The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity ↑

The freedom to enact other forms of social existence

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 of human history.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021, from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity