The Three Fundamental Human Freedoms That Modern Society Lacks
Reflecting upon Graeber & Wengrow's book Dawn of Everything.
David Wengrow and David Graeber’s Dawn of Everything is a dense book. I got it the day it came out in October of 2021, and I’ve been working my way through it ever since. I only just finished. Usually, I could only take the book one single-digit percentage at a time, my mind reeling with the implications of every fact about pre-statehood Indigenous life that I absorbed along the way.
Normally I would hold such a plodding, effortful readerly experience against a book, viewing it as either bogged down by the authors’ own fixations or woefully ‘inaccessible’ to the average busy, distracted person. But here I think Wengrow & Graeber did exactly what they needed to do, to afford the subject sufficient depth. The fields of history and anthropology are simply too complex to talk about on a superficial level — and everything that we have been taught about early human societies is glaringly, ruinously wrong.
The Dawn of Everything is a book about the history of human inequality, and of the concept of states — that is, governments that reign over an entire body of land and the people upon it, using information, violence, and propagandistic charm in order to do so. Though today state governments touch basically every corner of the planet, laws dictate how we must behave, and a sharp divide separates the wealthy and powerful from the poor and humble, there is no reason to believe humans were always going to wind up living this way, or that we should continue to.
It turns out that most gatherings of humans that have existed in history were not ruled by states. States are a recent invention, really, dating back only a couple hundred years at most — and before the entire world became covered in seemingly all-powerful state governments, leaders didn’t possess ultimate control over their subjects. In fact, subjects had a degree of choice over whether to remain subjects at all.
Henry VIII certainly wouldn’t have thought of himself as leading a state called England, for example, though we might talk about him as if he were a state leader now. Even with whatever military might, wealth, and charm he might have possessed, he could never ensure that a representative sent on his behalf would actually follow his orders. It was difficult to punish a treasonous or dishonest courtier once they were out of the king’s immediate physical grasp. Wengrow & Graeber state that in fact, this is true of most monarchs and rulers throughout human history.
To take an example from a completely different realm of the world, the societies of the Incas and Aztecs were also quite permeable; though they engaged in warfare, war games, and ritualistic killings, these and many other Indigenous American peoples couldn’t restrict the movement of all that lived within what we now call their “empire”. In fact, they didn’t really have empires in the way we typically mean that word. Individuals moved in and out of these societies quite freely at all times. There was no citizenship, there were no borders, and there usually was no standing military. Kings and chiefs had very little oversight over what was happening in their kingdoms, and people frequently left of their own accord.
Indigenous people in North America also moved between a variety of societies and areas of the continent, and not only to escape violence or oppressive rule. As Wengrow and Graeber state, a subset of human beings have always wanted to take a trek as far away as possible from their families. In fact, that’s probably a large part of why we see human settlements on far-flung islands and across vast expanses of desert relatively early in our collective history. There has always been an explorational, experimental spirit to our species, and some of us have always hated our relatives enough to risk everything to get away.
“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. And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else. Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them.”
― Dawn of Everything, page 279.
It’s difficult for modern people to imagine a life of such unbridled liberty and unauthoredness. Today, our names and histories follow us everywhere that we go. Knowledge about who we are, where we’ve lived, the kinds of jobs we’ve labored in, and even the medical issues we’ve endured can follow us everywhere we go. Even if we travel to far-away lands with different languages and cultures, we have to seek approval from multiple governments in order to do so, and we can’t be freed of our old associations if we do.
But in the past, humans could cast off their names and histories, or even have their names changed by a new culture they’d joined. Entire societies of people split off from existing cultures, and then chose to distinguish themselves from those old cultures as much as humanly possible, with hunters & raiders sometimes becoming peaceful foragers and vice versa.
As Wengrow and Graeber describe, human progress does not follow a linear pathway, from least technologically advanced to most over time, nor have they always moved from being small disparate communities of hunter-gatherers, to practicing agriculture, to forming larger, more law-governed cities in that order. People have instead moved in and out of various phases, adopted and abandoned tools and forms of social organization for a multitude of reasons — and it’s always been a core practice of humanity to engage in heated political debate about these things.
