it can be understood in a simple and general way

Disenchantment with western civilization led to re-thinkings about the idea of higher and higher stages.

A certain kind of re-thinking anthropologist said: “Life wasn’t so bad back then and it’s not so good now”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_the_Hunter

Re-thinking social changers realized this implied a critique of Marxism (which is heavily into progressive development) and so they were prone to call themselves anarchists instead. I think that’s a counterproductive terminology. I say that to my Fifth Estate friends all the time. But David Graeber adhered to it. Anyway, what he was motivated to do was to base our alternative worldview in social science:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

“The book ends by suggesting that narratives of social development in which western civilization is self-appointed to be the highest point of achievement to date in a linear progression are largely myths.”

The book sounds to me like a cacophony of details which is trying to justify what we want to say. I don’t have much interest in that kind of thing because it gets bogged down in controversies about the details. My sense is that the realization can be gleaned from simple and general ideas like . . . Benjamin Franklin in 1753:

“The proneness of human nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appear strongly in the heretofore little success that has attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians. . . . They visit us frequently and see the advantages that Arts, Science and compact Society procure us; they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never shown any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts.”

While Indians did not seem to have much inclination to exchange their culture for the Euro-American, many Euro-Americans appeared more than willing to become Indians at this time: “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. And that this is not natural [only to Indians], is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet within a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

Franklin followed with an example. He had heard of a person who had been “reclaimed” from the Indians and returned to a sizable estate. Tired of the care needed to maintain such a style of life, he had turned it over to his younger brother and, taking only a rifle and a matchcoat, “took his way again to the wilderness.” Reminiscent of Thoreau, Franklin used this story to illustrate his point that “no European who has tasted savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.” Indian societies, wrote Franklin, provided their members with greater opportunities for happiness than European cultures. Continuing, he said: “The care and labour of providing for artificial and fashionable wants, the sight of so many rich wallowing in superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distress’d for want, the insolence of [authority] . . . the [repression of over-domestication] all contrive to disgust them with what we call civil society.”

Graeber tried to document how “just fine” the Old Ways were (the ancient humans were civilized in their own ways) and dispute the idea of “advancement” into our ways … the conclusion being that we don’t have to live this way, a point well-taken. Many readers of the book seemed to get it, despite the slog of all the details. But is it then recognized just how hard it will be to back down from all the modern hypertrophies of population, production, etc. It’s a long way down.