The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Why I recommend this book This book, is a definite must read, if you ever want to try understand how money and debt really works and why it even exists. It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. Graeber explains how debt can be weaponised and used in a negative way by human greed and or the need to make war, and how the monetisation of debt has become such a big problem. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began 'comparing power with power, measuring, calculating' and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. 'And since we are human we help each other. 'Up in our country we are human!' said the hunter. “Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat.

Graeber debt book