The peculiar willingness of American families to accept, at a time of 9.2 percent unemployment, that our real problem is the need to cut government spending to balance the budget can only be explained as a classic example of magical thinking (I’m an anthropologist, I know magical thinking when I see it): perhaps if we can balance our collective budget, I will be able balance my family’s budget too.Obviously this is enormously relevant at the present time, given the facile rhetoric circulating especially among the anti-tax anti-government ante-constitutional Movement Republicans to justify their eagerness to crash the economy (you know, for kids!), endlessly analogizing budgetary decisions families make with those governments make -- even though family budgets are minute pieces of national budgets and not vice versa, although governments have tools available to them that no family has at its disposal, thus rendering the analogy instantly, obviously, utterly false.
It is interesting that Graeber is making the same sort of point from a different angle of view: Rather than imposing an inapt domestic set of budgetary standards on a national budget in an understandable effort to make comprehensible something unfathomably enormous through something modestly quotidian, something altogether alien through something more familiar, Graeber is proposing that another part of what might be afoot here is the desire to exert control on what seems volatile at the local level by uncritically demanding the control of the wider context in which that local threat is lodged, a desperate desire to wrangle the wider world into stability on familiar terms in the hope that one's own pocket of the world will thereby resume its own stability.
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