Quotes from book
The Utopia of Rules

Name: The Utopia of Rules
Author: David Graeber

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy is a 2015 book by anthropologist David Graeber about how people "relate to" and are influenced by bureaucracies. It was published by Melville House and released on February 24, 2015.

“Nowadays, nobody talks about bureaucracy. But in the middle of the last century, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies, the word was everywhere.”

David Graeber book The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules (2015)

“Power makes you lazy.”

David Graeber book The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“With the collapse of the old welfare states, all this has come to seem decidedly quaint. As the language of antibureaucratic individualism has been adopted, with increasing ferocity, by the Right, which insists on “market solutions” to every social problem, the mainstream Left has increasingly reduced itself to fighting a kind of pathetic rearguard action, trying to salvage remnants of the old welfare state: it has acquiesced with–often spearheaded–attempts to make government efforts more “efficient” though the partial privatization of services and the incorporation of ever-more “market principle,” “market incentives,” and market-based “accountability processes” into the structure of the bureaucracy itself.”

David Graeber book The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules (2015)

“Everyone knows how compromised the idea of bureaucracy as a meritocratic system is. The first criterion of loyalty to any organization is therefore complicity. Career advancement is not based on merit but on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, or with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally, when in fact they are often deployed as an instrument of arbitrary personal power. … As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than as systems of predatory extraction, we bustle about, trying to curry favor by pretending we actually believe it to be true.”

David Graeber book The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules (2015)