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You undoubtedly experience many of these “something for nothing” moments in your daily life. Maybe you’re at work and ask a coworker to pass you a tool—without your coworker expecting some kind of transactional reward from you in return.

Graeber notes that every society features some level of this “everyday communism,” but they vary from society to society and from person to person and from interaction to interaction.

Maybe we’re more likely to see these kinds of unreciprocated gifts in smaller-scale, face-to-face societies, and less often in larger societies with many more impersonal interactions between strangers. In those societies, maybe we’re more likely to witness what Graeber calls the “heroic gift.” These are situations in which people with power give away wealth to bolster their social status and prestige.

Think the potlatches of the indigenous communities of the northwest American Pacific coast, in which elites competed to hand out as much material wealth as they could. Or the classical Athenian liturgy, in which wealthy elites competed to make the largest donations to state finances. Or possibly that medieval merchant at the top of the thread.

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