The mind boggles reading just how many different ways of organizing and getting by humanity has really attempted. Today, Wengrow and Graeber write, state-based civilization can seem like an inevitable fact of history, as if human advancement was always going to lead to the point of large empires and powerful nations. But with their vivid examples and the sheer diversity of human modes of life and philosophical thought on display, the authors make it clear that this isn’t the case.
It was possible for humans to organize the erecting of large monuments or hearty food stores without a government administrator taxing the public or forcing laborers to do any of it. People were able to care for the sick, disabled, and aged without a formal social welfare system or even much wealth. And in many cases, humans actively chose to play along with the charismatic displays of a ruler, even if the “king” or “God” that they served was actually only their king for a few months out of the year, or if his authority only extended as far as his eyes could see.
Most Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States debated how best to arrive at decisions, how to arrange themselves, who had the right to use violence, and when — and they never stopped debating these things, or reconstituting their societies in order to reflect the changing point of view.
Today, in comparison, human organizing is quite stagnant. Though a majority of Americans support abolishing the Electoral College and at least a third of us have similar feelings about the Supreme Court, making significant changes to our existing government seems politically impossible. No matter any gathering of Americans’ opinions about police or desire to raise children free from coercive gendering at birth, actually organizing to live in accordance with our values is almost unfathomable. A combination of zoning laws, property laws, government oversight, and regular old poverty prevents us from finding people who think like we do, escaping our old ways of being, and creating new ways to live.
Today, where we live determines the laws we must live under, and as a result, who we get to be — and it’s incredibly difficult to ever make an escape. As an American, I get to enjoy the ill-gotten gains of global imperialism, eating bananas and coconuts during any season and dressing myself in cute, affordable t-shirts that were manufactured in sweatshops on the other side of the world. As a resident of Illinois, I get to take hormones that alter my body and outward presentation, and if I wanted to marry another man, I could, and that marriage would be recognized by my society.
But if I were living in Florida, I’d struggle to actually be the gay, transgender man that I am. And if I were living in one of the countries the United States extracts labor from, I might not have the time or energy to even dream of the kind of person I might one day want to be. If I wanted to escape my plight, I likely wouldn’t have the money or paperwork to be able to do so. And so I would be forced to continue following the laws of the land where I lived, and participating in its economic system, with no ability to change who I was or how I related to others. I’d be stuck — as many people are stuck, whether they’re in Florida or Guangzhou.
Throughout most of human history, though, this wasn’t the case. State rule was not supreme, social rules were not inviolable, and people did have some say over the rules of the societies in which they lived. In their book, Wengrow and Graeber argue that most of humanity enjoyed three fundamental freedoms — and that the loss of these three freedoms is why we now live with deeply entrenched inequality that can’t seem to be moved.
The three freedoms that most of our ancestors enjoyed, but which most modern humans lack are:
The freedom to leave.
The freedom to disobey an order.
The freedom to create new ways of relating to one another.
In the remainder of this essay, I will break each of these freedoms down, provide some historical and anthropological evidence for their widespread existence in human history, and explain what the loss of them means for us today. Consider this a supercharged Spark Notes of Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, and a reflective review sharing some of the book’s most important take-aways.
1. The Freedom to Leave
I think when most of us imagine early human societies, we tend to picture small bands of hunter-gatherers scouring the wilderness in search of anything remotely digestible. Early humans lived small encampments or caves with very few possessions, the legend goes, with almost no energy left at the end of the day for invention or creativity.
We imagine a lifestyle of uncertainty and violence, with high mortality rates and numerous sexual assaults. Maybe we even think of a powerful “alpha” male figure presiding over his wives and children with unquestioned authority, if we’ve read too much evolutionary psychology.
This is the early human history that social scientists believed in during middle of the 20th century, and it’s the image of our origins that still routinely appears in movies and TV shows. But none of it is reality-based. Hunter-gatherers did not (and do not) have especially punishing lives, for one; they only work about twenty hours per week gathering food, leaving plenty of time for leisure and their own projects. Historically, they enjoyed free housing in lush, idyllic areas, along with free organic food, and fresh water; Graeber and Wengrow argue many past hunter-gatherer societies had what would pass for an absolutely lavish existence today.
