innocence, and unwitting departure from a state of pristine simplicity on a voyage of technological discovery that would ultimately guarantee both our ‘complexity’ and our enslavement. ([Location 602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=602)) - In the Middle Ages, most people in other parts of the world who actually knew anything about northern Europe at all considered it an obscure and uninviting backwater full of religious fanatics who, aside from occasional attacks on their neighbours (‘the Crusades’), were largely irrelevant to global trade and world politics. ([Location 636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=636)) - Our notion that everyone is equal before the law, for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. ([Location 752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=752)) - we are using the term ‘American’ as it was used at the time, to refer to indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere; and ‘intellectual’ to refer to anyone in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas ([Location 767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=767)) - Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ ([Location 900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=900)) - However, there’s another way to use the word ‘communism’: not as a property regime but in the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. There’s also a certain minimal, ‘baseline’ communism which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one’s bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. ([Location 1006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1006)) - In fact, it remains entirely unclear what ‘egalitarian’ even means. Ultimately the idea is employed not because it has any real analytical substance, but rather for the same reason seventeenth-century natural law theorists speculated about equality in the State of Nature: ‘equality’ is a default term, referring to that kind of protoplasmic mass of humanity one imagines as being left over when all the trappings of civilization are stripped away. ‘Egalitarian’ people are those without princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests, and usually without cities or writing, or preferably even farming. They are societies of equals only in the sense that all the most obvious tokens of inequality are missing. ([Location 1538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1538)) - Monumentality is always to some degree a relative concept; that’s to say, a building or structure is ‘monumental’ only in comparison to other buildings and structures a viewer has actually experienced. Obviously, the Ice Age produced nothing on the scale of the Pyramids of Giza or the Roman Colosseum – but, by the standards of their day, the kind of structures we’ve been describing can only have been considered public works, involving sophisticated design and the co-ordination of labour on an impressive scale. ([Location 1839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1839)) - We are talking here about really staggering quantities of meat: for each structure (there were five at Yudinovo), there was enough mammoth to feed hundreds of people for around three months. ([Location 1846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1846)) - Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments. ([Location 1937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1937)) - These chiefs were in every sense self-conscious political actors. And it was their flexibility and adaptability that enabled them to take such a distanced perspective on whichever system obtained at any given time. ([Location 2015](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2015)) - Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility. ([Location 2344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2344)) - For far too long we have been generating myths. As a result, we’ve been mostly asking the wrong questions: are festive rituals expressions of authority, or vehicles for social creativity? Are they reactionary or progressive? Were our earliest ancestors simple and egalitarian, or complex and stratified? Is human nature innocent or corrupt? Are we, as a species, inherently co-operative or competitive, kind or selfish, good or evil? Perhaps all these questions blind us to what really makes us human in the first place, which is our capacity – as moral and social beings – to negotiate between such alternatives. ([Location 2357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2357)) - it’s becoming increasing clear that the earliest known evidence of human social life resembles a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. ([Location 2372](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2372)) - Truly egalitarian societies, for Woodburn, are those with ‘immediate return’ economies: food brought home is eaten the same day or the next; anything extra is shared out, but never preserved or stored. All this is in stark contrast to most foragers, and all pastoralists or farmers, who can be characterized as having ‘delayed return’ economies, regularly investing their energies in projects that only bear fruit at some point in the future. Such investments, he argues, inevitably lead to ongoing ties that can become the basis for some individuals to exercise power over others; ([Location 2557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2557)) - At first glance, Wendat society, with its elaborate constitutional structure of chiefs, speakers and other office holders, might not seem an obvious choice for inclusion on a list of ‘egalitarian’ societies. But ‘chiefs’ are not really chiefs if they have no means to enforce orders. Equality, in societies such as those of the Wendat, was a direct consequence of individual liberty. Of course, the same can be said in reverse: liberties are not really liberties if one cannot act on them. Most people today also believe they live in free societies (indeed, they often insist that, politically at least, this is what is most important about their societies), but the freedoms which form the moral basis of a nation like the United States are, largely, formal freedoms. American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like – provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors – unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs11 and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or ‘egalitarian’ people such as the Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones.12 They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid – what contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’ – was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy. ([Location 2586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2586)) - The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.15 If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court. ([Location 2630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=2630))