The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World… by David Graeber

“…that’s what traditions are: the continual process of their own fabrication.”
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“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like the United Kingdom or the United States would have achieved a fifteen-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”
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“A second surprising finding from recent research: bullies do not, in fact, suffer from low self-esteem. Psychologists had long assumed that mean kids were taking out their insecurities on others. No. It turns out that most bullies act like self-satisfied little pricks not because they are tortured by self-doubt, but because they actually are self-satisfied little pricks. Indeed, such is their self-assurance that they create a moral universe in which their swagger and violence becomes the standard by which all others are to be judged; weakness, clumsiness, absentmindedness, or self-righteous whining are not just sins, but provocations that would be wrong to leave unaddressed.”
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“A key aspect of caring is that it is about the creation and maintenance of relationships, a rejection of the patriarchal ideal of autonomy for an acceptance of interdependency, but, at the same time, a rejection too of the mere ‘empathetic’ projection of self onto another; rather, it is a self-effacing openness to the reality of others, their needs and desires. All this implies the caring is not actually a value but the prime means for the creation of value, and it is easy to see that almost all working-class labor already involves such a caring element—at least as much and generally much more so than a productive one. But then the question has to become, what precisely is it, what form of value, that is being produced here.”

-Dave Graeber, another dead hero