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

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.

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

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

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.”

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

I think we deserve more than coping strategies: we need political ones.

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

This means that our current capitalist system is set up less to meet and fulfill our current needs than it is to generate new ones, which, of course, can only be met through additional consumption—consumption of new lifestyles, experiences, products, upgrades, and apps with features we suddenly can’t live without.

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.