Many hunter-gatherer societies put their free time and abundance of resources to use: arranging large gatherings, competitive games, and festivals, engaging in trade with other peoples, constructing monuments or burial grounds, temporarily worshipping “play kings” for a season, and growing food in small gardens not out of necessity, but for pleasure (an act anthropologists call “play farming”). When they accumulated wealth, many of these societies seem to have deliberately kept inequality at bay by burying the dead with numerous riches, taking those objects out of circulation.
Counter to the popular myth that says agriculture was necessary to human progress, hunter-gatherers often had cities, and stockpiles of food. Sometimes they had rulers, but often they were organized in a less hierarchical way. Some hunter-gatherer cultures engaged in war with neighboring societies, or captured members of competing groups and enslaved them. Many barred violence against any members of their own community, especially violence against women and children, or required a community consensus before engaging in warfare.
These were (and are!) incredibly complex, varied modes of human organization. We shouldn’t idealize them as inherently more peaceful or morally ascended than groups of humans that farm for food, or participate in industrial production — but we certainly can’t say they were all stuck and starving, ruled over by oppressive alphas. Early humans enjoyed a great deal of mobility. This freedom continued throughout Indigenous history throughout the world, until the arrival of national borders and the state.
“North American Cities were, with few exceptions, marked by low birth rates and low population densities, which in turn facilitated mobility and made it easier for agriculturalists to shift back to a mode of subsistence more oriented to hunting, fishing, and foraging; or simply to relocate entirely. Meanwhile women…took on stronger political roles.” — Dawn of Everything, page 472.
In Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow argue that most early human societies were shaped by the freedom “to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place.” This is a difficult freedom for those of us living under capitalism to grasp. Our wealth (and with it, our security) is tied to our homes and the things we possess, and we are expected to care only for ourselves and our immediate kin.
Within this reality, fleeing an abusive partner or even just escaping an unfulfilling home life requires a lot of money, or a ton of pre-existing social support. One must always be able to buy a new place to rest one’s head. But in most human cultures of the past, this simply was not the case. People moved fluidly, perhaps engaging in trade or offering labor in order to find a place within an unfamiliar society, but just as often merely claiming a space and folding themselves within the greater fabric of a civilization without needing to be approved of or to pay their way.
Many ancestral human societies were “gift economies” where resources were shared without question. To keep track of what one person ‘owed’ to another was considered a great offense in many ancestral cultures, as David Graeber discussed in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
In Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow describe early cities as great ‘hospitality zones’ where anyone could find their own space. Large urban gatherings of humans were a social experiment, not a necessity for industrial production — again, almost a form of ‘play.’ People came together in large urban dwellings without any government creating them or organizing their behavior, and they could leave just as easily.
The nearest modern-day analogue to this that my brain can come up with is how people treat one another in camping spaces, homeless encampments, at outdoor festivals, or on really lengthy hiking trails. When you’re out in the wilderness with a bunch of other people and you have lots of time to kill, you don’t tend to keep track of whom owns what, and you’re just not as picky or transactional in who you spend time with as you might be in another setting.
On some level you’re just thankful for the company and the contribution to the camp. People lend one another supplies, give old equipment away, invite strangers to join them by the fire for a smoke and a drink, and stop measuring everyone by their output, wealth, or social position. (My buddy Chuck McKeever’s book A Good Place for Maniacs, about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, has many beautiful illustrations of this. Even the title of the book is nod to the fact that society’s outcasts find greater belonging and freedom out on the trail).
This is how many human beings historically lived — though again, both I and Dawn of Everything want to try and avoid overly romanticizing it. Many of the reasons that humans traveled away from their homes and into unfamiliar lands was to escape deprivation or violence. Throughout our existence as a species, families have abused their children, slavery has been practiced, and women have been subjugated by men. These and many other horrors have always been with us.
But what’s different between how these horrors were experienced in the past and how they are experienced now is the degree of agency many humans once had to alter where they were and who they associated with. A past life of oppression could readily be left behind, because freedom was only as far away as the nearest society that would tolerate you. And no matter the stigmas a person bore within their home culture, they could come to be known by a new name or as a new person within a different society.
