David Graeber

the whole story we summarized in the last chapter – our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique

a feeling of gratitude for a favour or service.
—Oxford English Dictionary

The very fact that we don’t know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power.

Those of us who do not have armed men behind us cannot afford to be so exacting.

For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions. Increasingly, it’s looking like we have no other choice.

Economists generally speak of three functions of money: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value.

Money provides a way to make multilateral exchange much simpler.

. Bullshit jobs regularly induce feelings of hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing. They are forms of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being.

Still, most testimonies focus on creativity as a form of defiance—the dogged fortitude with which many attempt to pursue art, or music, or writing, or poetry, serves as an antidote to the pointlessness of their “real” paid work.

For instance, workers hired for a certain skill, but who are then not really allowed to exercise it, rarely end up exercising that skill in a covert way when they discover they have free time on their hands.