WAS DAVID GRAEBER OFFERED A "DEAL HE COULDN'T REFUSE" BEFORE HE WAS ASSASSINATED?

Why would an anarchist argue that authoritarianism is the natural human condition in 2017's On Kings? Is the book's strange choice of cover art an example of Revelation of the Method?

HEY GANG,

Disclaimer - This post is about the mysterious events clustered around the death of David Graeber, but I will begin by talking about the Vitalik Buterin, the cypherpunk super-genius who invented Ethereum. Bear with me. It all make sense soon enough.

I have taken an interest in crypto for years.

Back in 2020, when some people were panic-buying toilet paper, I put all my money into Bitcoin right before it went on a bull run. I’m not a greedy person, but it’s hard not to get elated when your money starts doubling and tripling.

For awhile, I was watching a lot of crypto videos and telling everyone that they were missing out if they didn’t put all their money in crypto. I also did a lot of research into the innovators of crypto and crypto-adjacent cybercrime. I know quite a bit about the Silk Road and its successors, for example.

During this time I became familiar with Vitalik Buterin, who is one of the most influential people in the crypto space. He is a Russian-Canadian super-genius who is alleged to possibly have the highest IQ in the world.

As the inventor of the Ethereum network, he became incredibly rich, and probably has the best claim in the world to having become a billionaire without screwing anyone over.

The crypto space is so full of hucksters and shysters that it’s easy to forget that the original cypherpunks were motivated by very laudable political goals. Vitalik Buterin has stated very explicitly that his goals is to “destroy the banks”.

Anyone, all of this is simply to say that I don’t think that Vitalik Buterin is a bad guy. He’s got some very interesting ideas, and he’s worth paying attention to.

Anyway, the reason that I’m talking about this is because I saw an interview with Vitalik at one point in which he spoke about the possibility that he could be compromised at some point in the future.

In it, Vitalik said very forthrightly something along the lines of “Hey, listen up, guys. If the Powers That Be put a gun to my head and order me to code something for them, I’m going to do it. I’m not ashamed to admit that I wouldn’t take a bullet for the cause. I’d rather stay alive by complying, because for one thing, I don’t want to die and for another, I can’t do anything for the cause if I’m dead. If I was forced to work for the enemy, that doesn’t mean that I’ve betrayed everything that I stood for. It means that I’d rather stay alive than get myself killed on principle.”

He was making a point about the importance of decentralization in the open-source software movement. He was pointing that he was just one person, and that if people treated him like some kind of special leader, the movement would be weaker for it.

This idea always stuck with me, because it struck me as incredibly prescient and self-aware. A lot of people pretend to be braver than they are before flailing at a critical moment. It’s also true that sticking to your guns isn’t always the smartest thing you can do.

As King Solomon put it:

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

  a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
    a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
    a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
   a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
   a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
   a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
  a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

Expressing a similar thought in a slightly different way, Dave Chappelle famously warned about the dangers of being too ideologically rigid in his famous series of comedy sketches WHEN KEEPING IT REAL GOES WRONG.

I suppose this is one of the things that life teaches you, because I have definitely learned my lesson about the dangers of “keeping it real”. Sometimes it’s smarter to shut your mouth and to nod along than to be a hero. This might not be what you would expect to hear from someone like me, but really all I’m saying is that you’ve got to be smart if you want to strategic, meaning that sometimes it’s better to tranquilize one’s ego than to indulge it. Courage is a virtue, but pride is not.

Anyway, whether or not you think Ethereum is a good thin, Vitalik Buterin is extremely intelligent and is worth paying attention to. I think it was very smart of him to pre-emptively warn the world about the risk that he could be forced to work for an intelligence agency, because I think the risk is real.

The risk is real. The fact of the matter is that there aren’t many programmers with Buterin’s degree of proficiency. He reportedly has one of the highest IQs in the world, and honestly, there are only so many super-geniuses in the world. Furthermore, Vitalik is completely open that the entire point of the crypto movement is to destroy the banks, and he is one of the leaders of that movement. Does it seem implausible that he might be coerced by state actors into working for them?

