Quotes About David Graeber

That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case.

bullshit job into five categories. I will call these: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.

I am well known by my friends to be a workaholic - to their often justifiable annoyance. I am therefore keenly aware that such behavior is at best slightly pathological, and certainly in no sense makes one a better person.

one must oneself, in relations with one's friends and allies, embody the society one wishes to create.

Then you ask: what, within this cosmos, is the opposite of a vampire? The answer is obvious. The opposite of a vampire is a werewolf.

The reader might be asking: But what does all this have to do with the origins of money? The answer is, surprisingly: everything.

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.

Smith's argument is worth laying out in detail because it is, as I say, the great founding myth of the discipline of economics.

In most important ways, this world is explicitly antibureaucratic: that is, it evinces an explicit rejection of virtually all the core values of bureaucracy.

if Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the 'tribal' stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety.25 But empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker's conclusions.

makes perfect sense if you start from Nietzsche's initial premise. The problem is that the premise is insane.