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This is a common thread in much of Graeber’s work. In his essay “Army of Altruists,” Graeber argues that altruism and egoism are far from natural expressions of competing human motivation. Rather, “egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature” that historically emerged around the same time as both the great monotheistic religions and the increasingly profit-oriented economies of the ancient Near East. We might speculate that the idea of separate spheres of life—sacred and profane, value versus values, generosity versus greed—is an ex post facto justification for those market economies, not their cause.

Human beings are motivated by far more than greed and generosity:

“When we are dealing not with strangers but with friends, relatives, or enemies, a much more complicated set of motivations will generally come into play: envy, solidarity, pride, self-destructive grief, loyalty, romantic obsession, resentment, spite, shame, conviviality, the anticipation of shared enjoyment, the desire to show up a rival, and so on. These are the motivations impelling the major dramas of our lives that great novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky immortalize but that social theorists, for some reason, tend to ignore.”

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https://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/army-of-altruists/