The Hidden Truth Of The World

Pop culture and the meaning of life. Mini-essays written and illustrated by grimy, human hands.

Last night, I had dim sum with a man who explained that his company embodies human nature. This company generates “content” at a desperate, algorithm-defying clip, as well as “innovations” like a bottle opener that puts your laptop to sleep. The point of the bottle opener is that you work less and drink more (needless to say, everyone involved pulls psychosis-inducing hours). His argument was that hierarchies are necessary in the crusade to “get shit done.”

Depressed, headed to my train, I thought of David Graeber, the late anarchist anthropologist and occupier of Wall Street. Graeber was as close to famous as academics get, mostly thanks to his book Bullshit Jobs, a polemic against the work my dinner companion lionised: not capitalism exactly, but feudalism undercover, “displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers.”   

Graeber’s last major work was The Dawn Of Everything, co-authored with David Wengrow. It argues that humans are capable of creating the most astonishing range of societies, most of them far stranger, more imaginative, and more playful than my companion’s employer.

A large portion of the book describes such alternatives, picked from the historical record, though mostly ignored by mainstream historical narratives. It’s like reading science fiction, in the best possible way: a blizzard of possibilities. Except all of this happened, and not so long ago.

There are tribes guided by prophets we would label “neurodivergent”. There are people who accepted government during the dry season before living unshackled, nomadic lives for the wet season. There are ruthless police-like enforcers, who also fulfilled the role of clowns. There are rulers with the power to execute whomever they wished…but only within the royal compound. (Clearly, avoiding the royal compound would be an excellent idea.) There are more variations of egalitarianism than I’d thought possible, including cities without hierarchies (alien to us, of course: the urban seems like our social order made manifest, with its reliance on taxes, laws, and temples to bureaucracy, capital, and God).

Graebar’s best-known quote is probably, “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

If so, perhaps we can one day organise our companies–these miniature societies we pretend are something other than dictatorships–into something more interesting than vessels for “getting shit done.” And if we do, perhaps these companies will contribute more to popular culture than a didactic bottle opener.