The Utopia of Rules

by David Graeber

For everyone else, the main result of one’s years of professional training is to ensure that one is saddled with such an enormous burden of student debt that a substantial chunk of any subsequent income one will get from pursuing that profession will henceforth be siphoned off, each month, by the financial sector.

The corporatization of education; the resulting ballooning of tuitions as students are expected to pay for giant football stadiums and similar pet projects of executive trustees, or to contribute to the burgeoning salaries of ever-multiplying university officials; the increasing demands for degrees as certificates of entry into any job that promises access to anything like a middle-class standard of living; resulting rising levels of indebtedness—

those living check to check can regularly expect to be charged eighty dollars for a five-dollar overdraft—

All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves.

Our lives have come to be organized around the filling out of forms.

“structural violence”—

It’s “talking back” above all that inspires beat-downs,

The feeling is rooted in a profound sense of disappointment about the nature of the world we live in, a sense of a broken promise—of a solemn promise we felt we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like.

These military projects did have their own civilian spin-offs: the Internet is one.

When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones.

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.

The sort of thinkers most likely to come up with new conceptual breakthroughs are the least likely to receive funding,

It is the premise of this book that we live in a deeply bureaucratic society.

so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities in recent decades ultimately turned us all into part or full-time administrators.

and pretty much everyone understands that they have to learn how to perform jobs once relegated to travel agents, brokers, and accountants.

If nothing else, I think it’s safe to say that no population in the history of the world has spent nearly so much time engaged in paperwork.

“creating committees to deal with the problem of too many committees”

Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret.

The simplest explanation for the appeal of bureaucratic procedures lies in their impersonality. Cold, impersonal, bureaucratic relations are much like cash transactions, and both offer similar advantages and disadvantages.