LinkedIn Presents.

I'm Rufus Griscombe, and this is the next big idea.

Today, why the course of human election we've seen in generations, the question many of us are asking ourselves is, can we all get along?

Is our democracy working?

Is it possible to sustain collaborative, large-scale democracies that attend to everyone's needs?

I, for one, feel a little discouraged in this moment,

but I'm reminded of an uplifting conversation I had with David Wengro

about his extraordinary 2021 book, The Dawn of Everything,

a new history of humanity, which he co-wrote with the late anthropologist and anarchist,

David Graber.

To understand this conversation, you need a little backstory.

For decades, anthropologists have maintained that social evolution went like this.

First, we were hunter-gatherers living in small, blissful nomadic bands. Everyone was equal, everyone was free.

Then the story goes, we figured out farming, and things went downhill. Population swelled,

cities took shape. Food surpluses made possible artisans and armies and emperors. Before you knew it,

we had stratified societies in which the

ruling class subjugated the working class. But what if this social evolution was not inevitable?

What if the large-scale societies that emerged millennia ago could have been organized in totally

different ways? What would that mean for our understanding

of history, for our hopes for the future? These are the contrarian questions posed by the

Davids. It is clear they write that the world of hunter-gatherers, as it existed before the coming of

agriculture, was one of bold social experiments, resembling,

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