David Graeber: Humanity

David Graeber is American anthropologist and anarchist. Explore interesting quotes on humanity.

David Graeber: 110 quotes5 likes

“It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God's own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Four, "Cruelty and Redemption", p. 80

“To tell the history of debt, then, is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life—even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices ostensibly raised against it.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Five, "A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Moral Relations", p. 89

“Thus money is almost always something hovering between a commodity and a debt-token. This is probably why coins—pieces of silver or gold that are already valuable commodities in themselves, but that, being stamped with the emblem of local authority, became even more valuable—still sit in our heads as the quintessential form of money. They most perfectly straddle the divide that defines what money is in the first place. What's more, the relation between the two was a matter of constant political conversation. In other words, the battle between state and market, between governments and merchants is not inherent to the human condition.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Four, "Cruelty and Redemption", p. 75

“The criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 334

“Karl Marx, who knew quite a bit about the human tendency to fall down and worship our own creations, wrote Das Capital in an attempt to demonstrate that, even if we start from the economists' utopian vision, so long as we also allow some people to control productive capital, and, again, leave others with nothing to sell but but their brains and bodies, the results will be in very many ways barely distinguishable from slavery, and the whole system will eventually destroy itself.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 354

“If we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Five, "A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Moral Relations", p. 126

“In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Five, "A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Moral Relations", p. 96

“Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one's context, and thus from all the social relationships that make one a human being.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Seven, "Honor and Degradation", p. 168

“Egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one has tended to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world, for example, it is generally in the times and places that one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also sees the rise of world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If one sets aside a space and says, "Here you shall think only about acquiring material things for yourself," then it is hardly surprising that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space and declare, in effect: "Yes, but here we must contemplate the fact that the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant."”

Army of Altruists (2007)

“Even human relations become a matter of cost benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer.

It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way.”

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", pp. 319–320

“It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.... Hell is a collection of individuals who spend their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at.... Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.... Nurses, garbage collectors, mechanics, it's obvious were they to vanish, results would be catastrophic.... A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble.... It's not clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.... Real productive workers are squeezed and exploited. The remainder are unemployed and a larger stratum paid to do nothing.”

Dr. David Graeber, "Bullshit Jobs," Aug 2013