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