Cultures that created a sort of hierarchy in one season and destroyed it in another, every year, cannot help but have been as conscious of possibilities and choices in public policy as some of the Native Americans who were documented to be so after European arrival. Seasonal festivals in much of the world may be vestiges of more substantive seasonal changes in political power, but in that case the ability to conceive of what they once meant has faded.
One element of contemporary Western society self-interestedly promoted as permanent and inevitable is war. But the Earth had never seen anything resembling today's sorts of wars until very recently, and has seen societies of all varieties live for long periods with war and without war. There is no such thing as The Primitive Human or "human nature" from which to derive the True answer of whether humans Really wage war or not. People are not chimpanzees and are also not bonobos; they're not even people, where that is taken to specify some particular mode of behavior. All we have is the fact that most people who engage in war suffer horribly, while the cases documented in all of history of suffering from total war deprivation are nonexistent. Societies have banned war, required that victors in war pay compensation for every victim thereby discouraging war, created peace alliances, created peace-keeping officials, made war a subject of mockery rather than glory, treated war as a pastime acceptable only in a certain season of the year, treated war more as a game or spectacle with few if any deaths and, of course, have also done just the reverse of all of these things. The choice is ours.
The Spanish conquistadores, like others around the world, found that the societies that were difficult to conquer were the ones that had no ruler, the ones that had people lacking the habit of obedience, people who would have laughed or been revolted at the idea of pledging allegiance to a flag. The best defense against tyranny and occupation is actually not technological or murderous, but rebellious.
David Graeber and David Wengrow believe the evidence shows war to have been rare or nonexistent through most of humanity's existence, though it certainly has existed with and without large urban agricultural societies.
Much of the above may seem obvious, perhaps especially to the degree that one has not benefitted from formal education. If parts of it seem the opposite of obvious, then the extremely well-documented book, The Dawn of Everything, may help with that. But is it really needed? Do we really have to know that something has been done before in order to do it? The lengths we go to, to prove that even if there's nothing new under the sun we can still have a better society than we do now, end up, as in this book, endlessly chronicling new things appearing under the sun.
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