RIP Anthropologist David Graeber
Writer and Anthropologist David Graeber died last week at the age of 59. With his influence on the Occupy Wall Street movement and books like Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and BullShit Jobs (2018), he was known as an intellectual and political activist with a clear vision for the future. Graeber put the phenomenon ' #bullshitbaan “on the map.
In 'Bullshit' jobs, anthropologist and influential thinker David Graeber states that a large part of our work must be meaningless. Because thanks to the technology, we can meet our production needs with a fifteen-hour working week, and yet we all still make full days. He received thousands of comments on this topic on a blog: many people around the world seem to know the phenomenon. Note: a bullshite job is a job that the person thinks is (partly) a nonsense job.
In this book, Graeber describes the how and why of these jobs, which originate from Western capitalism but are actually at odds with them (they are more like employment in the former Eastern bloc). Insanity jobs are also the result of our Calvinist conviction that being unemployed is bad.
Graeber's sharp argument is interspersed with hilarious and at the same time tragic examples and makes you look at the role of work in our society with a different perspective.
More than twenty percent of the working people in the West feel that what they do makes no sense at all. Yet they work in an accident and make billions together. Why don't we just stop doing the bullshit jobs? Even worse: there are even people who know for sure that their work does not contribute anything.
Sometimes their work goes against all their principles. It is work that, if it were not done, will not be missed by anyone. It would make the world even better if it just stayed down. According to Graeber, today's managerial culture is a new feudal system, within which top managers build their kingdoms under the banner of efficiency. The building blocks are useless departments where people lose their way.
