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A short ten-minute read on a collection of David Graeber’s essays:

The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

Last Christmas, I talked about what is perhaps the funniest line in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and how I went about putting it on a tee: “You can’t say orange to your boss:”

https://brologue.net/2023/12/23/three-amstrads-two-droll-daves-and-an-orange-on-a-black-tee/

He analyses the worker-boss power relationship using BDSM terminology, and it’s through such tools as structural analysis that he could say things that are shocking, yet profound; outrageous, yet, insofar as truth is a felt sense, true. My response:

It’s like saying the safe word to your partner, breaking up with them immediately, and turning them out of doors. Naked. Poor, forked radish.

https://brologue.net/2023/12/23/three-amstrads-two-droll-daves-and-an-orange-on-a-black-tee/

That, right there, is the ultimate threat that underpins every experience we have with a superior – anyone who can change our future with so small an action as signing a document, or changing a number on a spreadsheet. The boss defines the rules, and the boss says, it really doesn’t matter if you quit, voluntarily or not.

This year – because we’re never bigger suckers for routine than this time of year – I’m doing a post on a recent posthumous collection of essays titled The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, edited by Nika Dubrovsky, his spouse.

Anyone who followed Graeber and his writings will find little new here. Most of these essays can be found in full on the Anarchist Library:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/search?query=author%3A%22David+Graeber%22&sort=

The book’s title and sleeve quote is a quote from one of Graeber’s previous, the Utopia of Rules:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules

(EDIT 3/1/25: I previously said you wouldn’t find these in the book. Reading comprehension – Dubrovsky’s introduction explores what Graeber meant by that.)

But I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up Dubrovsky’s introduction. Since Graeber’s death, she’s the one caring for his vast archive of his unpublished work. Care, in all forms, must lift someone else’s burdens for a time so they can be free – alive, or dead.

Like Graeber’s own writing, Dubrovsky immediately hits us in the face with a brief history lesson: “freedom,” as we understand it, has its roots in the private property laws of ancient Rome. And by ‘property,’ of course, she means slaves.

Slaves were things. By definition, they could not fully control their own bodies, nor form their own bonds. Those were decided by people. From there, most things we believe about freedom feature some reflection of this “bizarre link” to private property. But Graeber, himself, didn’t believe this.

Suffice it to say that every single essay in this collection speaks to the sort of freedom that he imagined – one not based on laws, or revolutions where the old powers are deposed by something new. Little of that amounts to change, does it? But what few would deny is that, when there is “a transformation of common sense,” so our ideas of what “freedom” means shift. As he and David Wengrow wrote in the Lapham’s Quarterly last November:

As late as the eighteenth century, most European political thinkers considered democracy beyond the pale.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/hiding-plain-sight

And, as he wrote himself in “Against Economics:”

One sign that something historically new has indeed appeared is if scholars begin reading the past in a new light.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-against-economics

Graeber set out to challenge our society’s most ironclad assumptions – to, as he once titled an essay, “write Big Question sorts of books” – and, at least in the minds of those who’ve read him, common sense is beginning to change.

There’s a million and one things in this world that are made as The Way Things Are. What would you change? Here are the three essays that’ve been on my mind:

Against Economics (permalink)

How about the stories we get told about where money comes from, and its purpose?

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-against-economics

The rhetoric put out by 14 years’ worth of Tory government is sadly being repeated by Starmer’s premiership. If all money is just a bookkeeping exercise, as modern monetary theory argues, then there is ZERO reason for Rachael Reeves to continue the austerity argument – that there just isn’t enough money. There is ZERO reason for politicians to continue to be tripped up by the question, “how are you going to pay for it?”

There is ZERO reason to treat education as an economic good and nothing more, but that’s what neoliberal economists have been telling us for well over forty years. Economics used to be a ‘moral philosophy,’ something you could talk about at the table – until it became wrapped in models, formulae, and impenetrable jargon.

Contemporary economics pretends to be an empirical science. Yes, it has always been about figuring out what sorts of questions we should be asking to meet everyone’s material needs. Sure, models are always going to be a lossy process. The problem comes when every variable that can’t be quantified with a number is sent to the memory hole and deemed irrelevant.

The premise that markets will always right themselves in the end can be tested only if one has a commonly agreed definition of when “the end” is; but for economists, that definition turns out to be “however long it takes to reach a point where I can say the economy has returned to equilibrium.”