In many cases, the intermingling of different cultures and clans was actively encouraged. In most Native American societies in North America, for instance, a person was barred from having children with a member of their own clan. Travel and cultural exchange were figured into how most societies operated. Many societies believed that providing food and shelter to everyone was a precondition of liberty for anyone, and maintained strict rules regarding the importance of providing hospitality to strangers. There’s a reason why two of humanity’s oldest story tropes are that a man goes on a journey, and a stranger arrives into town. Leaving and arriving are two of humanity’s most fundamental activities.
Before the existence of borders, birth certificates, state militaries, and federal taxes, it was far easier for a person to pack up and leave home, or get away from the influence of a leader or governing body that they disagreed with. This also made it far easier for our ancestors to disobey rulers who might otherwise have oppressed them — or to flout social norms altogether. This brings us to the second freedom:
2. The Freedom to Disobey a Rule or Order
When it was easier for human beings to relocate, it was also far easier for them to escape oppressive rule. With full freedom of movement afforded to most people, in fact, it was difficult for any kind of truly powerful king or leader to really exist.
This is another reality of human history that I think the average modern person might find difficult to understand. I certainly did. It isn’t intuitive to many of us that earlier humans were more free than we are, because we have been taught that people were subjugated by kings and violent dictators throughout most of early history, followed by empires and religious institutions. We’re taught that it was only after the Enlightenment that people began philosophizing about human liberty and slowly working their way to equal political representation for all, which was established with the right to vote.
As Dawn of Everything makes clear, this is a very European, shortsighted view of where freedom comes from. Long before Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Voltaire began pondering how best to elevate human nature, Indigenous American thinkers such as Kandiaronk were comparing various native societies to one another, debating the optimal modes of human self-governance, and contrasting the freedom of Indigenous life on Turtle Island with the hierarchical, oppressive societies that existed across in England and mainland Europe.
Centuries before the French Revolution, Indigenous people in the Mississippian region had rejected the violent, charismatic sovereign that ruled the Cahokia settlement in favor of more democratic modes of government. Long before the United States began contemplating the abolition of slavery, the Chetco people in what is now California had rejected mass enslavement and created cultural myths designed to ensure it would never rise up again. And many thousands of years before the American colonies broke away from English rule, Indigenous societies throughout the continent were breaking off from one another, challenging existing forms of governance, and imagining new ways of being.
The rule of law simply wasn’t as iron-tight in the past as it often feels today. There was a great deal more human mobility and anonymity, and with it far greater room to diverge and experiment. As I’ve already described, most rulers of the distant past were not quite as powerful as we’ve been conditioned to believe they were. Even a truly powerful king couldn’t control behavior that he couldn’t personally oversee, and militaries were won over with stirring propaganda and complex political and familial loyalties rather than being conscripted by force. There was a greater skepticism of rules and commands, because humans had far more options for disobeying without consequence.
Until state governments finally became powerful enough to track and control how most people moved through the world and behaved, Graeber and Wengrow write that most groups of humans had a strong aversion to being told what to do. Cultures from this era of human history that still exist today, such as the Nuer in Sudan and the Hazda in Tanzania, tend to regard all members of their communities as deserving of equally high regard, and shun the act of giving another person an order.
“The real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.” — Dawn of Everything, page 132.
Indigenous societies such as the Wendat historically believed that violence should never be used against members of their own group; mistreatment of women and even the spanking of children by parents were both considered verboten. In some Indigenous cultures, chiefs mainly existed to prevent any intense hierarchies from forming, and positions of power had to be passed along in ways designed to limit inequality. For example, nobles might have been required to marry commoners, or new leadership had to be selected from outside the current chief’s family.
Many Native American chiefs throughout what is now the United States had very limited power, in general. They might only be in charge of leading military expeditions once war had already been approved of by democratic vote, for example, or they were only in charge of performing symbolic roles during ceremonies. Some tribal leaders only held authority during specific seasons of the year, and never had the power to compel anyone to do anything.
And even in societies where a ruler did possess the authority to tell people what to do and could use violence to try and force them to obey, an unwilling subject could make an escape — or just choose to live far away enough on the fringes of the kingdom to not be monitored or controlled. This was true of many subjects living on the fringes of Aztec and Inca lands, for instance.
