The Utopia of Rules Quotes

“Why are we so confused about what police really do? The obvious reason is that in the popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it's not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits. And these imaginary police do, indeed, spend almost all of their time fighting violent crime, or dealing with its consequences.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“The most profound legacy of the dominance of bureaucratic forms of organization over the last two hundred years is that it has made this intuitive division between rational, technical means and the ultimately irrational ends to which they are put seem like common sense.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“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. That is: given a choice between a course of action that will make capitalism seem like the only possible economic system, and one that will make capitalism actually be a more viable long-term economic system, neoliberalism has meant always choosing the former. Does destroying job security while increasing working hours really create a more productive (let alone innovative, loyal) workforce? There is every reason to believe that exactly the opposite is the case. In purely economic terms the result of neoliberal reform of labor markets is almost certainly negative—an impression that overall lower economic growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties would tend to reinforce. However it has been spectacularly effective in depoliticizing labor. The same could be said of the burgeoning growth in armies, police, and private security services. They’re utterly unproductive—nothing but a resource sink. It’s quite possible, in fact, that the very weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will itself ultimately sink it. But it’s also easy to see how, if the ultimate imperative of those running the world is choking off the possibility of any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that will be fundamentally different than the world today must be a crucial part of the neoliberal project. Antithesis Yet even those areas of science and technology that did receive massive funding have not seen the breakthroughs originally anticipated”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they already know what they are going to discover.105 That’s pretty much the system we have now.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it’s just randomness.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“From the perspective of sixties radicals, who regularly watched antiwar demonstrations attacked by nationalist teamsters and construction workers, the reactionary implications of corporatism appeared self-evident. The corporate suits and the well-paid, Archie Bunker elements of the industrial proletariat were clearly on the same side. Unsurprising then that the left-wing critique of bureaucracy at the time focused on the ways that social democracy had more in common with fascism than its proponents cared to admit. Unsurprising, too, that this critique seems utterly irrelevant today.*

