# _The Dawn of Everything_ by David Graeber and David Wengrow #book-report ## 2. Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress (a passage from Kandiaronk) > A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason. > When our ancestors, Rousseau wrote, made the fatal decision to divide the earth into individually owned plots, creating legal structures to protect their property, then governments to enforce those laws, they imagined they were creating the means to preserve their liberty. In fact they 'ran headlong to their chains'. This is a powerful image, but it is uncelar what Rousseau felt this lost liberty would actually have looked like; espectially if, as he insisted, any ongoing relationship, even one of mutual aid, is itself a restraint on liberty. It's hardly surprising that he ends up inventing a purely imaginary age in which each individual wandered alone among the trees; more surprising, perhaps, that his imaginary world has come so often to define the arc of our own horizons. How did this happen? How convenient for this narrative that government was only relevant after there was private property. After all, no commonly-owned property is ever any benefit to anyone, and thus needs no protection. I recently read an interesting article on the [unofficial history of america](https://www.adbusters.org/article/the-unofficial-history-of-america), that originally it was anticorporation but those protections were whittled away over time. We still call ourselves the land of the free, but that really doesn't mean what it used to. > > As families multiplied, the means of subsistence began to fail; the nomad (or roaming) life ceased, and PROPERTY started into existence; men chose habitations; agriculture made them intermix. Language became universal; living together, one man began to measure his strength with another, and the weaker were distinguished from the stronger. This undoubtedly created the idea of mutual defence, of one individual governing diverse families reunited, and of thus defending their persons and their fields agains the invasion of an enemy; but hence LIBERTY was ruined in its foundation, and EQUALITY disappeared. > [footnote] Barruel 1799: 104. The quote is from an anti- Illuminati tract, claiming to be the 'Code of the Illuminati', and this whole discourse is shrouded in rumour and accusation that we can't even be entirely sure our sources didn't just make it up; but in a way it hardly matters, since the main point is that the right wing was Rouuseauian ideas as inspiring leftist revolutionary activity. > These words are drawn from the purported manifesto of the Secret Order of the Illuminati, a network of revolutionary cadres organized withing the Freemasons by a Bavarian law professor named Adam Weishaupt. > At the time of the American Revolution, the terms 'left' and 'right' themselves did not yet exist. A product of the decade immediately following, they originally referred to the respective seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French National Assembly of 1789. > ...for most of European history intellectuals seem to have been the only class of people who weren't capable of imagining that other worlds might be brought into being ## 3. Unfreezing the Ice Age: in and out of Chains: the Protean Possibilities of Human Politics > Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other's views, or working out a common problem. ## 4. Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property: (Not Necessarily in that Order) > All such behaviour, Woodburn insisted, is based on a self- conscious ethos, that no one should ever be in a relation of ongoing dependency to anybody else. The "behavior" here is hunter-gatherer egalitarianism. True egalitarianism, where property, knowledge and prestige are all shared. --- > 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. Later in this book (in chapter 5, below) made a point that often people of different cultures intermixed without the cultures mixing, if only because people wanted to differentiate themselves from each other. The possibility of teo groups living nearby and not adopting each others' habits is now more believable to me than the proposal that because there was no sharing they must not have crossed paths at all. > John Stuart Mill protested that 'All the labour-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being' This is relevant now with the hype around LLMs and generative AI tools. Yes, a lot of people are potentially displaced by it (writers, journalists, and they keep talking about coders too), but those people still have to work. I don't understand why we aren't taking these benefits of technology and using them to make less work for ourselves. We keep working the same amount and maybe we have more to show for it but we aren't happier as a species, are we? --- > The argument goes back to John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argued that property rights are necessarily derived from labour. In working the land, one 'mixes one's labour' with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself. ## 5. Many Seasons Ago: Why Canadian Foragers Kept Slaves and their Californian Neighbors Didn't; Or, the Problem with 'Modes of Production' > 'Societies', wrote [Marcel] Mauss, 'live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.' Mauss in Schlanger 2006: 44, and see also pp. 69, 137. > In fact, Mauss concluded, it is precisely in comparing themselves with their neighbours that people come to think of themselves as distinct groups. --- > Amerindian societies typically referred to themselves by some term that can be roughly translated as 'human beings' -- most of the tribal names traditionally applied to them by Europeans are derogatory terms used by their neighbors ('Eskimo', for example, means 'people who don't cook their fish', and 'Iroquois' is derived from an