My Graeber quote I try to incorporate into my thinking is…
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Still digesting all your ideas in that essay but seeing his name helped me lock in, as the kids say. He is missed, in these times when that kind of fog cutting wisdom is needed.
Thank you!
I’m a big fan of his work.
Have you seen his op-ed encouraging folks to ditch OpenAI? I have chosen to do so myself but I’m wary of being too excited about Anthropic as a force for good.
Loved utopia for realists and humankind.
Maybe the most important sentence David Graeber ever wrote. Adam Curtis, one of my heroes, used it as the epigraph for his film series Can’t Get You Out of My Head (good summary here).
Curtis is a critical voice regarding this. Over the past 30 years his focus has increasingly been on the astonishing stasis we find ourselves in, a seeming inability to move things in any direction. He embraces Graeber’s observation, yet doesn’t pretend to know how we should make the world differently, or even why we seem to be stuck in this one. He has said as much in recent interviews. That’s an honesty I find both rare and refreshing.
In embracing Graeber’s observation myself (implicity, long before he articulated it for me) I repeatedly made the mistake of thinking I could consider different possible worlds, choose one, and then work towards creating it. After many failed attempts I concluded that, rather than conjuring a vision for the world and then trying to make it happen, I am better off imagining what it would be like to live in such a world once realized, and then live that way regardless of the current state of things.
Why? Well, how I live my life is largely under my control, while how the world proceeds is largely out of it. Living that way exemplifies my vision to others, who can assess the results and then pick and choose or reject bits of it. And, regardless of how much external influence I have, at least I get to live this way.
So I join Curtis in watching, astonished that we’ve gone so long (for him, since about 1970 or so) with no fundamental social change in any direction. But I don’t join him in worrying about it. Change will happen if and when it happens, and if I contributed at all it will be as a butterfly flapping its wings, unable to comprehend its contribution to the hurricane down the road.
Tangentially related, as we all think about what path we want to follow, a poem by Antonio Machado:
Traveler, your footprints are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.
I am better off imagining what it would be like to live in such a world once realized, and then live that way regardless of the current state of things.
I love this. I intellectually know this is the only way, and yet it is so challenging for me to remain in this kind of mindset on a daily basis. I start to try to fix things, or fix people. I start to overperform, to envision an end point like a mirage in the distance. To not do this feels naive to me. And yet I know it is actually a sign of wisdom. I’m forever trying to figure out how to get my nervous system to follow where my experience knows it should go.
This reminds me of my favorite quote from a sci-fi TV show called Stargate-SG1: “The universe is vast, and we are so small. There is only thing we can ever truly control… whether we are good or evil.”
Likewise. It’s been many, many years and I’m still a work in progress, I suppose never to be completed. But the work is so beneficial — and so satisfying!
What I said cries out for several qualifications, but one is urgent: I’m not talking about wishful thinking, or manifesting your own reality, or anything like that. In pursuing this path I’m wholly with Montaigne:
Not being able to control events I control myself: if they will not adapt to me then I adapt to them.
When I live into an imagined reality, I am using it to look deeper into the nature of actual reality — which is certainly there, just beyond my comprehension. Still, seeing where my imagined version fits or doesn’t fit with the real helps me to fine tune, or occasionally to give up on my current framework for one that fits better (or at least yields more interesting insights).
Believe me, I’ve spent my life embracing and exploring and eventually discarding many different views on how to live. None of the time was wasted, all of it taught me important things about how the world really is, and some of it pointed me in more profitable directions. But one assumption has stayed constant: life has to be liveable, shalom has to be nurtured.
For example, I think I would be better off living an agrarian life instead of a modern one. And for ten years I tried very hard to do it. In the process I learned that living that way in the modern world is nearly impossible, at least for me. We tried small scale farming, and eventually decided the only sustainable model required that we sell to rich people — a market we just didn’t want to serve. So we gave up the farm. But our life in the fifteen years since has been fundamentally shaped by that effort. We live very differently that the average modern, while also making many compromises that make our life sustainable in this world. Where circumstances won’t adapt to us, we adapt to them, and maintain shalom.