(In the same way, statements like […] “truth always prevails” cannot be proved wrong, since in practice they just mean “whenever… truth prevails, I shall declare the story over.”)

There Never Was a West (permalink)

How about getting ‘democracy’ back on track? Everyone seems to say it’s slipping away more and more these days. The romantic, Western ideal of democracy is colloquially touted as a product of ancient Athens. To some extent, that may be true. But what if we were to agree that it was more a product of “the spaces in-between?”

What if there was never any such thing as ‘the West?’ What if we recognised that defining ‘the West’ in clear terms is a notoriously difficult task to begin with?

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west

Follow up this essay with The Dawn of Everything – many of the ideals we associate with the word ‘democracy’ today came not by the Enlightenment’s colonisers, but the Indigenous philosophers who engaged in dialogues with European thinkers.

Sometimes it’s an intellectual tradition, sometimes it’s geographical, cultural, racial, and so on. If any of these usages were applied consistently, the whole jerry-built apparatus [“the West”] would fall apart.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/hiding-plain-sight

Are You An Anarchist? (permalink)

OK, something more nebulous, something fuzzy, something more lofty – why can’t we all just get along? Well, a dyed-in-the-wool anarchist might say that, as long as we feel we can’t trust each other, and believe that state apparatus like the police are necessary to dole out violence, this won’t come to pass.

Graeber, meanwhile, argues that you may already be an anarchist. The two most important assumptions that outline anarchist beliefs emerge in our lives all the time:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you

I take the bus regularly, and so too do I bring along Graeber’s thought experiments. While standing in a British queue for a bus seems a chaotic affair – i.e., picking one of three separate queues that sprawl around the station, no-one’s ever been antsy to cause a brouhaha over where the queue starts, who’s in front of who, etc.. Everyone understands everyone else’s need – to get to where they need to be – and we just… organise.

If you share a private Discord community with your friends, chances are the next principle – voluntary association – mostly applies:

This is simply a matter of applying democratic principles to ordinary life. The only difference is that anarchists believe it should be possible to have a society in which EVERYTHING could be organised along these lines…

(I say ‘mostly’ because, at the very least, someone ‘owns’ the hangout spot. But while there is a chain of command, suffice it to say this is ignored most of the time – until a topic comes up that requires collective action to redefine the rules.)

(Speaking of collective action, I’d say it’s very related to voluntary association. Over the past couple of years, how many times have you had to form a consensus with your friends – say, on which restaurant has something to suit everyone’s needs and tastes, or what social media platform to escape to next?)

https://brologue.net/2023/11/15/i-want-my-twitter-friends-back/

The above absolutely applies if you’re part of a fighting game community. The act of labbing is also anarchistic if you share your findings with others, no matter how small, or redundant:

https://brologue.net/2024/01/19/uh-oh-back-to-the-lab-again/

I got sent a meme recently about teaching children ‘labour economics.’ Basically, it amounted to, “pay them money for doing chores, but give 60% to the neighbour’s kids next door for doing fuck all.” I think about the only thing you’d be teaching them is that ‘selfishness is a virtue.’ What a fucking miserable lesson. But at least it’s not so cruel as to suggest that, to their parents, those kids next door are dependent parasites.

Are humans inherently selfish and corrupt? Why is it that we’re taught in childhood to be fair, and share, only to find that all flies out the window once we reach into the so-called ‘real world?’

Perhaps we should decide whether we’re lying to our children when we tell them about right and wrong, or whether we’re willing to take our own injunctions seriously.

Every discovery or accomplishment that’s improved our lives has been based on cooperation and mutual aid.

Co-operation and mutual aid are what happens when people agree to organise themselves, and share their time and labour. British bus queues may be chaotic, but we do tacitly agree to co-operate and let everyone on the bus, one at a time, without having to be forced to.

This post might be a bit jumbled, and that’s because this is one of those books that I’m going to keep coming back to and quoting from. At least in the mind of this reader, David Graeber’s works have profoundly transformed my common sense. I don’t think humans are inherently selfish, and we can be a little more ambitious in our everyday co-operation than just waiting in the queue at a bus stop. It’s not like it’s never been done before.

If you don’t like the way the world’s going, and want to make it differently, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World might change your common sense, too.

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the world is available wherever books are sold – but if you are in the UK/US, please consider buying it and supporting a local bookstore through bookshop.org:

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-ultimate-hidden-truth-of-the-world-david-graeber/7643555?ean=9780241611555

TTLY… (permalink)

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This review of David Graeber’s “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.