Algonkian term meaning 'vicious killers'). > Mere acts of violence are passing; acts of violence transformed into caring relations have a tendency to endure. (This was in a section about slaves being given the caretaking work) ## 8. Imaginary Cities: Eurasia's first urbanites and how they built cities without kings > It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did. > Similarly, it is almost universal common sense that it's relatively easy for a small group to treat each other as equals and come to decisions democratically, but that the larger the number of people involved, the more difficult this becomes. If you think about it, this isn't really as commonsensical as it seems, since it clearly isn't true of groups that endure. Over time, any group of intimate friends, let alone a family, will eventually develop a complicated history that makes coming to agreement on almost anything difficult; whereas the larger the group, the less likely it is to contain a significant proportion of people you specifically detest. No idea what a small familial group of people trying to make democratic decisions is like... > On ritual occasions, or when game is particularly abundant, such bands coalesce to form 'residential groups' (or 'clans') of roughly 150 persons, which -- according to Dunbar -- is also around the upper limit of stable, trusting relationships we are cognitively able to keep track of in our heads. And this, he suggests, is no coincidence. Beyond 150 (which has come to be known as 'Dunbar's Number') larger groups such as 'tribes' may form -- but, Dunbar asserts, these larger groups will inevitably lack the solidarity of smaller, kin-based ones, and so conflicts will tend to arise within them. > Dunbar 1996: 69-71. The cognitive basis of Dunbar's Number is inferred from the comparative studies of non-human primates, which suggest a correlation between neocortex size and group size in various species of monkeys and apes (Dunbar 2002). > There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don't like their families very much. Hah! > In this, at least, modern foragers are no different from modern city dwellers or ancient hunter-gatherers. We all have the capacity to feel bound to people we will probably never meet; to take part in a macrosociety which exists most of the time as 'virtual reality', a world of possible relationships with its own rules, roles and structures that are held in the mind and recalled through the cognitive work of image-making and ritual. --- > Now, it is considered bad form to question an excavator’s first-hand judgement about a site, but we cannot resist a couple of observations. First, the ostensible ‘state of anarchy’ (elsewhere described as ‘collapse and chaos’)113 lasted for a considerable period of time, between two and three centuries. Second, the overall size of Taosi during the latter period actually grew from 280 to 300 hectares. This sounds a lot less like collapse than an age of widespread prosperity, following the abolition of a rigid class system. It suggests that after the destruction of the palace, people did not fall into a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ but simply got on with their lives – presumably under what they considered a more equitable system of local self-governance. > Here, on the banks of the Fen River, we might conceivably be in the presence of evidence for the world’s first documented social revolution, or at least the first in an urban setting. ## 9. Hiding in Plain Sight: The indigenous origins of social housing and democracy in the Americas > Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to demonstrate personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprecation – even shame. They were required to subordinate themselves to the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as the proper reward of ambition, and then – with one’s ego in tatters – a long period of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiation ended with a ‘coming out’ of the newly constituted public servant, amid feasting and celebration. ## 10. Why the State Has No Origin: The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics > Our term ‘the state’ only came into common usage in the late sixteenth century, when it was coined by a French lawyer named Jean Bodin, who also wrote, among many other things, an influential treatise on witchcraft, werewolves and the history of sorcerers. (He is further remembered today for his profound hatred of women.) But perhaps the first to attempt a systematic definition was a German philosopher named Rudolf von Ihering, who, in the late nineteenth century, proposed that a state should be defined as any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory (this definition has since come to be identified with the sociologist Max Weber). On this definition, a government is a ‘state’ if it lays claim to a certain stretch of land and insists that, within its borders, it is the only institution whose agents can kill people, beat them up, cut off parts of their body or lock them in cages; or, as von Ihering emphasized, that can decide who else has the right to do so on its behalf. Any other definitions of "state"? > Marxists offered one: they suggested that states make their first appearance in history to protect the power of an emerging ruling class. As soon as one has a group of people living routinely off the labour of another, the argument ran, they will necessarily create an apparatus of rule, officially to protect their property rights, in reality to preserve their advantage (a line of thinking very much in the tradition of Rousseau) > Land is only really ‘yours’, in this sense, if no one would think to challenge your claim over it, or if you have the capacity to summon at will people with weapons to threaten or attack anyone who disagrees, or just enters without permission and