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

When the Pew Charitable Trusts conducted a poll asking if people would prefer financial stability to upward mobility, more than nine out of ten respondents said they would eagerly abandon the pursuit of wealth for security.

When we shrink the welfare state because we expect the worst from people, we end up hurting ourselves and those we care about, creating a vicious cycle that stokes desperation and division.

our economic system depends on manufacturing insecurity to create more pliable workers and insatiable consumers.

An expansive and inclusive care economy is one possible expression of an ethic of insecurity, and one that would require dismantling systems that produce and exploit vulnerability. Instead of profit-hungry recklessness, a care economy would proceed cautiously, taking care of people and the planet by doing less harm, and by seeking to repair the dam

The hazard, in other words, comes from the possibility that millions of people might be less stressed-out and more free.

Things falling apart can portend doom, but it can also presage regeneration, allowing new possibilities to emerge amid the ruins.

Debt today functions as a kind of makeshift insurance scheme for people without recourse to adequate wages or social assistance, pushing household borrowing to record highs—Canadian households now have the worst debt ratio of any G7 country, outpacing the US.

In the words of narrator George Manuel, “perpetual debt binds us firmly to the store.”

In order for social insurance to become possible, what historian John Fabian Witt calls the “nonnegligent victim of nonfaulty harm” first had to be conceived.32 The idea of the accident had to be invented; put differently, we had to embrace the possibility that shit happens.

What made my experience unusual was the fact that my sheltered life caused me to find my peers’ behaviour not just cruel but bizarre—and that I had enough remove to be curious about it, too. I simply could not figure out why little kids with allowances of a couple quarters a week were judging each other for what they did or did not possess.