The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . .: Essays

[David Graeber's work] undercuts a lot of conventional thinking... Pointing out the many options that there are for developing more enlightened, more free societies, not just the ones encoded in our artificial traditions...I think that's a tremendous contribution. --Noam Chomsky n nDavid's superpower was being an outsider. He did not proceed from widely shared assumptions but sought to dismantle them, urging us to see they're arbitrary, confining, and optional, and inviting everyone into the spaces this opens up (while saluting those already there). So much of his writing says, in essence, 'What happens if we don't accept this?'--if we dissect it to see its origins and impacts or if we reject it, if we lift it off like some burden we don't have to carry, some outfit we don't have to wear. What happens is we get free: his is an analysis for the sake of liberation, liberatory in its means and its ends. In that, it's a gift, and a generous one. Thank you, David. --from the foreword by Rebecca Solnit n nDrawn from more than two decades of pathbreaking writing, the iconic and bestselling David Graeber's most important essays and interviews. The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently, wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes. There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future--to imagine a social order based on humans' fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time-- inequality, technology, the identity of the West, democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest--he challenges the old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, and driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different. During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining,<