Okay, so park that thought. We’ll come back to it in a moment.

What does this have to do with David Graeber?

As you know, lately I’ve been pretty far down a rabbit hole which I began exploring after the famed anarchist anthropologist David Graeber died mysteriously.

After learning about the circumstances of his death, I suspected that he had been killed, and when I learned that a major book had been published posthumously, I bought a copy.

From there, I fell down a rabbit hole. The book is such a riddle. Dr. Scrotes hit the nail on the head when he called it “a savant-idiot mix of dazzling success and ridiculous failure”.

After I got a couple of chapters in, I really started doubting that this was really the book that David Graeber spent ten years working on. It seems inconceivable that an anarchist could write a book which argues against the idea that egalitarian societies even exist. Not only is that ludicrously false, it’s also diametrically opposed to all known anarchist philosophy.

Why would an anarchist write an anti-anarchist polemic?

To give you an idea of how bad it is, one of the chapters is entitled “Why the State has no Origin” and in another, the authors use a handful of Ice Age burial sites to claim that human beings were quasi- or proto-statists tens of thousands of years before the earliest known states, which is beyond absurd.

There’s also a weird absence of reference to anarchist thinkers and a strange fixation with the most popular reactionaries of today.

Why would an anarchist spend so much time talking about the ideas of hardcore statists like Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and Yuval Noah Harari? Why would he neglect thinkers like Peter Kropotkin, Ronald Wright, Peter Gelderloos, John Zerzan, Fredy Perlman, Jacques Ellul, Ted Kaczynski, Kevin Tucker, Wolfi Landstreicher, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Murray Bookchin, Paul Cudenec, Darren Allen, and James C. Scott? All these thinkers have tons to say on the subject of human nature and the origins of class oppression.

Hell, you could probably add Emma Goldman, Louise Michel, Errico Malatesta, Ricardo Flores Magon, Maria Nikiforova, Louise Michel, Mary Shelley, and Bakunin to that list. Really, any anarchist theorist worth their salt has a sophisticated take on these questions. It’s pretty much required.

At one point, Graeber and Wengrow quote Jared Diamond and honestly, I think that this is the real thesis statement of The Dawn of Everything.

Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary.

The overall effect of the book is actually to bring us to back to the conclusion reached by Thomas Hobbes in 1651’s Leviathan.

By the way, you gotta way this video! It’s hilarious and genuinely does summarize Hobbes’s most lasting contribution to political science.

(Man, was that awesome or what?)

THE NEW LEVIATHAN

So, basically, I think I have cracked the code of why The Dawn of Everything is such an insane combination of dazzling brilliance and cringe-inducing, face-palming stupidity. It’s because David’s real work was adapted to serve certain propaganda purposes, namely convincing people that resistance is futile because people consciously choose to be oppressed.

Anyway, I really think that academics should take interest in the case of David Graeber. One of the world’s most brilliant anarchist thinkers died mysteriously after complaining that he was experiencing symptoms of poisoning. His cause of death was massive internal bleeding caused by necrotic pancreatitis.

After he died, his widow published a demented missive claiming that David died of COVID and that he wasn’t serious when he had told friends that she had been “torturing” him.

Because I have previously written about the mysterious circumstances of Graeber’s death elsewhere, I’ll direct you to that writing if you’d like to get up to speed.

My research is ongoing, and as I delve deeper and deeper I am becoming increasingly convinced that this riddle has a solution, although I have not solved it yet.

I am fully aware that I am thinking out loud, and I hope that I inspire others to explore the possibility that David was murdered.

I have to say, though - sorting everything out is an incredibly difficult task. For mysterious reasons, David Graeber ignored hyper-egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies throughout his entire career. Does this mean that he was controlled opposition from the beginning? It’s impossible that he wasn’t familiar with this literature, so why would he ignore it? I don’t have a good answer to this question.

The bigger question, however, has to do with the 2017 book On Kings, which Graeber co-published with his mentor, the great Marshall Sahlins.

