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David Graeber, David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything (Hardcover, 2021, Signal) 4 stars

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either free and equal …

If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition?

— The Dawn of Everything by , (Page 131)

replied to Tania's status

@Tania strange to read this quote without much context. I doubt that other sociopolitical civilization modes (like slavery based monarchies or feudalism) usually lasted less than our current.. let me guess, capitalism? Not to mention that those other systems are basically also based on capitalist logic, just they were more technologically limited and thus less global.

If I get the statement on political-social mode correctly (I hope I don't due to missing context), I'd argue for the contrary: only in the last centuries we finally have theoretical means, social technologies and sometimes democratic instruments to alter the mode, and we even did some (usually terrible) attempts on it.

replied to Justinas Dūdėnas's status

@Dudenas The authors refer to indigenous American tribes, Inuit, and African forager societies as those where alteration and awareness of different social possibilities is the norm. For example, having social hierarchies only during hunting seasons and the rest of the time being egalitarian. I'm undecided whether their arguments convince me or not, just thought it was an interesting idea to consider.