The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (The CBC Massey Lectures)

by Astra Taylor

We can emulate the security of the Stoics, seeking private peace amid the troubles that surround us; we can retreat to the security of the bunker, fortifying ourselves and our possessions behind walls and weaponry; or we can find solidarity and resiliency in the collective, cultivating what we might call an ethic of insecurity by accepting our inherent vulnerability and seeking public-spirited protection and community to help us weather life’s troubles as best we can.

This means that our current capitalist system is set up less to meet and fulfill our current needs than it is to generate new ones, which, of course, can only be met through additional consumption—consumption of new lifestyles, experiences, products, upgrades, and apps with features we suddenly can’t live without.

Capitalism thrives on bad feelings, on the knowledge that contented people buy less—an insight the old American trade magazine Printers’ Ink stated bluntly: “Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.”4 Consumer society thus capitalizes on the very insecurities it produces, which it then prods and perpetuates, making us all insecure by design.

Too often, insecurity propels the embrace of social hierarchy and domination, much the way the threat of environmental disaster and the coronavirus pandemic have fuelled science denial and other doomed attempts to escape insecurity by taking false solace in superiority and certitude.

“Capitalism,” Denning writes, “begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living.”24 In other words, it begins with manufactured insecurity—insecurity in its new modern economic sense.

Eight hundred years after the privatization of the English commons commenced, the old logic of enclosure reverberates from the current centres of government and high finance as they impose insecurity on ordinary people for the benefit of current and future employers.

Manufactured insecurity reflects a cynical theory of human motivation, one that says people will work only under the threat of duress, not from an intrinsic desire to create, collaborate, and care for one another. Insecurity goads us to keep working, earning, and craving—craving money, material goods, prestige, and more, more, more.

Manufactured insecurity encourages us to amass money and objects as surrogates for the kinds of security that cannot actually be commodified, the kind of security we can find only in concert with others.

As Diogenes the Cynic, the former-slave-turned-philosopher, observed two thousand years ago, “A man keeps and feeds a lion; the lion owns a man.”

Recognizing our shared existential insecurity, and understanding how it is currently used against us, can be a first step toward creating solidarity. Solidarity, in the end, is one of the most important forms of security we can possess—the security of confronting our shared predicament as humans on this planet in crisis, together.

The astonishing wealth of today’s financial sector has been built atop the insecurity of the many—and particularly, it must be noted, the insecurity of Indigenous and racialized people.

“Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor.”

When you have a communications architecture explicitly designed to bring readers’ eyeballs to advertisers—as ours is structured to do—you have a communications architecture optimized for insecurity, whether it is the insecurity of body-shaming ads or the insecurity of truth-corroding disinformation.

What we need, instead, is a system of education that is public, universal, reparative, and free. By public I mean funded by public dollars, not by tuition or by debt. By universal, I mean a space for everyone at every stage of life, where all subjects can be explored. By reparative, I mean an education system designed to acknowledge and actively redress past and ongoing social inequalities. By free, I mean in both price and purpose: education must be free in cost and aimed at freedom by unbinding curiosity. Should these conditions be met, education could actually be the motor of equality, opportunity, and learning so many of us want it to

History shows that increased material security helps people be more open-minded, tolerant, and curious, whereas rising insecurity does the reverse, causing dogmatism, rigidity, and bigotry to spike.

“I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain,” James Baldwin observed.

Banks and corporations routinely receive government bailouts or engage in “strategic” defaults, while debt relief for ordinary people remains as rare as it is controversial. This double standard serves as a form of security or insurance for the privileged: poor debtors are pushed to pay off their loans to avoid harsh penalties, while the affluent are shielded from risk and responsibility.

We can’t police and imprison our way out of poverty, mental health disorders, and addiction, or a lack of secure housing and opportunity. A carceral approach to social problems doesn’t solve them, it only deepens insecurity.

Huge amounts of precious public resources are spent burying penniless people in debt and then attempting to shake them down for payment, though the exact financial details of these schemes are alarmingly foggy.

If we truly want to be liberated from insecurity, we need to redefine security for ourselves. The real threat comes not from caring for our fellow citizens but from the systems and entities that undermine the public good for private gain: the unregulated financial sector creating derivatives markets capable of crashing the economy, lenders willing to destroy people’s lives to collect a debt, employers colluding to cheapen the price of labour, fossil-fuel companies profiting from the atmosphere’s destruction, privatizers who want to enclose the welfare commons. Commercial insurance and policing, mass consumption and the military, capitalism and human supremacy—like the mythical symbol of the ouroboros, these systems eat their own tails, devouring the future as we race to escape the insecurity they generate.

“The most impressive increases in output in the history of both the United States and other western countries,” Galbraith writes, “have occurred since men began to concern themselves with reducing the risks of the competitive system.”

What the writer Rebecca Solnit has called capitalism’s “ideology of isolation” encourages us to ignore all of the ways we are, in fact, mutually dependent.3 When we are shamed into denying the gift of care that we all need, we turn inward and put up defences, which only makes the world seem more inhospitable and hostile and ourselves more adrift and lost. In reality, other people are our best and most reliable form of security—the security of working with others to create a more caring society.

Today, many people respond to insecurity by donning masks of superiority and invincibility. They denounce “snowflakes” who need “safe spaces” while taking shelter behind bigotry, clinging to a centre that oppresses the periphery.

It reminds me of the words of my late friend David Graeber, the ingenious and mischievous anthropologist who helped us launch the debt resistance movement. “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world,” David said, “is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”