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.

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

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.

Trying to be less guarded, more resilient, and authentic does not preclude also trying, simultaneously, to change the structures that systematically assault our self-worth.

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.

Fourth grade was my first encounter with what I call manufactured insecurity, the kind of insecurity generated to keep us competing and consuming, nudging us to act like materialists and compete for scarce resources, even if we might prefer to try to live another way.

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.

Today, we are caught between two conflicting theories of human motivation: one that sees material security as the basis for personal and social growth (a view held, for example, by Inglehart and Maslow), and another that is committed to manufacturing insecurity to keep people compliant, anxious, and striving.