refuses to leave. Even if you shoot the trespassers yourself, you still need others to agree you were within your rights to do so. In other words, ‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. > We would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power.2 > Sovereignty always represents itself as a symbolic break with the moral order; this is why kings so often commit some kind of outrage to establish themselves, massacring their brothers, marrying their sisters, desecrating the bones of their ancestors or, in some documented cases, literally standing outside their palace and gunning down random passers-by.62 Apparently Graeber wrote a prior book with someone else titled _Kings_ (the book, not the coauthor). > We’ve also observed that when early regimes do base their domination on exclusive access to forms of knowledge, these are often not the kinds of knowledge we ourselves would consider particularly practical (the shamanic, psychotropic revelations that seem to have inspired the builders of Chavín de Huántar would be one such example). In fact, the first forms of functional administration, in the sense of keeping archives of lists, ledgers, accounting procedures, overseers, audits and files, seem to emerge in precisely these kinds of ritual contexts: in Mesopotamian temples, Egyptian ancestor cults, Chinese oracle readings and so forth.116 So one thing we can now say with a fair degree of certainty is that bureaucracy did not begin simply as a practical solution to problems of information management, when human societies advanced beyond a particular threshold of scale and complexity. > Our emerging archaeological understanding suggests that the first systems of specialized administrative control actually emerged in very small communities. > Intriguingly, it is possible that we are witnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world’s first cities, and that administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening. > As anyone knows who has spent time in a rural community, or serving on a municipal or parish council of a large city, resolving suchinequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair. It’s the addition of sovereign power, and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it’ that allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous. > We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises. The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, much as physically running away from a difficult situation is the most basic element of the first. In fact, the earliest word for ‘freedom’ recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term _ama(r)-gi_, which literally means ‘return tomother’ – because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom, cancelling all non-commercial debts and in some cases allowing those held as debt peons in their creditors’ households to return home to their kin. > If anything is clear by now it’s this. Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart. Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself. > What until now has passed for ‘civilization’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre (this because bureaucracy requires math, and math probably was developed by women, through weaving and beadwork) ## 11. Full Circle: On the historical foundations of the indigenous critique > The key to the importance of grain, Scott notes, is that it was durable, portable, easily divisible and quantifiable by bulk, and therefore an ideal medium to serve as a basis for taxation. Growing above ground – unlike, say, certain tubers or legumes – grain crops were also highly visible and amenable to appropriation. Cereal agriculture did not cause the rise of extractive states, but it was certainly predisposed to their fiscal requirements.3 > The reason why these ways of thinking remain in place, no matter how many times people point out their incoherence, is precisely because we find it so difficult to imagine history that isn’t teleological – that is, to organize history in a way which does not imply that current arrangements were somehow inevitable. > Among descendants of Cahokian subjects, migration is often framed as implying the restructuring of an entire social order, merging our three elementary freedoms into a single project of emancipation: to move away, to disobey and to build new social worlds. --- > There were extensive stretches of uninhabited territory (often marked by ruins and effigies, their builders long since forgotten), so it was not difficult for groups simply to relocate. Sounds a lot like an RPG or video game. Ruins of a precursor race. --- > As we’ve said before, there are certain freedoms – to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties – that tend to be taken for granted by anyone who has not been specifically trained into obedience (as anyone reading this book, for instance, is likely to have been). > In other words, not only did indigenous North Americans manage almost entirely to sidestep the evolutionary trap that we assume must always lead, eventually, from agriculture to therise of some all-powerful state or empire; but in doing so they developed political sensibilities that wereultimately to have a deep influence on Enlightenment thinkers and, through them, are still with us today. > If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part ofhuman history. > Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones. All this brings into focus another question. Does this newly established nexus between external violence and internal care – between the most impersonal and the most intimate of human relations – mark the point where everything begins to get confused? Is this an example of how relations that wereonce flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck? If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?