What went wrong with humanity? When people look across contemporary headlines—inequality spiraling, sustainability failing, political systems crumbling—many assume the problem is inequality itself. But Graeber and Wengrow push deeper: the real catastrophe is our loss of social imagination—we’ve lost the ability to even imagine alternatives. In the first half of Chapter 12’s Conclusion, they trace how three basic freedoms disappeared—freedom to move, to disobey, and to reimagine social existence—and how warfare, Roman law, and patriarchal households combined to create systems of domination we now mistake for natural or inevitable.
The Enlightenment Debate: Left, Right, or Imposed?
Standard narratives about inequality offer two tired alternatives: Rousseau’s Fall from Grace (we were once egalitarian hunter-gatherers) or Hobbes’s nasty, brutish state of nature (things are better now, stop complaining). As the authors note on page 493, the Hobbesian view “is extremely popular among billionaires, but holds little appeal to anyone else.” (For their earlier critique of Hobbes and the “stupid savage” myth, see The Indigenous Critique.) Both stories fail to match the archaeological and historical evidence explored throughout the book.
Today’s debate centers on the Enlightenment’s legacy. Conservatives now defend Enlightenment ideals, with Steven Pinker championing reason, science, and progress as guarantors of improvement. But Graeber and Wengrow identify critical problems: if Western modernity represents humanity’s apex, why did it require colonial violence to impose? Why would market capitalism never have won a democratic vote during most of its history? And if the West is best, why did so many Europeans flee to Indigenous societies?
More fundamentally, the “Enlightenment as fundamental break” narrative portrays everything before it as “traditional societies”—peoples supposedly trapped in cyclical time, enslaved to custom, unable to imagine political alternatives. This view pervades both political rhetoric and early anthropology, which described non-Western societies as locked in eternal structural patterns rather than as dynamic, historical communities.
Mircea Eliade and the Myth of Cyclical Time
Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade pushed this logic to extremes, arguing that traditional societies lived in cyclical time where “everything important has already happened.” All significant events occurred at creation, with mythic figures walking the Earth. Contemporary people merely recycled or repeated those primordial acts. Even major changes would be absorbed into existing myths rather than recognized as innovations. History itself became impossible—everything predetermined by ancestral customs.
Eliade’s term illud tempus (“that time” in Latin)—referring to this mythic dawn when everything was established—gives Graeber and Wengrow their book title. The concept embodies the arrogance they’re challenging: the assumption that only modern Western people possess linear time consciousness, progress awareness, and the capacity to deliberately reshape society. Ironically, Eliade himself considered linear time catastrophic, producing anxiety and nihilism. Even more troublingly, he blamed Jews for introducing it—an accusation Graeber and Wengrow, as Jewish scholars, explicitly reject.
Technology, Women’s Knowledge, and the Zone of Ritual Play
Technological determinism—the notion that inventions drive social change through revolutionary breakthroughs—offers another flawed explanation for historical transformation. Graeber and Wengrow counter that technologies emerge from centuries of accumulated knowledge and experimentation, primarily by women. On page 499, they note: “Every time we sit down to breakfast, we are likely to be benefiting from a dozen such prehistoric inventions. Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can be almost certain she was a woman, and would most likely not be considered white if she tried to immigrate to a European country today.”
Moreover, many major innovations didn’t arise from practical necessity but from what the authors call the “zone of ritual play”—experimentation for its own sake. Greeks invented the steam engine for temple door effects. Chinese developed gunpowder for fireworks. This playful experimentation created an “encyclopedia of social possibilities” (spelled with the British “ae” in the book, which generates class discussion about spelling conventions).
The pattern holds across anthropology: centuries of accumulated knowledge, not sudden breakthroughs, explain human technological and social development. Yet despite this rich history of human experimentation and possibility, contemporary society has lost basic freedoms.
The Three Lost Freedoms
Rather than focus on inequality’s origins, Graeber and Wengrow return to the three fundamental freedoms they identified earlier—now asking how we lost them:
Freedom to move: The ability to migrate, traverse borders, enter different societies without surveillance, detention, or violent enforcement of territorial boundaries.
Freedom to disobey: The capacity to ignore orders without facing imprisonment, torture, or death. Not absolute license, but reasonable space to reject commands without catastrophic punishment.
Freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence: Perhaps most critically—the ability to even conceive of alternatives to current social arrangements, let alone experiment with implementing them.
This last freedom represents the deepest loss—the loss of social imagination itself. We’ve reached a point where imagining fundamentally different social organization feels impossible. The question becomes: why and when did we lose these freedoms?
Shrinking Worlds and the Rise of Warfare
One factor involves shrinking culture areas. Where people once traversed vast regions—Turtle Island (North America) functioning as a single cultural sphere—human societies gradually contracted. Smaller worlds meant fewer escape options, reduced ability to move between different social systems. Yet even 500 years ago, people could still leave state societies for alternatives if dissatisfied.
