Quotes from David Graeber

a "negative correlation," as David Apter put it,55 between coercion and information: that is, while relatively democratic regimes tend to be awash in too much information, as everyone bombards political authorities with explanations and demands, the more authoritarian and repressive a regime, the less reason people have to tell it anything—which is why such regimes are forced to rely so heavily on spies, intelligence agencies, and secret police.

140 What until now has passed for 'civilization' might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.

the factors that people actually object to about such 'unequal' social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth.

To this day, indigenous societies incorporated into the global economy, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions, as Marshall Sahlins puts it, by opposition to the white man's 'living in the way of money'.38

Over and over I have set forth the qualities that we Wendat believe ought to define humanity – wisdom, reason, equity, etc. – and demonstrated that the existence of separate material interests knocks all these on the head. A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason.

Paper money was debt money, and debt money was war money, and this has always remained the case.

Si potrebbe anche dire che una delle tragedie dell'esistenza umana è il fatto che la violenza è una forma di stupidità alla quale è molto difficile replicare con una risposta intelligente.

Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves...working forty or even fifty hours on paper but effectively working fifteen hours...since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles, or downloading TV box sets.

Honor" is different from '"dignity." Honor is an obsession with status, with a sense that status can be lost, and therefore any sign of disrespect must be treated as a challenge that must be suppressed.

it may be true that, if I could con- vince 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. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic — one reason both politics and magic tend, just about everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud.

If the organization grows in size, higher-ups' importance will almost invariably be measured by the total number of employees working under them, which, in turn, creates an even more powerful incentive for those on top of the organizational ladder to either hire employees and only then decide what they are going to do with them or—even more often, perhaps—to resist any efforts to eliminate jobs that are found to be redundant.

all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous:

It is the premise of this book that we live in a deeply bureau­cratic society. If we do not notice it, it is largely because bureau­cratic practices and requirements have become so all-pervasive that we can barely see them—or worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.

Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term 'schismogenesis' to describe people's tendency to define themselves against one another.37

The Neolithic botanists'] was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase the likelihood of securing a favourable outcome. Their 'laboratory' was the real world of plants and animals, whose innate tendencies they exploited through close observation and experimentation.

If taxes represent our absolute debt to the society that created us, then the first step toward creating real money comes when we start calculating much more specific debts to society, systems of fines, fees, and penalties, or even debts we owe to specific individuals who we have wronged in some way, and thus to whom we stand in a relation of "sin" or

Civilization' came as a package. It meant misery and suffering for some (since some would inevitably be reduced to serfs, slaves or debt peons), but also allowed for the possibility of philosophy, art and the accumulation of scientific knowledge. The evidence no longer suggests anything of the sort.

The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will.

we are all in the situation of the inmate who prefers working in the prison laundry to sitting in the cell watching TV all day.

Silicon Valley is in the process of taking aim at health care, education, and the liberal professions as well.

lack of imagination is not itself an argument.

ÄŒesÃ…Â¥ bojovníka spo?íva v jeho ochote staviÃ…Â¥ do hry vÅ¡etko. Jeho ve?kosÃ…Â¥ je priamo úmerná tomu, ako hlboko môže klesnúÃ…Â¥.

I]n most human societies, men tend to try, and usually succeed, to monopolize the most exciting, dramatic kinds of work—they'll set the fires that burn down the forest on which they plant their fields, for example, and, if they can, relegate to women the more monotonous and time-consuming tasks, such as weeding. One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during.

The entire process [Uruk expansion] was, in a sense, colonial, and it did not go unopposed. As it turns out, we cannot really understand the rise of what we have come to call 'the star' - and specifically of aristocracies and monarchies - except in the larger context of that counter-reaction.