The Two-Edged Sword of Insecurity
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in April 2024.
Astra Taylor gave the Massey Lecture this year on the Age of Insecurity. She’s a bright young thing, talks very fast, twirls your mind like black licorice and leaves you with something to chew on. (Available wherever you get your podcasts, as they say.) I found myself nodding a lot!
Here’s what she said in the first salvo that resonated with me:
One: insecurity is an existential component of life. It’s hard-baked into the human condition. For good reason. Because the only way we can be protected from everything, have absolutely nothing to worry about, is to be dead. It is either both good and bad, or neither good nor bad. It just is – and it’s integral to life. Taylor calls this existential insecurity.
Two: insecurity is an integral element of capitalism. The DNA of capitalism, its only reason for being, is to make money. This enables you to buy everything you may need. Capitalism seeks through blanket marketing to ensure that you will never feel confident that you have everything you need, that there will always be something, perhaps not even created yet, without which life is not good. Capitalism consistently sells insecurity. Taylor calls this manufactured insecurity.
Three: The only antidote for insecurity is community, the sense that someone/s has your back. Before capitalism took root and spread like crab grass, communities were self-sufficient. If we want to talk about what they didn’t have – cell phones, processed food, airline travel – we must also include insecurity. The community collectively had what it needed to survive. When it didn’t, it died. Which, as we’ve established, is the ultimate freedom from insecurity. Death in those cultures was very much part of life, not something that must be avoided at any cost. (Cost: got that?)
The rise of capitalism required the death of community – because capitalism requires insecurity and community addresses insecurity. In recent civilized history, this started with the Enclosure Movement, the methodical clawing back of the Commons to private ownership, which stole from Commoners the means to be self sufficient. Eventually Commoners were squeezed to the point where they had to exchange the only thing they owned, their labour, in order to survive. This birthed the Industrial Revolution which tipped the world into the destruction of global warming. (In North American history, this appeared as colonialism: terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery, another route to global destruction as is being played out in the present.)
So it follows that the antidote for insecurity is the resurrection of community. It seems almost heretical to say that, after the massive outpouring of veneration for Brian Mulroney as the Father of International Trade, but I believe the outpouring was for him as a man who had the courage of his convictions, rather than for the wisdom of those convictions, given the burgeoning inequality they midwifed.
And if it’s so, that community destroys insecurity, we have an advantage as a small rural community for whom building self-sufficiency is rememberable history. We had a little sip of that in the early days of the pandemic, when the government did what I think governments are supposed to do, look after the basic needs of its people, and provided what amounted to a Guaranteed Annual Income. We re-acquainted ourselves with challenge and joy of our kitchens. We prioritized our social connections and invested in the care of others. We bundled up and socialized in fresh air. We found ways to be entertained without spending money. We stayed close to home. We gave the environment a break.
We ‘discovered’ – or maybe uncovered is the better word, as in exposing a repressed secret – that loneliness kills. Of course capitalism wants to monetize that discovery, wants to sell the cure -- for a profit. But the truth is that human connection, caring for others, is not an easily commodifiable product. We can create the conditions under which it happens, but we can’t make people click. It happens or it doesn’t: that’s the human part, the part that AI can simulate but not produce. A robot pet may be better than nothing, but it’s not a solution to loneliness, it’s not going to build community, it’s not going to go a-commoning.
Did you know commoning is a verb? It means to act for the wellbeing of the community. Who is going to go a-commoning? We are, if we choose. Insecurity, community, lemme see, which feels like how I wanna be? Hmm, I think community sounds a bit enticing, don’t you?
