If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you dont have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you dont. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.

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About David Graeber

David Graeber was a 20th-century American anthropologist and activist. David Rolfe Graeber was an American anthropologist and anarchist social and political activist. His influential work in social and economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time. Read more on Wikipedia →

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