What began to happen in the seventies, and paved the way for what we see today, was a kind of strategic pivot of the upper echelons of U.S. corporate bureaucracy—away from the workers, and towards shareholders, and eventually, towards the financial structure as a whole.
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*Though it is notable that it is precisely this sixties radical equation of communism, fascism, and the bureaucratic welfare state that has been taken up by right-wing populists in America today. The internet is rife with such rhetoric. One need only consider the way that 'Obamacare' is continually equated with socialism and Nazism, often both at the same time.”
― david graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“(...) polisten dayak yiyenlerin veya başka türlü eziyet görenlerin büyük bir çoğunluğunun sonunda hiçbir suçu olmadığının anlaşıldığı tespit edilmiştir.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“The “public” does not work—a sentence like “most of the American public works in the service industry” would never appear in a magazine or paper, and if a journalist were to attempt to write such a sentence, her editor would certainly change it to something else. It is especially odd since the public does apparently have to go to work:”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization in the former Soviet Union or former colonial backwaters of the Global South. There is a rich anthropological literature, for instance, on the cult of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world. Often the argument is that in countries like Bangladesh, Trinidad, or Cameroon, which hover between the stifling legacy of colonial domination and their own magical traditions, official credentials are seen as a kind of material fetish—magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience, or training they’re supposed to represent. But since the eighties, the real explosion of credentialism has been in what are supposedly the most “advanced” economies, like the United States, Great Britain, or Canada.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“About the only policies that can’t be referred to as “deregulation” are ones that aim to reverse some other policy that has already been labeled “deregulation,” which means it’s important, in playing the game, to have your policy labeled “deregulation” first.”
― david graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“Banks are institutions to which the government has granted the power to create money—or,”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“...if one gives sufficient social power to a class of people holding even the most outlandish ideas, they will, consciously or not, eventually contrive to produce a world organized in such a way that living in it will, in a thousand subtle ways, reinforce the impression that those ideas are self-evidently true.”
― david graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“In fact, from inside the system, the algorithms and mathematical formulae by which the world comes to be assessed become, ultimately, not just measures of value, but the source of value itself.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“Left solution to any social problems—and radical left solutions are, almost everywhere now, ruled out tout court—has invariably come to be some nightmare fusion of the worst elements of bureaucracy and the worst elements of capitalism.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“Someone once figured out that the average American will spend a cumulative six months of her life waiting for the light to change.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“The English, American, and French revolutionaries changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty--declaring that the power once held by kings is now held by an entity that they called "the people." This created an immediate logical problem, because "the people" are by definition a group of individuals united by the fact that they are, in fact, bound by a certain set of laws. So in what sense can they have created those laws? When this questions was first posed in the wake of the British, American, and French revolutions, the answer seemed obvious: through those revolutions themselves. But this created a further problem. Revolutions are acts of law-breaking. It is completely illegal to rise up in arms, overthrow a government, and create a new political order. In fact, nothing could possibly be more illegal. Cromwell, Jefferson, or Danton were all clearly guilty of treason, according to the laws under which they grew up, just as much as they would have been had they tried to do the same thing again under the new regimes they created, say, twenty years later.
So laws emerge from illegal activity. (p. 214)”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“One of the central arguments of this essay so far is that structural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination. Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them--including having to imagine the perspectives of those on top--while the latter can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them. That is, the powerless not only end up doing most of the actual, physical labor required to keep society running, they also do most of the interpretive labor as well. (p. 81)”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“Jim Cooper, a former LAPD officer turned sociologist, has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any crime. "Cops don't beat up burglars," he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reactions from police is a challenge to their right to, as he puts is, "define the situation." (p. 80)”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don't have to worry about, don't have to know about, and don't have to do.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“All of this would explain why revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to re-create and reimagine everything around them.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“What “the public,” “the workforce,” “the electorate,” “consumers,” and “the population” all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“one of the most effective ways for a system of authority to tout its virtues is not to speak of them directly, but to create a particularly vivid image of their absolute negation—of what it claims life would be like in the total absence of, say, patriarchal authority, or capitalism, or the state.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid. But this didn’t just happen. It is the result of intentional policy choices. Since the 1980s, legislators have led the way in systematically defunding the post office and encouraging private alternatives as part of an ongoing campaign to convince Americans that government doesn’t really work.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world’s population into full-time industrial workers, 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.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“The rise of the modern corporation, in the late nineteenth century, was largely seen at the time as a matter of applying modern, bureaucratic techniques to the private sector—and these techniques were assumed to be required, when operating on a large scale, because they were more efficient than the networks of personal or informal connections that had dominated a world of small family firms.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along.164 The United States might call itself “a country of laws, not men,” but as we have learned in recent years, American presidents can order torture, assassinations, domestic surveillance programs, even set up extra-legal zones like Guantanamo where they can treat prisoners pretty much any way they choose to. Even on the lowest levels, those who enforce the law are not really subject to it. It’s extraordinary difficult, for instance, for a police officer to do anything to an American citizen that would lead to that officer being convicted of a crime.165”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“Then you ask: what, within this cosmos, is the opposite of a vampire? The answer is obvious. The opposite of a vampire is a werewolf.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“The first criterion of loyalty to the organization becomes complicity. Career advancement is not based on merit. And not even necessarily based on being someone's cousin.

Above all, it's based on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, even though everyone knows this not to be true. Or, a willingness to play along with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally when, in fact, they're often deployed as a means for entirely arbitrary personal power.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“It is one of the defining features of any bureaucracy that those who staff it are selected by formal, impersonal criteria. Most often, some kind of test. That is, bureaucrats are not, say, elected like politicians. But neither should they get the job just because they are someone's cousin.

In theory, they are meritocracies. In fact, everyone knows that the system is compromised in a thousand different ways. Many of the staff are, in fact, there just because they are someone's cousin. And everybody knows it.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“But in this particular case, and in the larger political-economic context, where bureaucracy has been the primary means by which a tiny percentage of the population extracts wealth from the rest of us, they have created a situation where the pursuit of freedom from arbitrary power simply ends up producing more arbitrary power, and as a result, regulations choke existence, armed guards and surveillance cameras appear everywhere, science and creativity are smothered, and all of us find increasing percentages of our day are taken up in the filling out of forms.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy