now here is graeber discussing his book, "bs jobs."

[inaudible conversations] good evening, everybody. yes a big round of applause for me. my name is david gonzalez and i am one of the event managers so on behalf of the store and the park, we want to thank you guys for coming this evening. we are going to get this show on the road at first and foremost please check your cell phones to make sure you put it on vibrate or sign wins and we want to make sure phones don't go off during the conversation. also, i would like to make an

announcement about a group we have at the store of some of you may not be aware of the current reading group. we have three in-store book clubs and one of them for some reason there is an a lot of interest let's say over the last 18 months or so. if you are familiar with the story, but by all means sign up for their e-mail list. it's a fascinating reflection of books for one of which whe is ce out so please sign up as well as our events. i would like to say going back

to back is literally in the warehouse and suggests tomorrow night just in time for father's day we will be hosting michael in the store very close to here for his book of essays called fatherhood in pieces and it would make an excellent book if you don't know what to get your dad, brother, husband, friend, somebody that is mired in fatherhood at the moment. so, without further ado please let me welcome guest this evening cory doctorow is a science fiction activist and coeditor and author of many books and our guest tonight, david graeber professor at the school of economics and the author and contributor to the guardians and others. please welcome cory doctorow and

david graeber. [applause] [cheering] hello there. i think we are live. i thought it started giving us the pitch for "bullsh*t job." >> let me start. five years ago i read an essay -- five years ago the phenomena of "bullsh*t jobs" and believe it came about is i had written this book that had done fairly well and i kind of discovered that if you write something offbeat o that people find

interesting, the world will conspire to make sure you never do that again. they will try to make you say the same thing and rate the same book and get the same talk the rest of your life, so i'm goingg to do the opposite that no one would ever publish and figure out a way to get it out of there. a lot of those things probably died a merciful death and everybody has forgotten them. but this one kind of took off and it was all based on [inaudible] anthropologist by profession but i'm not used to this. i don't come from that kind of background or professional managerial class, so we kind of figure them out and it's based on the idea that you get a certain insight based on not

knowing what's going on and being completely clueless. in this case i kept noticing when you ask people what they do david say nothing really, and usually think that this kind of modest but over time and a few drinks you realize now they meant that literally, they do nothing all day. i could basically do it in half an hour and i don't tell my boss but i basically sithat i basicad look at the cat all day, facebook, majong, whatever it is. so i wrote this essay where i said maybe this is is the reason we are not working a 15 hour week. automation should be at the

point i thought if you look at the jobs they have at the time we could eliminate them accept instead we seem to have made up the imaginary jobs, so i had no idea how many people were doing this, but there was a new one they said write about whatever you like and i said really. so i put this out and it's a thought experiment maybe they are making up jobs to keep us off the streets got the thing went crazy. i had no idea this was going to happen. it translated to 13 different languages. i was getting thousands of e-mails, i got this across my desk 18 times a day. shows you are not really doing

much. said people started writing these confessions saying things like its true i'm a corporate lawyer and i contribute nothing to society. [laughter] one thing led to another and discovered 37% of all people who have jobs today that their job shouldn't exist but it contributes nothing to society and that it would make no difference whatsoever and it would be 40% in holland, so i figured okay this is interesting to. clearly it's evidence of people's experience. what i did is i just went out

where i had a lot of followers and said have you ever had a job that is completely pointless, tell me all about it i would love to know. and i made up a gmail account, do i have a graeber job or what. i had a giant file and i used that for the box that is what we have before us now. >> is a sparkling book. this is a nice thing. one of the things your book does is something of a combination of capitalism itself. i know people that nurture believers and it's a manual for

the statecraft. but what they say if i give them a copy of this book lacks saw them some of them are insightful. they would say it is a principal agent problem. if you hire someone to do a job for you and instead they do a job for themselves. the founder of wal-mart wouldn't let his agents take so much as a glass of water for the salespeople because he said you know, you work for me at the minute you owe a favor you work for yourself. the two of you will figure out. and you describe very vividly this kind of renaissance to create and leaving aside that they are crooks come is it

powerbrokers of people so that they can use that within the company. so that is in large par a larget is going on. it's definitely a big part of it. i make a distinction with different kinds of jobs. this comes from the kind of stories -- i say that judging by the testimonies i've got, there are five basic jobs. there are flunks, gurus, box papers, tickets and task managers. [laughter] they are obvious and they are there to make someone look good don't actually do anything. like a receptionist who gets one call a day.

