david on stupidity
via nika dubrovsky tweet [https://x.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1988610451161427975?s=20]:
If only we were intelligent enough to realize our own stupidity, we might enjoy our lives more. But we aren’t. [https://lithub.com/on-david-graebers-ideas-about-the-structural-stupidity-of-bureaucracy/]
notes/quotes via Stuart Jeffries nov 2025 article – On David Graeber’s Ideas About the Structural Stupidity of Bureaucracy – linked in tweet:
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. “Running around feeling like an idiot all day? Being somehow put in a position where one actually does end up acting like an idiot?” As we sat together in the restaurant that evening, he asked himself: “How did I not notice that the signature was on the wrong line? There’s something about being in that bureaucratic situation that encourages you to behave foolishly.”
In The Utopia of Rules, he wrote:
Bureaucratic procedures, which have an uncanny ability to make even the smartest people act like idiots, are not so much forms of stupidity in themselves, as they are ways of managing situations already stupid because of the effects of structural violence… Stupidity in the name of fairness and decency is still stupidity, and violence in the name of human liberation is still violence. It’s no coincidence the two so often seem to arrive together.
The stupid and stupefying rules he experienced while filling in forms to apply for Medicaid is, he argued, a structural stupidity experienced both by those who deliver the services and those who use them.
In 2005, Graeber went on a year’s sabbatical from Yale, “and did a lot of direct action and was in the media.” When he returned, he was, he said, snubbed by colleagues and did not have his contract renewed. He reckoned this was in part because his countercultural activities were an embarrassment to Yale. But that didn’t stop him. He carried on combining academic work with battling what he took to be structural stupidity. As he put it in The Utopia of Rules: “Bureaucracies… are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity—of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.”
In that sense, Graeber’s life and works were a systematic resistance to the dead hand of what he called structural stupidity. He quoted to me with approval the anarchist collective Crimethinc:
Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the nature of habit, law, custom or prejudice—and it’s up to you to create the situations.
Graeber believed that the most basic level of being is play rather than economics, fun rather than rules, goofing around rather than filling in forms. If only we were intelligent enough to realize our own stupidity, we might enjoy our lives more. But we aren’t.
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be you. 