A more significant factor links external warfare to internal domination. Drawing on Douglas Fry’s work (though the class notes they should have cited it more explicitly), Graeber and Wengrow distinguish warfare from interpersonal violence. Warfare involves group-against-group conflict where any member of the enemy group becomes a legitimate target, regardless of individual culpability. This organized collective violence emerged perhaps 12,000-15,000 years ago and wasn’t continuous—long peaceful periods existed before, during, and after its emergence.
Crucially, warfare requires extensive conditioning. As the authors note on page 506, “it is almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs, and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other in such systematic and yet indiscriminate ways.” The military term “breaking” soldiers reveals the violence required to overcome natural human reluctance to systematically harm others. Historical examples include 19th-century line formations where soldiers were trained to continue firing even as comrades died beside them—behavior requiring deliberate psychological restructuring.
The connection between external military capacity and internal freedom loss becomes clearer through examination of patriarchal household structures.
Roman Law: Property, Slavery, and Domination
Roman legal concepts provide the template for contemporary understandings of property and power. Under Roman law, property owners possess absolute dominion—the right to destroy, modify, or control their possessions without restriction (barring violations of other laws). Own a car? You can destroy it. Own a house? Set off grenades inside if you want. The principle seems straightforward until we recognize its origins in slavery law.
Romans developed these property concepts by treating enslaved people as objects. Orlando Patterson’s work on social death—previously discussed in the course—explains how enslavement strips away capacity for personal relationships, reducing humans to things. Roman law simply extended this logic: if you own an object, you control it absolutely.
The linguistic legacy reveals the violence embedded in seemingly benign concepts. Familia—root of “family”—originally meant the household of enslaved people under the pater familias (father/head of household). “Family values” discourse thus unwittingly invokes slavery’s household structure. Similarly, domus (household) gives us both “domestic” and “dominate”—the power to control thoroughly linked to home and care.
These aren’t merely etymological curiosities. They reveal how contemporary ideas about property, family, care, and authority trace directly to Roman slavery systems and patriarchal control—and how this legal framework contributed to our loss of social imagination by making these arrangements seem natural and inevitable.
Wendat vs. French: Two Models of Violence and Care
Comparing Wendat and French Jesuit practices illuminates alternative possibilities. Both societies practiced public torture, shocking neither group when they encountered each other. However, the structural differences prove crucial.
Wendat practiced “mourning wars”—retributive conflicts following deaths of community members. Captives faced two possibilities: adoption into the society (replacing the deceased) or public torture. The Jesuits were shocked not by torture’s existence—common in France—but by its communal nature. Everyone participated: women, children, the entire community. They’d torture the captive, let him rest, then continue.
The critical distinction: Wendat torture applied only to external enemies, people captured in warfare. It never extended to household or community members. French torture, conversely, applied to anyone convicted of crimes—internal society members. It formed part of the regular punishment system.
This difference reflects deeper structural patterns. French society modeled households on Roman patriarchal principles: the pater familias exercising dominion over wives, children, and servants. As page 513 explains: “Each was made in the other’s image, with the patriarchal family serving as a template for the absolute power of kings and vice versa. Children were to be submissive to their parents always, wives to husbands, and subjects to rulers whose authority came from God.”
Domination and care fused together in this system. Parents invoke love while punishing: “this hurts me more than it hurts you.” The bizarre logic claims violence serves care—discipline demonstrates affection. Authority derives from God, flows through kings to fathers, who exercise it over wives and children.
Wendat society separated violence from household care. External warfare remained distinct from internal relationships. No fusion of domination with love, no patriarchal template scaling from family to kingdom. This structural difference preserved the space for social imagination—the possibility of organizing life differently.
The Path Forward: Recovering Lost Possibilities
Graeber and Wengrow haven’t yet proven their case—this is only the conclusion’s first half. But they suggest that if we seek to understand how humanity lost basic freedoms (to move, disobey, and reimagine social existence), we must examine the intersection of organized warfare, patriarchal households, and systems of domination that fuse violence with care.
The Roman legal legacy—treating people as property, households as dominion—combined with militarized external conflict and patriarchal authority structures to create self-reinforcing systems. These systems then became so naturalized, so embedded in language and thought, that imagining alternatives grew increasingly difficult.
Yet the Wendat example demonstrates that other arrangements remained possible even in relatively recent history. Societies could organize warfare, household life, and care differently. They could separate domains that European societies fused together. If we want to remake social relations and recover lost freedoms, we must study these alternative possibilities—not to romanticize them, but to understand that human social organization has always been more flexible, creative, and diverse than dominant narratives acknowledge.
The deepest loss may be imaginative: our inability to conceive that things could be fundamentally different. This loss of social imagination is what Graeber and Wengrow ultimately challenge. Recovering that capacity requires recognizing it once existed—that for most of human history, people experimented with social forms, moved between systems, and exercised political creativity. The “dawn of everything” wasn’t a mythic time when all possibilities were exhausted. It’s the perpetual present where humans continue to have choices about how to organize collective life—if we can recover the imagination to see them.
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