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

What The Silent Revolution demonstrated was that varying levels of insecurity and security can have profound cultural and political consequences. Security or its absence can usher along the forces of reaction or of progress. It can stifle democracy or strengthen it.

Security means having some assurance of future stability and the ability to plan ahead.

When polls were conducted of incoming American freshman in the late sixties, a full 80 percent of respondents said it was essential to them to develop a meaningful philosophy of life; around 45 percent felt financial success was essential.43 For the students surveyed, university was less about career training than self-actualization.

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 ins

When we examine society through the lens of insecurity, which affects everyone, as opposed to inequality, which emphasizes two opposing extremes, we can see the degree to which unnecessary suffering is widespread even among those who appear to be “winning” according to the logic of the capitalist game.

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.

Curiosity is something we can safely be consumed by, since consuming knowledge enriches us without creating waste.

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

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

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