The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World ...

( em português: sol2070.in/2025/04/livro-david-graeber-ultimate-hidden-truth/ )

”The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...” (2024, 384 pgs) brings together articles and interviews by anarchist anthropologist David Graeber.

Anyone who enjoys his thought-provoking work will be delighted. With his characteristic perspicacity, which points out the obvious that no one is noticing, he touches on diverse topics — such as the economy, inequality, the cultural landscape, altruism, the politics of hatred, etc — in which each article could be the starting point to an entire book.

On the other hand, some articles condense central themes from his most influential works, such as “The Dawn of Everything”, “Debt” and “Bullshit Jobs”. Some were the germs that gave rise to the books; others are developments with recapitulation.

The title of the collection, “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World”, refers to the theme that runs through some of the articles and is also at the heart of “The Dawn of Everything”. This “ultimate hidden truth” is that we are free to build better societies and lives. There is no compulsory socio-political-economic direction that is not cultural, that was not created by humans. We are not bound by any oppressive fixed destiny. In the same way that the evils that plague humanity, such as inequality, were manufactured, we can manufacture and adapt beneficial and liberating cultures, at the individual and collective levels.

The following is a translation of one of the best articles in the book, in which Graeber speculates — among other topics, such as natural theories about selfishness and altruism, and even the “hard problem” of consciousness — about panpsychism, the idea that all things have at least some cognition. This doesn't mean that every material particle has a soul or intelligence, but rather that, for example, for a molecule to be able to self-organize in the way it does, it needs to “sense” its exterior in some way, and this amounts to a minimum level of cognition.

He goes on to argue that a sense of play, of playing and having fun, being an inseparable expression of a fundamental freedom, is a central aspect of consciousness or subjectivity. And if it is in everything, it would also be in the essence of all reality. Of course, his liberating and anarchically inquisitive spirit could not be missing from this investigation.

The title (“What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?“) seems to refer to the famous phrase by anarchist feminist Emma Goldman: “If I can't dance, it's not my revolution.”

thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun

Super easy to read this book when you've read all but one essay in it multiple times already. (Or, in some cases, have come back to the essay multiple times, skimming it for the piece of information you remember existing within its text.)

This book frustrates me, much like many of the David Graeber projects that have come out since his death. There's a hollowness to it that feels like someone trying to build a person up into some kind of Anarchist God (or Anthropologist God), and it's exhausting. Certainly, there must be more people out there than this one man who often and frequently neglected whole swathes of criticism that would've fueled his analyses. I'm sure there must be more people out there than the one guy who—though his work was engaging, sometimes insightful, and interesting—frequently extrapolated his more modern examples to beyond useless because he rarely looked at the context in which those examples fit (a superb irony for an anthropologist who had careful consideration for the nuance of the past).

At best, his work regarding patriarchy was surface level, and I don't care how many people try to convince me otherwise while highlighting the works in which he showcases those very surface level critiques. "The Bully's Pulpit," which is present in this book, is a perfect example of not understanding how the targeting of Bosniak boys and men over the age of 15 is part of a patriarchal problem, nor does it really explore why it was that Bosnian Serbs could successfully target them and pretend they weren't engaging in genocide, but it is also a perfect example of how that that very idea he had around boys and men can be extrapolated and misattributed by the "male loneliness epidemic" manarchists.

There is one "new" essay, which I have not found anywhere online. It's "The Revolt of the Caring Classes." Perhaps someone should lift it and post it to TAL, ensuring that the collection is complete. Perhaps it's good as a free ebook that collates a lot of his most commonly referenced essays, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend someone pay for this (saw a hardback in my local bookstore for €32, which is a bit pricy for things that've been widely distributed multiple times). Other essays included were turned into longer works (such as "There Never Was a West," which fueled much of what became The Dawn of Everything and "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which became Bullshit Jobs).

It's baffling that this is the choice that would be made, either by the editors or the publisher. Certainly, it would've been more interesting to engage in his unpublished works over these often referenced pieces.