The Dawn of Everything | David Graeber & David Wengrow

Why it is included:

This is a dense, academic text.

We include it because it dismantles the single biggest myth blocking our future: the idea that inequality and hierarchy are the inevitable price of "civilization."

Graeber and Wengrow use modern archaeology to prove that for 30,000 years, humans were conscious political experimenters.

Our ancestors built cities without kings, moved between hierarchies and egalitarianism seasonally, and played with social structures.

It proves we are not "stuck" in our current system by evolution; we are stuck because we have lost our political imagination.

This book gives us the historical precedent to reclaim it.