but other people are there to demand the staff if you hire someone for an academic job or provost or something you give them five little minions and then they decide what they are going to do. sometimes it isn't clear, sometimes the boss has a bullshit job. so then the category that i had to make up because so many people sai said i'm a telemarker or i'm a corporate lawyer. a lot of them would say what they are doing its bullshit and i think what they meant is not so much that i don't do anything or not but i don't do anything for the company, but my entire industry is bullshit. [laughter] [laughter] it shouldn't exist and that makes sense because they are

both very aggressive and you've only need them if your opponent has them. otherwise you don't need corporate lawyers. she walked into the 160,000 pounds a year job and did nothing but connecting with other people and it was a telegraph line that they have amazing hair and just talked with each other on behalf of. >> duct tapers are there to fix problems that shouldn't exist if the organizations organized at all well and often they remain on the job because they become flunkies because they are

measured by how many people work under them. you could have a lot of people that are fixing it. you could have a lot of people under you removing a bucket every hour. or an example i like to give is one university i was at there was only one carpenter apparently, so at one point there was a hole in the wall and it took weeks. there was one guy whose entire job assisted of apologizing that he was too busy to come. he's very good at it. [laughter] he wanted to but he couldn't. so there's a voice in your headd saying give you fire him and just hire a second carpenter said it woul that would be a pet example.

so they say that they are doing something and they ar that theyt giving into the commission of inquiry or something like that. that. a lot of companies have targets and all these statistics are trying to gather but nobody does anything with it. in the universities i asked for a time allocation study and so they are all supposed to be about figuring out how to do the optimal allocation of and got used to do so much time filling out the forms that it wouldn't be anything to the measuring and accounting. in fact in a lot of jobs in addition to bullshit jobs you have the real jobs, and so the rituals take up more and more of your time and instead of talking about what he would do.

okay so that is all taxonomy. it's a supervision they make up. but then the nice thing i like the explanation that so much of this is just about the principal agents is that it explains why you never fire people doing bullshit jobs that require but e that are doing real jobs is the reason the bullshit job exists is to shore up some empire dot those are the only people that matter in the company. one thing that you find that there is a rhetoric starting in the 80s. you cut down their members and speed them up.

meanwhile, they are doing absolutely nothing and they will never get fired because that is sort of the batch of honor and they are not only esteemed measured but often salaries on how many people are working under you in terms of how much money you have. you mac one thing that has emerged, people are miserable doing bullshit jobs. i spent time putting on my ayn rand hat [inaudible] [laughter] there is this theory that every

person has their own proclivities and it isn't unique to capitalism. people are happy doing different things and maybe the problem isn't that doing this work makes you miserable. maybe it's just the people have haven't found those jobs yet and we just misallocated the jobs anand we bear this be there thit they work. they have a tiny quantum of authority to organize the useless finals and incredible order. maybe those people are the people who delight in sitting at a counter every day for the chance to do the one phone call.

>> she had this idea that we could solve the proble problem e job distribution finding jobs nobody else would want. children like to play, let them clean the toilets and that kind of thing. [laughter] that's kind of the spirit of putting it. but yes, i suppose. the question though is why do you need to do that at all, if you can make interesting games for them to play and this is one of the arguments i can do at the end of the book if we were to allocate jobs or is the way that anybody given the choice of doing whatever they want would end up sayinwithinthat saying it another box and even if they are not meticulously annoying people who want to do precise things.

>> you talk about the work ethic and how it makes them sit in a room and watch tv all day. >> the theory and the economics of the grounding philosophy is to be trained in economics for anything. what economics teaches you is we are all selfish bastards and we are all lazy. basically we are all trying to maximize our utility which means getting a maximum benefit for the least amount of expenditure and resources. by that logic you should be divided. you win. people are just repetitively

unhappy. people are miserable, depression, anxiety, psycho suppression ... given the task to do, and incredibly toxic work environment. people talk about how you are doing something together and w why. everybody starts screaming at each other. it's an incredible bizarre ritual. so there is that there is also the additio addition that they e miserably and can't even justify it so i can't even complain. i'm so happy, and then complaining that it's nothing. okay. come on. >> there is a question then about where this all comes from and you have this move where you

go back to and you have to find some other grea way to put peopo work and so on. it's something that reminded me of these earlier days to trace this long course of human thought. perhaps i am being simplistic but when i took my courses they taught me that feudalism is a a project extractions of capitalism is based on you get your profits from employing people into paying them less than they produce whereas you could just take their stuff, so

it operates through the government and they are not separate in a system which is the idea why the economy is a separate spear developed. 500 years ago he hadn't heard of vietcong. there was no such thing. we have now is a situation where most profits on wall street are derived from finance either from financial firms or eve firms ors manufacturing from the financial branches. so they are just directly taking things and they just grabbed a huge pile of loot and are distributed the goods. anybody knows and ge give some f it back to everybody and establish a magnificent view of.

