Am, i didn't know david graber, but i've read quite a bit about him. And and i think it is how to govern people, how to solve conflicts and things like that. So the potential interactions of and disagreements between people multiply astronomically as population increases. A large society that continues to leave conflict resolution to all its members is guaranteed to blow up. That factor alone would explain why societies of thousands can exist only if they develop alized authority to monopolize force and resolve conflict.
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.