WAS DAVID GRAEBER COMPROMISED?

My question is this - is it possible that David Graeber was approached by the Powers that Shouldn’t Be and told that he had no choice but to start working for them?

Could it be that he was a presented with a proverbial “deal he couldn’t refuse?” Perhaps his life was threatened. Perhaps he was told that if continued publishing unauthorized writing, he would be killed.

What would he have done at that point? Would he have gone along with it?

Put yourself in his shoes. What would you do? Would you run off to Democracy Now or the Real News Network or Al-Jazeera to raise the alarm? Or would you figure that your best bet was to keep your head down and bide your time?

If David Graeber was compromised, I’m guessing that he was approached after the publication of Debt: The Five First Thousand Years, to which he owed his rockstar status.

Although the world tends to regard the Occupy movement as a failed experiment, I think that it stands to reason that it was significant enough to motivate the ruling class to launch a major campaign of ideological subversion, which might have involved assassination as well as a host of other tactics.

I will note that Aragorn and Ted Kaczysnki also died mysteriously in recent years.

AS IF ALREADY FREE

There is a group of anthropologists who have taken it upon themselves to reflect on David Graeber’s legacy, which involves reviewing the roughly 5000 pages of published writing that he left behind.

They have published a collection of essays about his life’s work called As If Already Free, which will surely be the first of many volumes to explore Graeber’s thought.

This is how the authors describe On Kings.

On Kings, co-authored with Marshall Sahlins, appeared in 2017. Kings is in the style of Debt but arguably better: in organization, coherence, and significance. It deals with the emergence of states and sovereignty from ritual and the supernatural.,, We might see it as an attempt to make good on some of the promise that he saw in anthropology when he was younger: what can be achieved through broad comparison of the ethnographic record? How can we make it relevant to the pressing questions of our day?

It’s worth noting that As If Already Free was published by AK Press, which continues to ignore accusations that has been taken over by spooks and turned into a clearinghouse for fake-Left faux radicalism tailored to the purposes of ideological subversion.

I’m not hating on the authors of As If Already Free, which is well worth reading. I am annoyed that they gloss over the mysterious circumstances of David’s death, though.

IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IMAGINARY KINGS AND REAL ONES?

So, in On Kings, Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber apparently argue that the natural order of the universe is authoritarianism because invisible divine kings (such as Jesus Christ, for example) serve the same sociological functions as real kings,

To this specious argument, I would reply: Yeah, sure, except the bad ones!

It boggles my mind that anyone would argue that invisible kings, which lack coercive authority. That’s like saying that anarchy and theocracy are the same thing because they don’t recognized earthly political authority as legitimate. Actually, that’s significantly LESS ridiculous than their argument that imaginary kings are the same as real kings.

To be fair, however, I haven’t read the book, so maybe I’ve misunderstood things, but I think the idea that statism is natural because imaginary authority and real-world political authority are the same thing is like saying that imaginary violence is the same thing as real violence.

You might expect to hear such a claim come from some woke queer theorist, but from David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins? I don’t think so.

Remember, Sahlins was the author of The Original Affluent Society and Stone Age Economics, both of which are classic texts commonly cited in defence of the egalitarian origins hypothesis.

To say that divine authority is the same thing as earthly political authority is great if you get paid to talk about ideas all day long, but if you live in the real world, this is just a bunch of nonsense. It reminds me of people who argue that Christian anarchism is an oxymoron because the Bible describes Jesus Christ as a king.

Did Tolstoy have to deal with these kinds of arguments when he published The Kingdom of God is within you? Do people know what a metaphor is?

Literally anything you can think of can be likened to anything else. To say that there is no difference between things because they are similar in some way is beyond ridiculous.

The problem with kings isn’t symbolism - it’s the real-world exercise of power, which comes down to the use of violence. Maintaining military supremacy in a given territorial requires armies, which consist of soldiers who need to paid.

This requires taxation and a correspondent bureaucracy consisting of accountant, lawyers, judges, clerical workers, and of course, some kind of propaganda campaign to make the bitter pill go down easier. Let us never forget that civilization is an extortion racket with an advertising campaign.

If you feel tyrannized by your own imagination, the problem is you. If you are paying tax to a government against your will, you are a victim in an extortion scheme. The former problem calls for a psychological solution; the latter for a political one.

There’s a world of difference between real kings and imaginary ones, and everyone that’s ever engaged in real activism should know that.

WOULD DAVID GRAEBER AND MARSHALL SAHLINS REALLY HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK ARGUING THAT AUTHORITARIANISM IS THE NATURAL STATE FOR HUMAN SOCIETIES?

This is a great example of how stupid political discourse can get when it becomes removed from real-world situations. No one would conflate real kings with imaginary kings if they were trying to solve a real problem. The logical conclusion of Graeber and Sahlins’s argument seems to be that there is no difference between feeling oppressed and actually being oppressed.

If one’s feeling of oppression has to do with a negative emotional state, that’s a psychological problem, not a political one. The solution to feeling oppressed by reality is to focus on building confidence and improving self-esteem. But political organizing is something else entirely - it requires coming together with other people on the basis of some shared objective, which is often in competition with the objectives of other parties.

If we’re talking about ending home foreclosures, for instance, one is necessarily in conflict with the real estate speculators who profit off of the status quo. To be ignorant of this is to be ignorant of politics, and no one can plausibly accuse David Graeber of political ignorance.

When the rubber meets the road, politics often does come down to force. If students block the entrance to their university, for instance, police will eventually be called to arrest them, and at that point said students have a bigger problem than doubts and insecurities. The problem of the state isn’t that they make rules, it’s that they enforce them with violence and the threat of violence.

A lot of people believe that anarchists are against rules, but that’s not true. We are against laws, and we are against the existence of a professional class of armed goons enforcing those laws because they are imposing the will of the ruling class onto the people.

And there’s no way that David Graeber didn’t know that.

Anyway, I suppose that I am leaning towards the idea that David Graeber was approached sometime between 2011 and 2017 and given a choice between working for the Enemy… or else.

Alternatively, I suppose that he could have been bribed. If we were talking about someone else, I would be more inclined to consider this possibility, but my gut tells me that neither Graeber nor Sahlins would have sold their souls in such a way. But who knows?

I find it more plausible that the Powers That Shouldn’t Be made Graeber and Sahlins an offer they couldn’t refuse. Pablo Escobar was famous for offering people his version of the double bind, which has gone down in history as “Plata o plomo”, which means “Silver or Lead”. Basically, he was in the habit of offering people a choice between working for him, which would be lucrative, and refusing to work for him, which would result in premature death. The “lead” in “silver or lead” refers to the metal that bullets are made from.

It’s also worth noting that The Dawn of Everything was not the only book published posthumously by Graeber’s estate. His widow also released a book called The Democracy Project, which I have yet to investigate. If my theory holds water, this book will also contain analysis which is incongruent with David’s pre-Occupy writing.

Anyway, my theory is that the following books are not “real” David Graeber books:

• On Kings

• The Democracy Project

• The Dawn of Everything

Then again, keep in mind that I’m thinking out loud here. I haven’t read On Kings or The Democracy Project. Based on what I know, they don’t seem like they’re worth reading.

Anyway, I present these ideas knowing full well that I am speculating. I am neither an anthropologist nor a Graeber specialist, and I’m probably not the best person to analyze his work or investigate his death. My hope is that my efforts to bring attention to the many bizarre things about David Graeber’s life after the publication of Debt.

By now, you probably understand why I began with that anecdote about Vitalik Buterin. Could David Graeber have been approached by the Powers That Shouldn’t Be and told: “You work for us now.”

How would he have reacted if his life was threatened if he didn’t comply? Would he have chosen Vitalik’s plan? Or would he have chosen to “keep it real”?

Put yourself in his shoes. There’s a reason that violence is the preferred persuasion strategy of evil and stupid people. It’s very difficult to argue with. I’m not sure what I would do in that situation, and I suspect that if you’re honest with yourself, neither do you. If you haven’t been in a situation where your life is being threatened, you don’t know how you would react. The instinct for self-preservation is strong.

My theory is that Graeber continued to write, but that he was required by his handlers to get approval before publishing his work.

This leads me to my theory about Bullshit Jobs. I suspect that he applied for permission to write a critique of bureaucracy, which was granted, allowing him to publish Bullshit Jobs.

I think that he asked them: “Well, what am I allowed to write about? Can I write about bureaucracy? That seems like a safe, boring topic that would be on-brand for a Leftist academic.”

This accounts for Bullshit Jobs, which was greeted as a phenomenal success. If he did manage to slip it past the censors, it is testament to his genius and an argument in favour of strategic compliance.

A bit later, David Graeber got married to Nika Dubrovsky, who I suspect is a spook. I would be curious as to the opinions of people who knew the two of them. Did they have a normal courtship process? Or did their marriage come as a big surprise to his friends?

I hope this doesn’t come off the wrong way, but she kind of seems like a cold-hearted bitch. Why would David Graeber marry her? As a world-famous rockstar academic, it kind of seems like he could have done better. I guess there’s no accounting for taste, but you would kind of expect an anthropologist to approach mate selection more judiciously, wouldn’t you?

As of the current moment, not one person has breathed one word in her defence, which itself says something.

This seems like an easy question to answer. It’s usually pretty easy to tell when two people are truly in love. If anyone out there believes that Nika and David were truly in love, please do me a favour and let us know in the comments. I wouldn’t want to malign an innocent woman, but no one has stood up for her yet, and she sure doesn’t seem very innocent to me. But what do I know? All I know is that the current explanation for David’s death is unsatisfactory.

My research is ongoing. I suppose that if I am to do my due diligence, I would have to read all of David Graeber’s books, including On Kings and The Democracy Project. That could take awhile, especially considering that I have other research priorities.

It is interested to note that the most revelatory takeaway from The Dawn of Everything - the fact that a Huron-Wendat chief named Kondiaronk played a key role in inspiring the French Revolution - was published in French in an obscure anthropology journal called Le Journal de Mauss (which takes its name from Graeber’s hero Marcel Mauss).

This essay has never been translated into English, which strikes me more a little strange. Could it be that Graeber slipped this essay past the censors too?

If so, I’m going to go out on limb and say that if there was one particular thing that got him killed, it was probably that. The restoration of Kondiaronk to his rightful place in world history is nothing short of a game-changer.

If David Graeber’s final major play was to completely overturn the history of Western Civilization, all I have to say is that he picked his final battle well.

If this is what happened, comrades of David can rest assured that he made it to Valhalla.

WHAT HAPPENED WITH HAU, THE ANTHROPOLOGY JOURNAL THAT GRAEBER CO-FOUNDED?

My theory is that David Graeber was compromised sometime between the publication of Debt (2011) and On Kings (2017).

Around that time, Graeber became embroiled in some kind of scandal involving HAU, the anthropology journal that he had co-founded.

As one of the authors of As If Already Free notes:

Given that Graeber perceived himself to be writing against a very powerful war on imagination, it is understandable that he would be particularly open to opportunities aimed at generating and disseminating novel ideas.

This is how one might understand his involvement with the journal HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory. He did not mention this journal in his scholarly works, but it was prominent in the final decade of his life.

The journal was launched in 2011, with Graeber as “editor-at-large” and with an introduction co-authored by Graeber and the journal’s driving force, Giovanni da Col.

The journal promised to revolutionize anthropological publishing, offering gold standard Open Access free to both readers and contributors, courtesy of the voluntary labor of reviewers and editorial staff.

The journal also promised to revolutionize anthropology by returning the discipline to its original promise as a source of “ethnographic theory”—as da Col and Graeber put it—or the generation of novel concepts from the analysis of the ethnographic record.

Despite a wave of initial enthusiasm, in which HAU garnered endorsements from a long list of heavy hitters, the journal soon faltered, running into a long series of problems that lead me to question whether someone was trying to scuttle it.