it's a very circular process. there's another thread running through this which is that basically we are in the purity of the soviet union was like in the capitalism i think i called if not in the book. can you talk through that it lacks >> the standard critique of the state socialism has a utopian idea that violates the basic principles of human nature. so if you accept it as it is, watch what people do and adjust to it but if you are utopian, people should be like this and molded by their environments and if you tell them how they are supposed to behave and they can't behave like that an then u punish them and it comes violent and horrible, so then they

realize the entire economy kind of works like that. i was reading about j.p. morgan chase and something like 16%, it might be more, of the profits arthe profits arefrom fees and . it is exactly that and they have the ideal image of what the actor should be like. utopianism has not only become a basis of capitalism but it's become a basis for the

capitalist profits. the biggest firm in america is getting most of the profits from pretending that the human nature is different than it is punishing you for not being able to live up to it. you wouldn't want to be in the soviet union because come and it's like because they always have to stand in long lines. there's only one kind of store that sells one kind of good and you hit this. the essay benefit forms and at the same 1,000 skus. >> please fill out way more forms than they did. somebody actually managed to figure out the average american spends six months of their life

waiting for the lights to change. that's the disturbing thought. nobody figured out the statistics for how long we take filling out forms. so like the internet has become fact that we've gone paperless means we all want to be travel agents and i think we spend more time filling out in any population in history so the bureaucracies invaded our lives that you continue that theme bullshit jobs. you know that their version of full employment is people have to sit in a room doing nothing all day. it is the intentional socialism in order to buy a loaf of bread

you say i want that, let me get a coupon. they make the system ridiculously elaborate so they keep everybody employed. i found this quote where he is talking about why he didn't want socialism. everybody says that it would be more efficient so that's true. sure it would get rid of redundancy and wasted effort in the system. think about this. 1 million, 2 million from 3 million people working for blue cross blue shield. what are we going to do with those guys and he's like wow that is like a smoking gun he's saying right here you don't want socialism. it's too efficient. otherwise what do we do with

these guys. so they create these blue-collar jobs and i think it is right around there in the no one wants to talk about this and i thought i knew something david doesn't know. the austerity and the collapse to see that kind of crypto marxist writer. it's about the idea that they used to promise every peasant could look like a board and somewhere along the way it said every one. so as a science writer, he has a new book coming out that i ha he a manuscript for called the people's republic of wal-mart and he revisits this debate about whether you could compute an economy. we can do managerial sciences to figure out where to allocate the

goods and so on saying it is an intractable problems you would need a calculator displays of ten buildings to do it. he named three institutions each have an internal economy the pentagon, wal-mart and amazon. she's basically saying it is in our grasp. but also what you've been saying is you're soaking in it. socialism and all the things you are worried about and hope for is all around us. >> it is totally possible. and we think about all those people who spend all their time doing lightning speed gigabit of trading. if you just said okay we find

replicators with stuff like that economies at all comfortable, they could come up with systems quite easily if they put their minds to it. we are just wasting all of this imagination and sometimes i think that is the whole point. they make them do this stuff so we don't get there and they are afraid of the future. that was true the people that could be inventing this stuff. for the high-speed trader types is that we are quite a diverse office here. one of them is cambridge and the other art oxford. they all have phd's and they did what they called liquidity provision which were off and put orders in for shares but did so in a way that someone else couldn'elsecouldn't figure out e putting in these orders and so

the reason they did that as as there's another group in the world who are writing these thoughts before they go and fight them and they would admit thithat it was the most socially useless work imaginable. they are interesting and we put our intellects against other people and so on but the most interesting thing i think a lot of appreciate is they were fully subsidized state education for two of ten years education and what they put it to work doing is writing software trade. >> i have a friend that grew up in st. petersburg and had friends that were versus delete cookies at math whiz.

