In his reading of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Graeber clearly sees the influence of the early native Americans who came to France and were disgusted by the inhuman ways of the Europeans, letting poor people dying of hunger, forcing them to become soldiers and so on. Right in Rousseau, Graeber sees the origin of the left and of the struggle to bring Western society back to the origin, a theory that is starkly in contrast with that of Thomas Hobbes who see indigenous people as brutish savages and advocates for the creation of authoritarian states as we now them.

In this sense liberty, equality and fraternity are not only the motto of the French revolution which works like that of Rousseau and other radical philosophers contribute to generate; these values are already in place among indigenous societies and particularly among hunter-gatherers. We modern humans are only trying to go back to these values. Now the only dilemma here, as pointed out by Graber, is to understand whether these values with which we have lived throughout our time as hunter-gatherers can apply in the complex and quite oppressive environments of our modern and technology driven world.