David Graeber on Freedom & Constraints

“ On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. It is not for nothing that we all have the picture of the schoolmarm rapping a child across the knuckles for some grammatical error as one of our primodrial images of oppression.

But at the same time, if there were no shared conventions of any kind–no semantics, syntax, phonemics–we’d all just be babbling incoherently and wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other at all. Obviously in such circumstances none of us would be free to do much of anything.

So at some point along the way, rules-as-constraining pass over into rules-as-enabling, even if it’s impossible to say exactly where. Freedom, then, really is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating.”

David Graeber in “The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy” (2015)