one of them is doing software for wal-mart and another is in wall street derivatives. >> we have this whole debate about the access to scholarly work because maybe the person who can cure your cancer is one away from the article. >> at the end of the book we kind of skipped that and i came back with an argument for the unconditional basic income and one of the arguments i make is sometimes referred to in the problem that one of the objections to giving everybody money saying it is up to you to

figure out what you want to do with your life, when his people are lazy and don't want to work that we know that thi that isn'e otherwise they wouldn't be so miserable, but the other one is they are all going to go off and do stupid shit so you give people money like they are going to go off and become bad poets or something like that. but the thing is interesting is it's what they do when they are pretending to work this whole time. so, if we have that, sure some people do that, but 40% of people are already doing this how is it going to be any worse than it is now. if they do, they will be happier

than highlighting firms all day and a second o second of all, tn important, just one of them has advice realizing a healthy return on that investment. >> we do want to talk about this idea of universal basic instinctive about the left-wing in particular which goes something like this. every benefit we fought very hard for. if you roll them all up and say they are too expensive to minister your going to roll them up, there are a lot of ways to keep it smaller than the benefits people are entitled to and moreover if you take people out of work than you further diminish the movement and its

like labor can swing to the right. so they are good but don't have a concentrated people of interest especially to the right to never come back. >> there are different versions and this would be very true of the basic income but it's not the one so the criticism, what is the first part? they are not substituting very much. they are the ones that have already been eroded. the left-wing version is a way of expanding those in the

conditionality to contracts that so what you are doing is getting rid of the gigantic bureaucracy of conditionality and that seems insidious. if there's any conditionality under the benefits than 20% of the people but could have gotten it won't fall through. people are entitled to it but it's one of those little formulas i made up when i described the whole phenomena. speaking within jobs in the private sector are more likely to make people feel good about themselves. speaking within basically make poor people feel bad about themselves. there are armies of people to say are you looking hard enough for work so it's a left-wing

program but one that gets rid of the bureaucrats that do intervened so they are judging whether you are good enough to get something. what i learned in writing this book is whose job it is for enough forms to go to a homeless shelter or things like that. how can those people live with themselves? often they can't or they are unhappy. so they get it and try to make a perpetual motion. much happier than they are doing now. so there's that. the argument about the inflation, there's all these benefits already.

however, if you have the basic income there would be a lot of accidents to fight them because you can battle with whatever. i think at one point when they came up with a formula for the kind of reform that makes things better that make them better in a way that creates new problems that can only be resolved by the radical reforms and then there's another like that. this is a little like that of a traditional demand. they are dependent on their

livelihood and providing situation if they say i quit at any time if nothing would happen to them. >> we are winding and coming up to q-and-a. i wondered you wrote this essay and now you've written a book and it is a good successful work. what happens next in its incarnation in this particular project? the >> i gave a talk at the bank of england a couple of weeks ago called on the macroeconomic consequences of useless employment. >> something they need for bullshit jobs. [laughter]

>> first anthropologists to give a seminar in the bank of england. when i go home i have to meet with people to discuss the idea. i am part of the extra parliamentary left. there should be a push and pull between the two. so particularly for the bullshit jobs project. i'm interested in the idea of the classes. this is a concept i threw out in the book and it comes from my experience of occupied. they took place in the occupations and want to show their support. at one point i spent two days going through every single

testimony. if the feminists would describe as one education or social service in one way or another and there was an incredible outrage at the fact the more you work the less they pay you. they would be so in debt and miserable that you can't even take care of your family. so there was a kind of outrage and that is what we are seeing. there's less people employed in the profits go up. in the education it is the opposite. productivity keeps going up and at the same time we have to bring more and more people into that sector because the productivity is down and the

amount of services and the rate of health care inflation and education inflation we all know about. the only way to get any profitability is to squeeze the wage is so although for the world we see this rebellion. in the uk, we have the professor strikes, the teacher strikes all over the place and in france we talked about the nursing home workers. the working class this is something it always was in this idea of the productivity. most ar by maintaining and takig care of things, taking care of people. this is one project i would like to do. how do we reimagine the value around carrying.

we are defending the social value and therefore it is a bullshit job. real work takes care of others and even if you build a bridge where you kerry people who cross the river so if it is a complemenacompliment to kerry at is freedom for the production and consumption i think that we should talk about the care and freedom. it is work that maintains or augments another person's freedom. it's like the freedom are very closely related concepts. they can go out and play and so why did we take that as our basic paradigm for value, care and play and freedom?

if we do so, we have a completely different perception of what is important in our society and we can build a society once the drudgery of the product for production is largely automated what are the things we are going to do that are valuable, so i am going to work on that. [applause] i would like to remind you that our question is a brief sentence that goes up at the end. [laughter] and followed by what do you think of that question the quess not good ones and do you mind if we alternate. one side of the room and then switch over to.

