Quotes from David Graeber

The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imaginations than on the life itself.

Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility.

The question of why one player won a game rather than another is different from the question of how hard the game is to play.

End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longer a working class. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau left us a story about the origins of social inequality that continues to be told and retold, in endless variations, to this day. It is the story of humanity's original innocence, and unwitting departure from a state fo pristine simplicity on a voyage of technological discovery that would ultimately guarantee both our 'complexity' and our enslavement. How did this ambivalent story of civilization come about?

Reconsider the lobster. Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating. It's unpleasant to throw a struggling creature in a pot of boiling water; one needs to be able to tell oneself that the lobster isn't really feeling it.

There is every reason to believe that sceptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them.

Still, I suspect they would all have agreed on at least two things: first, that the most important things one gets out of a job are (1) money to pay the bills, and (2) the opportunity to make a positive contribution to the world. Second, that there is an inverse relation between the two. The more your work helps and benefits others, and the more social value you create, the less you are likely to be paid for it.

In short, [Native Americans] say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.

Kandiaronk] swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:

If 'national character' can really be said to exist, it can only be asa. result of such schismogenetic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on. if nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another.

he had a way of standing and looking into the distance like he really believed in something

Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 BC, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also received permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the creation of what we now consider Judaism.

we now know that placing prisoners in solitary confinement for more than six months at a stretch inevitably results in physically observable forms of brain damage. Human beings are not just social animals; they are so intrinsically social that if they are cut off from relations with other humans, they begin to decay physically.

How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but will not, for fear they should be imployed and set to work. —Antoine Le Grand, c. 1675

The burden of rights-scolding falls above all on the younger generations. In most wealthy countries, the current crop of people in their twenties represents the first generation in more than a century that can, on the whole, expect opportunities and living standards substantially worse than those enjoyed by their parents. Yet at the same time, they are lectured relentlessly from both left and right on their sense of entitlement for feeling they might deserve anything else.

it would appear to be a general truth that the more harm a category of powerful people do in the world, the more yes-men and propagandists will tend to accumulate around them, coming up with reasons why they are really doing good—and the more likely it is that at least some of those powerful people will believe them.

The less the value of work is seen to lie either in what it produces, or the benefits it provides to others, the more work comes to be seen as valuable primarily as a form of self-sacrifice, which means that anything that makes that work less onerous or more enjoyable, even the gratification of knowing that one's work benefits others, is actually seen to lower its value—and as a result, to justify lower levels of pay.

We modern-day humans tend to exaggerate our differences. The results of such exaggeration re often catastrophic. Between war, slavery, imperialism and sheer day-to-day racist oppression, the last several centuries have seen so much human suffering justified by minor differences in human appearance that we can easily forget just how minor these differences really are. By any biologically meaningful standard, living humans are barely distinguishable.

it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.

Capital, then, is not simply money. It is not even just wealth that can be turned into money. But neither is it just the use of political power to help one use one's money to make more money.

If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other's languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a phrase like "all power to the imagination" expresses the very quintessence of the Left.

We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where this would not be true.

The term 'inequality' is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.