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 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.

As social provision shrunk, striving became a form of personal insurance against future risk; as employment became more precarious, education was advertised as the most reliable path to upward mobility. Competition was extolled as the most effective way to keep afloat, and the purchase of new products the surest path to self-expression.

The aim was to “increase the number of hands for labour, by removing the means of subsisting in idleness,” as one outspoken proprietor put it.

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.

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.

As social provision shrunk, striving became a form of personal insurance against future risk; as employment became more precarious, education was advertised as the most reliable path to upward mobility. Competition was extolled as the most effective way to keep afloat, and the purchase of new products the surest path to self-expression.

Certainty is not security, it’s a snapping shut and a cover-up—an attempt to escape from the insecurity of not knowing.

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.