>> this concept is kind of new to me, but i heard a debate and i don't remember who it was we were talking about guaranteed federal jobs. she said it's better to have a guaranteed job if people can go to if they needed to work and needed money rather than this because she said the income would be given to everyone like the coke brothers and at the top of the money we're doesn't go into the economy or do any good. it's not needed and then people at the bottom spend it and the big objection was inflation i think you've touched on that. so can you help me understand that debate? >> there's a lot of different points that you are making.

the basic argument is to get people automatic universal incomes or do we have a program where everybody wants a job and disable both have similar effects in raising wages for everybody else because you don't have a disparate group of people that you can employ. for me the difference is ultimately. the people that go through the guaranteed job are not trying to get rid of the idea that you need that work because there's still going to be somebody administering and making sure you don't get paid unless the work. people come from these managerial backgrounds assume they are goinbutassume they aree maintaining the bureaucracy. i think we should create him the freedom where it is up to you to decide what you want to do.

it is on top of the basic income that would be great but instead of this income, you are still saying you are not going the full length of saying you've are alive you should be guaranteed the means to live and then decide how you want to contribute. and especially this is true of labor because a lot of the ideas of the basic universal income comes out of feminism. if you are serious about your system come hal can have work ig paid. when it came time for what he really wants, it is measuring the hours you do and commoditizing and even taking care of a baby. so let's give everybody a flat rate and you can decide what you want to produce or what you want

to do. and that would be a guaranteed in the jobs to the question is would it be inflationary and that depends on the money. you have a theory of money is the same amount that is and how it works. controls on rent, that would inflate rent prices, but otherwise i think that the problem of the jobs is that it doesn't create a moral transformation. it still says everybody has to

work otherwise you are not deserving of life and we are trying to say no, you are. >> the modern monetary theory and the esoteric argument for. >> you talked about the corporate world and the government jobs. what about the nonprofit sector that people are trying to make up for as you mentioned in that group are generally how the nonprofit sector and also maybe

another category [inaudible] >> there is a great deal of bullshit. anybody that works in the charities talks about that and it's pretty much equally across the board. i think ironically the government sector is less than the private fun because it is under so much pressure because people assume it is bullshit progress of the israeli checking the sector. ngo i havngo via satellite withf especially in that nexus where it isn't clear that's where we get the worst accumulation in the middle zone. but the question about the collectives that there is a

degree in this unnecessary process and formalization unless they are self-consciously trying to make sure that it wasn't, but it doesn't mean that it will lead to full-time bullshit jobs and traditionally this organization has been famous for, to be honest, collected in the deep inspiration for why i wrote this book. my father is an ambulance driver based in barcelona so he got to live under these forms of the organization and what he told me is they have a very simple solution to collectivize the interfaces they simply got rid of all of the white collar workers and sometimes they are here to make you feel bad about

yourself. they devise a job or get some back. they didn't find the need for the full-time positions like that. and part of the whole idea so that nobody would be giving exclusive paperwork anyway. so you would all probably try to keep it to a minimum. >> seven terms of the sector i remember when canada needed someone to run the red cross and of course they are filled with people from finance because they know how to raise money and they brought in someone that used to run the record industry lobby and he decided that the red

cross major priority is to make sure that no one uses red cross trademark and they spend a lot of time shaking down videogame makers about whether they had red crosses on them. i always do that as an example because nowadays economics is the badge of any sort of confidence, so anybody that runs anything has to be trained in economics. so you can't run a charity. >> can you tell me what happened to the experience in different parts into places where they've been tried and it did they all pretty much by? >> the major long-term were extremely successful. the one that they did in finland that they gave up on what they

are or supplements, basically forms of long-term unemployment, the day are not for everyone. the ones that have been real had been in relatively poor countries and often we find that they are things they didn't even really expects like the rate of domestic violence because it turns out they are more or less about money. it has a strong effect. another thing they find it's often people hold a certain percentage of it. so they found people kept half for themselves and each family

together half in a pool of and they all decided in these places they have like endless development projects and try to impose some stuff on them and they were curious about what would happen if people decide for themselves and the if they p with something like they never thought of and in this case they decided with the community really needed was a post office so they pulled their money and created one. >> i think my microphone is off. when it comes to these automated corporations or organizations

using something like a crypto currency to evangelize everything to do away with all of the bullshit that we have to deal with and then using something like that to alleviate highlighting and all that sort of thing. >> is about crypto currency to eliminate bullshit. 60% of all questions are nonconsensual and -- [laughter] that is a really useful quote. i will refer you to a thing that i read this morning that i vociferously disagree with who started a theory talking about was it a good idea, and his

answer was no and he had a kind of gloss over what he would do now. it's interesting that kind of inside baseball and i'm not a crypto currency person but if you were thinking about it that is what i would look like if it was on the marginal revolution which is the account of whom i read religiously because i disagree with everything he says and admire how reasonable he makes it sound. she makes the best case for whatever position i wouldn't have. >> they make the most ridiculous case possible. >> anybody that would like to identify and ask the next

question. [inaudible] >> it is just a talking stick now. >> it would seem what we have been reading recently, the brave new world is almost upon us with artificial intelligence and robots doing massive numbers of jobs currently and people being employed upon the. for example if 4 million truck drivers are replaced with self driving trucks in the next ten years, how do you see those people being incorporated into the economy? what they be given bullshit jobs? >> okay. i find it really fascinating that we kill the prospect of the

elimination of drudgery is now a problem. my standard answer to the question is okay for the last 30 to 40 years, they've been telling us that market capitalism might suck in a million ways, but it's the most efficient possible. it's whatever you want the most efficient way possibl possible,e only system that will provide efficiency will be a disaster and will not work. ..

>> i think we need another one. >> as a science fiction writer. [laughter] i find that story from self driving cars to be grossly overstated on the one hand we don't have them that are very good and if we did we would have so much else of a problem to put millions of truckers out of work that would be minor reveling to be a record industry executive in 2002 say it would screw up all the other business people we soon the musicland but wait until 3-d printers come along and you all do the same thing. yeah that is mongering but

that is kind of cool. and where will those forces go but to characterize that with a major impact is a little shortsighted. >> anybody with a final question or the okay question? >> what is the difference between this and trickle down? >> because it's not really trickle down it is trickle up. actually most of the jobs are result of trickle-down but

that everybody seems to agree on that it is more jobs and to give money to consumers so rich people will employee those will -- mill workers and trickle down says no. give them money and able figure it out but then they can't hire people to make stuff because nobody will buy it. and then that is real trickle-down. and that is what they used to call trickle out but it is the opposite but the difference is it isn't necessarily creating jobs. and working harder for someone

who is annoying. so it has nothing to do with trickle-down or trickle up so it is about reallocating money or that resources. it does give it that certain branch of the population. >> it was trauma for those that were going through the stages of grieving. maybe if trickle-down isn't working we can just depend on a ai. or those industries that are advocating to say with growth any quality. so anyone having to mortgage their houses.

so this is increasing the power of people who get it but psychology has a lot to do with this and how we package it. because you are acknowledging the role that people had to create the things that make wealth possible. and high tech makes it possible. but all these basic forms of knowledge like english which is language. commonwealth. and that would make possible you can't say i created it more. we all did. so we give people a social dividend.

>> thanks for coming. this is a moment. >> now we will clear the stage if you want to get the book signed line up right here. hang tight. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> well we do between birth because at some point and that small exercise to create in us a shared vulnerability of the commonality because this life in this moment right here is all that we have in the contraction of this cosmos. i fear we will not leave many of you with much hope.

some are far more dangerous or disconcerting and it seems what we are suggesting here is compatible when it comes to discussing race we must not be like odysseus to allow the sirens to sing to us with intimate and courageous discussions about race and avoided we must allow the strength of the unpredictable spaces with those practices and that embodied orientation. wes the open to rethink or more specifically with those discussions of race and

likeness we must ask more of white people black people must be willing to die that unnecessary death. not talking physical death but to whites denial to innocence to technological innocence adapt to white goodness a death to privilege and a death to white denial or self-righteousness. death to white allusions to that likeness and a death to all of those tricks that white people play with themselves to convince themselves they are fine and the good ones and the sophisticated ones and then to listen courageously and then i

published a piece in the new york times that the article generated over 600 comments your stock in trade it is payback you pedal your racial hatred that makes you a racist i read your creed on a summers evening and you write like one. to lead others astray. and just like hitler when you get there. mac hello everyone i am the ceo of the atlas society which is a philosophy think tank