[...] In Graeber's interpretation [...] structural violence refers to the "forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm" that "invariably tend to create the kinds of willful blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures. To put it crudely," he continues, "it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid, but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence."

[...] dead zones of the imagination are both the means and the effects of revenge capitalism, a form of structural and systemic violence that appears to be retribution for unknown infraction [sic], expressed against whole populations out not out of personal malice (though that can play a role) but through the banality of the whole system. Revenge here is the character, not the intention, of capitalism in its neoliberal, financialized valence which relentlessly seeks to recode social life and institutions to better accommodate its imperatives of accumulation.

[...] Extractive industries are, by definition, temporary. When the resource being exploited runs out, or when it proves no longer profitable to continue the exploitation, the man camp is shuttered and the local community is left with a radically transformed economic and social landscape: a wasteland or sacrifice which has ceased to be of use to the circuits of global capitalism.

[...] the elevation of capitalists [...] to the most prestigious positions in the arts or government solidifies the illusion that they represent the cream of humanity. [...] anything good or whole or real about us is dependent on them and their intentional or unintentional largesse. [...] For all their individual creativity the system that enriched and empowered this tiny minority was actually the enemy of progress because it delimited the freedom and potential of the vast majority of workers. [...]

At the very core of the investor ethos at the core of financialization is a dead zone because it is predicated on a kind of obscuration of its own ontological truth: the investor-self imagines that its wealth, success, and autonomy comes [...] from individual competition, self-maximization, perseverance, and intelligence. In fact, their (longed-for) wealth and security is merely the unfairly distributed (and unfairly wrought) wealth of the society of which they are a part, but whose implications and responsibilities they loathe. In other words, the investor, whether real or imagined, is a taker who resentfully thinks themselves a giver.