Security is fundamentally about being able to hold and stay in the tension of uncertainty without compulsively resolving it or dispelling it.
Jessica • Tweet
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Security is fundamentally about being able to hold and stay in the tension of uncertainty without compulsively resolving it or dispelling it.
To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
Alan Watts • The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Security means having some assurance of future stability and the ability to plan ahead.
Astra Taylor • The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (The CBC Massey Lectures)
As uncertainty and precarity become the new normal, so governmental regimes have shifted their focus from how to secure us to how to make us resilient. Security, and the longing for it, have become a kind of pathology. We are no longer to expect or seek certainty but rather to embrace and accept challenge and danger, a state of perpetual emergency…
Vincent Deary • How We Break
Certainty is not security, it’s a snapping shut and a cover-up—an attempt to escape from the insecurity of not knowing.
Astra Taylor • The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (The CBC Massey Lectures)
To be insecure, then, means being unfixed and unsure, to be in a place of possibility. Depending on the context, this kind of insecurity can be unpleasant or even terrifying, and it is especially awful when it is foisted on us by those looking to take advantage of our disorientation. But under the right conditions—when it is buttressed by a more fu
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