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

The security of having our needs met allows us to have real autonomy and creative agency in the world.

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.

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.

For a well-positioned few, multiplying hazards are market opportunities. “As the risk society develops,” Beck warned, “so does the antagonism between those afflicted by risks and those who profit from them.”

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

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

We work hard, shop hard, hustle, get credentialed, scrimp and save, invest, diet, self-medicate, meditate, exercise, exfoliate. Like the Stoics before us, we engage in self-care, hoping it might help us one day care less.

It is not enough to be granted the right not to be abused by our governments without the corresponding right to receive assistance; not enough to possess civil and political rights without social and economic ones as well.