The idea that humans are inherently selfish and work for themselves is one the most stupid fucking myths invented by capitalists, it’s not even true in capitalism itself.

For all the individuality and selfishness that capitalism instills us with in order to survive in a cannibalistic system like it, you still see people going above and beyond and helping others with nothing to gain. Simple people risking their lives and swimming to rescue refugees so they won’t drown in the sea, people making food and distributing it to the ones who need it, people who risk their lives to fight fires that the capitalist state is unwilling to do so effectively.

We are a species that started out by being communal and evolved that way, the very reason that we became so advanced is that we are so capable of communicating and coming together to achieve common goals. While it doesn’t look that way in the capitalist dystopia that we live in, our nature is still inherent to us and it will awaken in full once we get rid of systems that rely on exploitation.

The citation is frustratingly misleading in this context.

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book is a very eye opening and worthwhile read. But it is also widely acknowledged by now to be full of sophistry. What they do well is piece together a lot of loose bits of important cultural anthropology out there into one big compilation strewn into a narrative. For anyone interested in cultural anthropology, it’s a great way to see everything all at once.

But they do also regularly leave out things in extremely misleading ways, create strawpeople, and act with a kind of penetratingly charismatic confusion.

In this particular context, the citation is egregious because they are attributing a conclusion that was borne out of the blood and sweat of researchers who G&W malign in a really dishonest way. Here’s something we’ve known since the 80s thanks to the work of cultural anthropologists studying the most egalitarian human societies in the world: Human egalitarianism was ubiquitous in early societies. But those cultural anthropologists are precisely the people that G&W have an axe to grind against.

G&W first of all provide gross misrepresentations of how these anthropologists come to their conclusions (or leave it out and act amused and confused at why some particular researcher they cite came to their conclusion). They second of all want to argue that this narrative is actually reactionary in all kinds of ways, and actually reject the ubiquity of egalitarianism in early human societies (and even reject that we can even come to any conclusions about early human societies, opting to start merely forty thousand years ago in the Upper Paleolithic Era, which has all kinds of methodological issues). But in fact, plenty of evidence suggests G&W’s narrative ends up being far more reactionary.

And yet here, this article suggests it’s G&W we can thank for the conclusion that early human egalitarianism is naturally ubiquitous! How backwards!

It’s a worthwhile read, but it does not belong in this article.