Graeber and Wengrow write that even in Medieval Europe, human life was less controlled by sovereign power than we might imagine. Feudal laborers weren’t slaves being forced to till the land by the king and his military; they spent many of their days in leisure, drinking and celebrating, with over 60 recognized annual holidays on the calendar.
Local witches often had more control over the farming & harvesting schedule than any kind of royal leadership did, as Abby Thorn beautifully describes in her video on witchcraft, gender, and Marxism. They could ensure everyone had the day off simply by declaring that they’d observed some portent of doom on the horizon — and since the peasants benefitted from this, the witches’ authority was upheld and celebrated.
Those of us who grew up reading about Enlightenment thinkers and “noble savages” learned that humans are by nature chaotic and selfish, and require a strong leader to force us to focus and complete difficult tasks. But again, the vibrancy and diversity of human history in Dawn of Everything proves this isn’t the case. Most humans who have built houses and cities, farmed land, fermented food, buried their dead, partook in trade, or created beautiful monuments did so without anybody forcing them to.
In many cases in human history, administrative power was completely divorced from leadership power, meaning that people stayed organized and kept records of their affairs because they chose to, and because it was helpful, not because of the orders of the tax man or some grand vizier.
Graeber and Wengrow write that many large human dwellings and monuments in the Americas were likely planned out by women who kept meticulous records using knots tied into string. This early record-keeping system was essentially an early version of a binary coding language, and it made data recording and architectural planning efficient, and accessible for an average person to do.
The arrestingly beautiful Serpent Mounds in my home state of Ohio were likely built by Indigenous people slowly, in annual gatherings over the course of numerous years. Indigenous peoples first built the mounds about three thousand years ago, and then organized a restoration of them nearly one thousand years later. There was no powerful leader present to enslave or conscript people and force them to build these mounds — or any other mounds on Turtle Island like them. Their creation was a coordinated act of human expression, ritual, or play.
It turns out humans have a strong drive to produce great works, even when (or perhaps especially when) we are not forced to. And when we have the freedom to move as we like and to disobey laws we disagree with, we also get to apply our wonderfully creative, inventive minds to the act of social organization itself — which brings us to the final freedom that Graeber and Wengrow describe.
The Freedom to Create New Ways of Relating
Though Medieval people worked beneath kings and were told how to behave by the Church, they were also familiar with democracy. At holidays like Yuletide, the community came together to vote democratically on a temporary king to oversee celebrations.
During many annual festivals in Medieval Europe, the existing social order was flipped on its head, with lower-class members of society being exalted, children commanding parents, women issuing orders to their husbands, and leaders or sheriffs being robbed of their authority, if only for a time. And though many feudal monarchs claimed to be imbued with power from God, free peasants on their lands could vote with their feet and relocate to another kingdom at any time they pleased.
Several hundred years later, Enlightenment-era philosophers would claim that no humans had really practiced direct democracy since Ancient Rome, but that wasn’t true. Humans have experimented with forms of governance and organization across all of time, Graeber and Wengrow write. And before state governments cemented what the rule of law was and who was subjected to it, we had a lot more power to play with how we gathered and divvied up power.
If you can leave a place you don’t like at any time, and disobey any rule that you do not agree with, you have a great deal of freedom to think about who you want to associate and what you desire for the rules to even be. And so we see that humans who possessed the first two of Graeber & Wengrow’s freedoms also played quite freely with the third freedom, which is essentially the freedom to rewrite political rules. Many human societies did not stick to an unchanging style of government at all, instead shifting between various rules and structures over the course of a single year.
Some Indigenous cultures in the Midwest and Southern United States, for example, gathered in cities for certain portions of the year, but went on lengthy hunting and fishing trips during which the very young and the very old stayed behind. In many Indigenous societies there were seasons of rule and seasons of freedom, with kings or chiefs living as regular everyday citizens the majority of the time, or citizen police forces reverting to a more permanent status as clowns.
“A police force that operated for only three months of the year, and whose membership rotated annually, was in a certain sense a play police force — which makes it slightly less bizarre that their members were sometimes recruited directly from the ranks of ritual clowns.” — Dawn of Everything, page 502.
Long after the powerful chiefdoms of the Mississippian region had declined, people in the region still paid tribute to minor local micos, or symbolic rulers who no longer held any political power and hadn’t possessed any for hundreds of years. After these descendants of rulers began to die out, people in the region started living in large, communal houses rather, after centuries of living spread out in distant homesteads. The societal structure was in a constant state of evolution, influenced by the wars and rulers of the past, but not tied down by them.
As a reader, it’s striking to me how more openly people with such freedoms contemplated issues of identity. For example, if a murdered Wendat warrior was avenged and his killer was captured, for example, it was up to the wives and children of the deceased to determine how justice would be served. Either the killer would be ritualistically tortured for days, with the entire community participating — or he’d be given a new name, perhaps even the name of the man he had killed, and adopted into Wendat society in his victim’s place.
Some Amazonian peoples doted on their war captives as if they were pets, until such captives became sufficiently ‘domesticated’ by their new culture and began being counted as citizens in full. And as Graeber and Wengrow describe at length, numerous European settlers in the American colonies broke away from their home cultures to be welcomed into Indigenous societies, recognizing that they actually enjoyed greater freedom, political influence, and social mobility as members of egalitarian tribes, compared to when they were subject to British rule.
These are just some of the many examples the authors provide of how mutable human social orders have frequently been. In the absence of a powerful state or an unquestioned Church, beliefs and ritualistic practices were also subject to evolution and debate. Throughout ancient Egyptian history, for instance, we see contrasting views over what the living owed to the dead, then crystallizing into more standard expectations around 3500 BC.
Much of ancient Egyptian society as we now know it only came into existence once members of the culture began to believe that the dead required wheat bread and brewed beer to be left in their graves as a form of sustenance. Agriculture exploded in its scope and importance across the region for this specific reason — not because bread and beer were nutritionally necessary for living humans in the area.
The entire structure of a society was shaped by its shifting, debated religious beliefs surrounding death. Populations centralized, administrative bodies organized the growing of wheat and the distribution of bread and beer, labor was mobilized to ensure it was steadily produced, and a family’s social standing was reflected by their ability to feed their deceased loved ones. An entire political system was created to enable a religious practice.
This really shows just how powerful human ideas have always been, and how philosophical at its core our species really is. We can construct entire empires complete with vast civic infrastructures, just by making decisions about what we believe in.
Human beings don’t just use our free time and cognitive capacities to invent tools or make art; we also use our creative minds to construct new ways of relating to one another. Another ancient Egyptian innovation, after all, was an early version of the assembly line. The pyramids were built in much the same way that the Ford automobile was, but using only social technology, not industrial tools of production.
In Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow describe how Indigenous intellectuals created what would eventually become the Enlightenment-era coffee house; men of the Creek tribe would gather around for hours every day sipping caffeinated beverages, smoking tobacco, and rationally debating matters of politics. Centuries before this, Aztec nobles had demonstrated their prowess to the public by engaging in open philosophical debates. And since many Indigenous leaders in North America lacked the power to issue orders, their influence hinged on their persuasive abilities and charm.
It wasn’t just any particular course of action that was subject to debate in many of these societies, but the entire social and political order. Many tribes had incredibly intricate clan structures that dictated how people within a community organized their sleep quarters, their sitting positions at regular councils, and whom they were permitted to marry. Over time, additional clans, structures, and even cosmologies were added, sometimes creating incredibly complex forms of social organization that we really have no modern-day parallel to.
I think many modern people mistake intricate social practices like these for rigid ‘rules’ that restricted people’s freedom. But the reality is they were often far more changeable than any social orders that govern our lives today. There’s nothing I can do, politically or persuasively, to get my neighbors to stop viewing me as disabled, and there’s no way I can escape society classifying me as transgender, no matter how far away from my birth assignment I get, or how many years I live as a man. Much of my position in the world is locked in, and the unchangeable nature of my country’s political system and economy ensures this.
If a person grows up poor, evidence of their class is written into their accent, their teeth, and even basic stories of how they spent their summers as a child. They will continue to be judged by that context, and have their opportunities limited by it for the rest of their days.
No matter how much they speak out about it, they lack the ability to meaningfully challenge how society is organized for the poor. There are large swathes of the country that they can never live in, cultures and communities they can never pass into with ease. Even though millions of people in the United States share their plight, collectively they have almost no voice in government, and very little ability to ever be heard.
Leave Non-Voters Alone
Non-voters aren’t lazy or apathetic, they’re victims of systemic injusticedevonprice.medium.com
No matter how many years I dwell within a community, being known by its people and rooting myself within its culture, I can never undo my original citizenship. I belong to the state I was born under and the laws that govern it, whether I like it or not. As a citizen of one of the world’s wealthiest and most militarized imperial powers, this fact restricts me — but nowhere near as much as it restricts almost everybody else on the planet.
People like me can accumulate the money and political influence needed to relocate, but we always require permission to move, and we are forever tracked by some state or another. Most other people on the planet do not even get that. Instead they’re hemmed in by laws that limit their ability to move, and are tied down by leases or debt balances they can scarcely afford to pay down. They can’t disobey the commands of their local police even once, lest they risk death or imprisonment, and if their government tells them what they can or can’t do with their bodies, they have no real means to disobey.
Politically, their influence is next to nothing, with the impact of their votes either being nullified by the cynical drawing of district lines, or by outright voter suppression. If they do not approve of how their political system works, they can’t do anything about that either, because its authority and structure is written into the law. They can’t leave, they can’t say no, and they can’t propose anything new. They’re forced to work, live, and raise their families in a state of permanent alienation, while also being monitored, trapped in small residences in packed cities, surrounded by people they barely have any connection to.
I think it’s really important that us modern-day people get more familiar with the ways in which our ancestors used to live, so we learn just how much freedom has been taken from us. Looking to the past can also help us recognize that the current social order is not so inarguable and inevitable as it might presently seem.
Reading Dawn of Everything, I was repeatedly struck with an all-body sadness, and a strange instinctual nostalgia for a way of living I’ve never even seen. It was as though some rebellious human spirit inside of me had always known that it was possible to walk away, to reject orders, and to explore new social possibilities alongside people who had reservations about the status quo, just like me.
I could easily envision some primordial echo of me who had abandoned his family the moment they began insisting he marry and bear children, and ventured out to become acquainted with all the options the world had to offer him. After exploring long expanses of nature and playing at many different roles within many different societies, this man finally arrived at one where he could more or less be himself. By then, he would have become so well-versed in his own capabilities and the political dilemmas of his day that he could have contributed greatly to philosophical debates in his new culture, weighing in during council meetings and collaborating with others to propose new solutions.
He would have been a learned and yet unpretentious man, his status determined by his experience and what he had to offer others, not by his wealth or his biological relations. As he aged, he could have trusted that his society would always have a place for him. When people in his community discussed burial and remembrance practices, he would be given a voice. Eventually he would pass on and be remembered, his social world shaped in a noticeable way by his impact, but continuing to reinvent itself long after he was gone.
I can’t help but yearn for such a reality, in which queer and disabled people could run away when we aren’t being included, and where people of color are not systematically excluded on the basis of imperialist beliefs about their bodies. I wish that each one of us could refuse to pay taxes that go toward wars we don’t believe in, and that we had the genuine power to weigh on whether we went to war at all.
I wish that we could tear down jails and mental institutions, erase debts, raise and teach our children collectively, and rethink how we distribute housing and food. A better world than the one we’ve been saddled with is so tantalizingly possible — or at the very least, it is possible for us to live in a world where humanity can change.
The persistent inequality and violent state authority that shapes modern civilization was not always around. It does not have to remain around forever. The whole of human history is one of experimentation and change. We need only to get back to it, so that we can experiment our way to something better again.
We don’t have to have a utopic vision figured out. Humans have always debated what the best ways of governing ourselves have been. We may never arrive at a tidy solution. In fact, Dawn of Everything has left me convinced that to become static is perhaps the worst outcome a human society could have. We need the ability to change and evolve. We need the ability to leave, the ability to say no, and the ability to imagine new futures for ourselves.
Thank you this is the spark notes I NEEDED, I’ve been wanting to read this ever since you told me about it but the page count has been so daunting!!
So much of history writing is about the rediscovery of people, information and ideas that were previously ignored, belittled or suppressed. This book definitely falls into that tradition.