Donations had been raised in the initial uprush of enthusiasm to support the journal, but donors became concerned when financial reports were delayed. Audited accounts were at first non-existent and, when they finally appeared, the detailed report was not available to the public or even to financial donors. In addition to questions swirling around da Col’s alleged mismanagement and unethical behavior, some critics used the attention HAU was drawing to call for renewed disciplinary commitments to decolonization and anti-racism. There were fears, for example, that ethnographic theorizing would only serve to justify renewed enthusiasm for appropriating cultural knowledge and meaning for mostly privileged, Western and white academic audiences.

Now, this sounds annoying and typical of campus culture during the woke era, but a serious investigation into David’s death would look into this scandal. If we zoom out a bit, we can see that a leading anarchist theorist tried to use his fame to found a revolutionary journal, only to encounter a bunch of problems that derailed the whole endeavour. The timing also fits my theory - David distanced himself from HAU in 2017.

This is the kind of thing he had to deal with, by the way:

@HAUTalk also highlighted the pervasive sexism of the discipline. This was something that Graeber sought to expose, but again this was most prominent only in his later and posthumous works. In Dawn of Everything,Graeber and Wengrow admit that the kind of myth-work they accomplish there, including the creation of long, sprawling scholarly books, is an act that is regularly indulged in by men but effectively barred to women.

Wait, what? Anthropology is sexist because women haven’t made important contributions to anthropology? Excuse me? Have these people never heard of Helene Clastres? Margaret Mead? Helen Fisher? Margaret Murray? Merlin Stone? Riane Eisler? Starhawk? Who’s stopping women from creating “long, sprawling scholarly books”? What the fuck are these people talking about?

Man, I’m so glad I’m not an academic. Can you imagine how annoying it would be dealing with these kinds of critiques?

THERE IS SO MUCH WRONG WITH GRAEBER’S LATER WORK THAT I BELIEVE THAT IT WAS WRITTEN IN ORDER TO MISLEAD PEOPLE

If it weren’t for the fact that David Graeber died mysteriously, we would probably have to conclude that he was controlled opposition all along, or that he sold his soul along the way somewhere.

If we were to put on our tin foil hats, I suppose we could have to consider whether the peculiar choice of cover art for On Kings might be an example of the “Revelation of the Method”.

That same artwork is commonly featured on covers of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Isn’t that weird?

“Okay,” you might be thinking. “That’s a little weird. Could that be a coincidence? Why would David Graeber have chosen the artwork from Leviathan? Maybe we sh

You might be interested to learn that the artwork in question was in fact commissioned by Thomas Hobbes in order to illustrate the ideas contained in Leviathan.

From Wikipedia:

After lengthy discussion with Thomas Hobbes, the Parisian Abraham Bosse created the etching for the book's famous frontispiece in the géometrique style which Bosse himself had refined. It is similar in organisation to the frontispiece of Hobbes' De Cive (1642), created by Jean Matheus. The frontispiece has two main elements.

In it, a giant crowned figure is seen emerging from the landscape, clutching a sword and a crosier, beneath a quote from the Book of Job—"Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei. Iob. 41 . 24" ("There is no power on earth to be compared to him. Job 41 . 24")—further linking the figure to the monster of the book. (Due to disagreements over the precise location of the chapters and verses when they were divided in the Late Middle Ages, the verse Hobbes quotes is usually given as Job 41:33 in modern Christian translations into English,^[8] Job 41:25 in the Masoretic text, Septuagint, and the Luther Bible; it is Job 41:24 in the Vulgate.) The torso and arms of the figure are composed of over three hundred persons, in the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo; all are facing away from the viewer, with just the giant's head having visible facial features. (A manuscript of Leviathan created for Charles II in 1651 has notable differences – a different main head but significantly the body is also composed of many faces, all looking outwards from the body and with a range of expressions.)

