What Happens When Law and Order Breaks Down?

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I do think we need some kind of governance of some sort, whatever you want to call it n has to be hierarchical. It seems like people are rational actors and making, you know, sort of rational utility choices from an economic perspective. And so if if you say, ah, if you give them the incentive to cheat or steal, they will. Not everybody, but people sow the shadow of enforcement is important,. Ok, but you've slightly shifted the goal posts there. Mi, co man ologist, and i work in an institute with about a hundred colleagues who would fervently disagree with you. Oh, please.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike — either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

In this conversation, based on the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Shermer speaks with professor of comparative archaeology, David Wengrow, about his pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology that fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society.