Quotes from David Graeber

qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings. 'Security' takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there's the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.

What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they're actually more imaginative than we are?

They quickly started passing from hand to hand and operated something like currency. The government first tried to forbid their use, then a year or two later—and this became a familiar pattern in China—when it realized that it could not suppress them, switched gears and established a bureau empowered to issue such notes themselves.

I was walking down the street with a friend the other day and a guy with a gun jumps out of an alley and says "Stick 'em up." As I pull out my wallet, I figure, "Shouldn't be a total loss." So I pull out some money, turn to my friend and say, "Hey, Fred, here's that fifty bucks I owe you." The robber was so offended he took out a thousand dollars of his own money, forced Fred to lend it to me at gunpoint, and then took it back again.

Good' and 'evil' are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because 'good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

Scientists in 2020 are not (as readers of mid-twentieth-century science fiction might have hoped) encountering alien civilizations in distant star systems; but they are encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar, but now understood in entirely new ways.

most Amazonians don't want to give others the power to threaten them with physical injury if they don't do as they are told. Maybe we should better be asking what it says about ourselves that we feel this attitude needs any sort of explanation.

The English word "free," for instance, is derived from a German root meaning "friend," since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a community of equals.

the taste for Victorian-era sci-fi futures is more than anything else a nostalgia for the last moment, before the carnage of World War I, when everyone could safely feel a redemptive future was possible.

What social forms would still exist, even among people who had no recognizable form of law or government? Would marriage exist? What forms might it take? Would Natural Man tend to be naturally gregarious, or would people tend to avoid one another? Was there such a thing as natural religion?

these same parties self-consciously rejected any remaining elements of their old working-class constituencies, and instead became, as Tom Frank has so effectively demonstrated, the parties of the professional-managerial class: that is, not just doctors and lawyers, but the administrators and managers actually responsible for the bullshitization of the caring sectors of the economy.15

Still, most testimonies focus on creativity as a form of defiance—the dogged fortitude with which many attempt to pursue art, or music, or writing, or poetry, serves as an antidote to the pointlessness of their "real" paid work.

It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. 'Good' and 'evil' are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because 'good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another.

Etant donné que la valeur du travail réside désormais moins dans ce qu'il produit ou dans les bienfaits qu'il apporte aux autres que dans sa dimension sacrificielle, tout élément susceptible de le rendre moins pénible ou plus plaisant, y compris la satisfaction de se sentir utile à ses semblables, diminue sa valeur - justifiant donc un salaire inférieur. C'est un système d'une incroyable perversité.

People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars – at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language – by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.

Even the most extreme individualists only become individuals through the care and support of their fellows;

Cleaning is a necessary function: things get dusty even if they just sit there, and the ordinary conduct of life tends to leave traces that need to be tidied up. But cleaning up after someone who makes a completely gratuitous and unnecessary mess is always irritating.

Why the West Rules – For Now

It's those who do not have the power to hire and fire who are left with the work of figuring out what actually did go wrong

So what is slavery? I've already begun to suggest an answer in the last chapter. Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one's context, and thus from all social relationships that make one a human being. Another way to put this is that the slave is, in a very real sense, dead.

on a political level, where every arbitrary act of power tends to reinforce a feeling that it's not power, but arbitrariness—that is, freedom itself—that is the problem.

When and how did we come to believe that creativity was supposed to be painful

Good' and 'evil' are purely human concepts. it would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because 'good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

We are projects of self-creation. What f we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling. story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?