The lower portion is a triptych, framed in a wooden border. The centre form contains the title on an ornate curtain. The two sides reflect the sword and crosier of the main figure – earthly power on the left and the powers of the church on the right. Each side element reflects the equivalent power – castle to church, crown to mitre, cannon to excommunication, weapons to logic, and the battlefield to the religious courts. The giant holds the symbols of both sides, reflecting the union of secular, and spiritual in the sovereign, but the construction of the torso also makes the figure the state.

Huh. Interesting. I guess that does away with the “coincidence” theory. David Graeber was clearly paying tribute to Leviathan. But why?

IS THIS AN EXAMPLE OF REVELATION OF THE METHOD?

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of “Revelation of the Method”, by the way, let me bring you up to speed.

Dustin Broadbery writes:

According to Michael Hoffman: first they suppress the counterargument, and when the most opportune time arrives, they reveal aspects of what’s really happened, but in a limited hangout sort of way.

Michael Hoffman suggests that the ruling elite are giving notice of their supremacy. Declaring themselves virtuoso criminal masterminds, above the law and beyond reproach. But most of all, they are telling you, in no uncertain terms, that you are without recourse, these events are beyond your control, as is your own destiny for that matter. Eventually a sense of apathy and abulia engulfs humanity, demoralising us to the point of conceding defeat to a system we are powerless to change.

Not that you would ever have restitution. The house is not designed to do its own housekeeping. Buried deep within their rule of law, is a hidden constitution that states: nothing happens without your consent. In this version of contract law, once the truth is hidden in plain sight, you have agreed to it. There exists someplace an unsigned contract with your unsworn oath on it.

In the end, we’re all victims of the same masterstroke, whether keyboard evangelist or state-apologist, everyone is being royally screwed, and it’s not so much that they’re laughing at you, it’s that you’re laughing at yourself.

Yeah, weird, I know.

This is one of those areas like predictive programming - it seems undeniable that such things are happening - consider the Hollywood movie Contagion, for instance - but if you take conspiracy theories about such things seriously, you risk becoming clinically paranoid.

Could the publishers on On Kings be dropping a not-so-subtle hint by choosing cover art which harkens back to Hobbes’s Leviathan?

I know that this probably sounds crazy to some of you out there. I wouldn’t even mention this, were it not for the fact that it supports my hypothesis so well. It just doesn’t strike me as likely this could be a coincidence.

If anyone can think of any reason that David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, of all people, would pay tribute to Hobbes’s Leviathan, I’m all ears.

According to my brain, this simply does not compute.

HOW TO PROCEED

The truth is that I don’t know what happened to David on that fateful Venice night. Maybe I’m just being paranoid, in which case I imagine someone that personally knew David will eventually come forward to tell me why I’m wrong. Honestly, it’s kind of surprising that no one has come forward yet.

And that is my plea, I suppose - that people more sober-minded than myself answer this call. If anyone is a position to set the record straight about any aspect of David’s life or death, I implore you to please do so. This is important. If dissident academics are being murdered, we can’t afford to live in denial about it.

If anyone out there has information about David’s death but wishes to remain anonymous, please consider sending what you know to Nevermore. We will respect your confidentiality.

As for myself, I will honour David’s legacy by continuing to explore his ideas, which I believe have a ton to offer us as the crisis of capitalism deepens and intensifies.

I will continue to share my thoughts about his death, but my focus will be on his ideas, because I think that that’s what he would want.

David Graeber stated that he wanted to live forever, and although his spirit has passed on, there is no doubt that he will be outlived by his ideas.

If he really was murdered, it was probably because powerful people feared the power of his ideas. If we let his ideas fall into obscurity, they win.

I believe we should pick up where Graeber left off. I believe we should follow his example and delve into the anthropological record and ethnographic theory in search of ideas that we can apply to contemporary political organizing.

If you have information about David’s life and death that you would like to share with us, please do so in the comments. Alternatively, you can email me at thecrowisamessenger@riseup.net. I am currently working on a more granular summary of the circumstantial evidence supporting the hypothesis that David Graeber was assassinated.

Wish me luck, and if I die mysteriously, please consider the matter settled!

Love & Solidarity,

Crow Qu’appelle