In the weeks after the November election, encountering the energetic optimism contained in the new essay collection by the activist and anthropologist David Graeber is something of a surreal experience. Graeber died suddenly in September 2020, at the tail end of the first Trump presidency — before the QAnon Shaman and the attack on the Capitol; before four years of President Biden; before tech billionaires like Elon Musk joined the Trump team; before Musk pledged to take a wrecking ball to the government bureaucracy that Graeber, a self-described anarchist, spent decades critiquing.
“The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World …” gets its tantalizing title from Graeber’s book “The Utopia of Rules” (2015): “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” The line is classic Graeber — dramatic, exhilarating and so instinctively appealing that it’s only when you stop to think about it that you realize it isn’t entirely true.
In an introduction to the new essay collection, Graeber’s widow and the editor of the volume, Nika Dubrovsky, says that one of Graeber’s touchstones was Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” But even existentialists who agree that the world is what we make it might wonder if unmaking it is really as simple as all that, given the stubbornness of power. Doing things “differently” never comes “just as easily,” even if it’s more captivating to say that it does.
But close reading (and, arguably, nit-picking) is what critics do; Graeber was more interested in the varieties of human experience, and how bold declarations of counterintuitive ideas could open up new horizons of possibility. He was a prolific writer who produced doorstops like “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” and the best-selling “The Dawn of Everything,” which he wrote with David Wengrow. In a foreword to “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…,” Rebecca Solnit recalls Graeber’s commitment to writing books that were accessible and fun to read. “I call it ‘being nice to the reader,’” he said, “which is an extension of the politics, in a sense.”
After all, Graeber considered his politics to be resolutely democratic, arguing that anarchy and democracy were essentially one and the same. He objected to the assumption that state power was necessary to get people to do good things and stop them from doing bad ones. In the essay “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!,” he offers the example of people lining up to board a bus. They will usually wait their turn without elbowing one another, “even in the absence of police,” he wrote — proof of “the anarchist principle of self-organization.”
The problem, Graeber maintained, isn’t human nature but inhuman, hierarchical institutions. “Almost all the antisocial behavior which makes us think it’s necessary to have armies, police, prisons and governments to control our lives is actually caused by the systemic inequalities and injustice those armies, police, prisons and governments make possible,” he wrote. Graeber had a bullish view of human potential unfettered from constraint. He emphasized the possibility of “democratic improvisation,” which would take place “outside of the control of states, in which diverse sorts of people with different traditions and experiences are obliged to figure out some way to deal with one another.”
The 18 pieces collected here showcase the range of Graeber’s interests, along with his recurring preoccupations: inequality and capitalism, bureaucracy and creativity. They also contain the kernels of ideas that he would later spin off into books like “Pirate Enlightenment” and “Bullshit Jobs.” His playful cultural commentary even extended to Hollywood, once a “magical place of potential social elevation” that he believed has since deteriorated into an insular club of nepobabies. Sometime in the 1960s, he said, the Hollywood cop replaced the Hollywood cowboy: “The moment cop movies rose to prominence, cowboy movies effectively disappeared.”
But it was his more sustained political and economic arguments that secured his iconoclastic reputation while also inviting some pointed criticism. In his relentless pursuit of Big Ideas — the modern state is inimical to freedom; most people hate their jobs; the story of early humanity has more to do with creativity than domination — he has been charged with dressing up tentative conjecture as fact, and sacrificing historical accuracy for provocation. After “Debt” was published in 2011, a lively exchange on the academic blog Crooked Timber degenerated into what one historian called a “Hobbesian nightmare,” with an irate Graeber accusing the author of a tough but respectful critique of engaging in a “strategy of delegitimization.”
Yet “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World …” makes abundantly clear that even Graeber didn’t put much stock in limiting himself to a historical record that he considered frequently warped by elite bias or woefully incomplete. “I find that historians obviously do the most detailed, empirically informed work,” he told an interviewer in 2012, “but they have this rigorous refusal to talk about anything for which they do not have specific, concrete evidence, to the extent that you have to treat things that you can’t prove as if they didn’t happen, which is insane.”
Last year, the political scientist Henry Farrell, the author of the original post that started the brouhaha at Crooked Timber, suggested that “the best way to understand Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction.” Despite their differences, Farrell was appreciative: “Sometimes it is less valuable to be right than to expand the space of perceived social and political possibilities.”
That’s because people can narrow the space of possibility to the point where they take the current dispensation for granted, failing to recognize a coming cataclysm until it’s too late. More than a decade ago, Graeber, who was among the first organizers of Occupy Wall Street, warned about establishment figures settling into comfortable complacency and getting caught unawares: “They’ve been so effective with the ideology, in convincing everybody that nothing else is conceivable, that the moment the thing starts to collapse everyone is sitting there with their mouths gaping open, saying, ‘But wait, this was supposed to be there forever. Now what do we do?’”
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