Ideas - Astra Taylor's CBC Massey Lectures | #1: Cura’s Gift

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

Insecurity has become a "defining feature of our time," says CBC Massey lecturer Astra Taylor. The Winnipeg-born writer and filmmaker explores how rising inequality, declining mental health, the climate crisis, and the threat of authoritarianism originate from a social order built on insecurity. In her first lecture, she explores the existential insecurity we can’t escape — and the manufactured insecurity imposed on us from above.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. This is the first of the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, The Age of Insecurity, by writer, filmmaker, and political organizer Astra Taylor.

Everyone feels insecure these days. And in this year's lecture series, Astra explores how the many different crises we're facing, mental health, housing, food insecurity, are tied to the fact that our social order runs on insecurity. From policing to the beauty industry, the systems that promise us security instead seem to undermine it. But while our society runs on insecurity, Astra Taylor argues that there are ways to change that. Astra Taylor was born in Winnipeg and raised in Athens, Georgia. Her most recent book is Remake the World, Essays, Reflections, Rebellions. Others include the

American Book Award winner, The People's Platform, Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, and Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone. Every year we record the Massey Lectures on a cross-Canada tour, and this year we went to Winnipeg, Halifax, Whitehorse, Vancouver, and Toronto. Today on Ideas, from Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg, we bring you the first of the lectures titled, Cura's Gift. Here's Astra Taylor. Okay, before I start, I do just want to say a few thanks. I mean, again, it's a tremendous honor to be here to give the first of my Massey talks.

In my bio, it was mentioned that I've toured around in a rock band. This is the beginning of the nerd tour. It's much more my element. So it's just really special to be here in Winnipeg on Treaty One territory. And again, thank you. Thank you for having me. So this is the first lecture. It's called Kira's Gift. Stories about how our species came into being often involve mud, including the one that I'm about to tell. It is the myth of the Roman goddess Kira, whose name tells us she is the embodiment of care, concern, anxiety, and worry. One day, as Kira was crossing a river, she saw some clay soil. Thoughtfully, she took it up and began to fashion a figure. While she was pondering what she had done, Jupiter, king of the gods, appeared, and she

said, would you breathe life into what I've made? He readily granted her wish, breathing spirit into her creation. But when Kira wanted to give this newly fashioned figure her name, Jupiter objected. He insisted that his name be used instead. As they quarreled, none other than Mother Earth, Telus herself, appeared, and she demanded that the honor be hers. After all, she had given her body to Kira's project. Having reached an impasse, they called on Saturn, the god of time, to come and settle the dispute, and his judgment was swift and decisive. He said, Jupiter, since you gave the creature life, you can take its soul after death. Since Telus offered her body, let her receive its body in turn. And because Kira first fashioned the being, let her possess it as long as

it lives. But since there is controversy about the naming, let the name be Homo, since the creature seems to be made from humus, from dirt. This was one of the hundreds of fables collected by the Roman slave turned grammarian Hyginus more than 2,000 years ago. The myth of cura reflects the human condition. Care and anxiety, concern and worry, the multiple meanings of the Latin word cura, are part of what makes us who and what we are, and it's hardly a self-aggrandizing narrative. part of what makes us who and what we are, and it's hardly a self-aggrandizing narrative. Cura's more famous Greek counterpart, the god Prometheus, for example, is said to have molded humankind in his image, enabling us to stand upright. He went on to steal fire on our species' behalf, enraging Zeus, who condemned Prometheus to eternal torment as punishment for that act.

who condemned Prometheus to eternal torment as punishment for that act. That tale, conflicted though its message may be, is one of human exceptionalism. It describes the origins of our Promethean characteristics of risk-taking, right, and technological innovation. It's a story in which the possession of fire sets us apart and above from other animals. Kira, in contrast, she doesn't give us any special tools or traits to ease our troubles. Instead, she worries over us, she cares for us, she acts thoughtfully, and she ponders, the story tells us, and so fates us to worry, to care, to ponder in return. At the time Hyginus transcribed his fables, the leading philosophers in ancient Rome were the Stoics.

And they were preoccupied with trying to escape the condition that Cura represents. To be Stoic was to pursue a state of mind they called securitas, being without worry, free from care. Securitas is the root of the modern word security. Securitas meant equanimity, the mental calm that the Stoics aspired to in their daily lives. Writing during the first century BCE, both Cicero and Seneca extolled imperturbability in the face of chaos and uncertainty. What is the blessed life, Seneca asked. Security and perpetual tranquility was his reply.

In Seneca's telling, true securitas involves not eliminating the concerns and anxieties that inevitably bedevil and unsettle us, but rather rising above them. He wrote, the brave man has no fear. Unconquered, he looks down from a lofty height upon his sufferings. For Cicero, the goal was to keep insecurity at bay. We must keep ourselves free from every disturbing emotion, not only from desire and fear, but also from excessive pain and pleasure and from anger, so that we may enjoy that calm of soul and security which brings both moral stability and dignity. Both ambitions, surmounting emotions or being liberated from them, require willpower and hard work. In their dedication, the Stoics revealed a fundamental contradiction.

Securitas, which again is care's absence, can only be achieved with effort, that is to say, with care. The myth of cura, meanwhile, tells us that such quests are futile, at least in absolute terms. To be human is to be perpetually insecure. Real securitas, the parable implies, can only be achieved in death when our spirits return to Jupiter and our bodies go back to Telos, freeing us, finally, from Kira's influence. In other words, as long as we are alive,

we are destined to exist in a condition that I will call existential insecurity. This existential insecurity is the kind that comes from being dependent on others for survival, from being vulnerable to physical and psychological wounding or illness, and of course, from the fact that we're mortal. It's the insecurity of randomness and of risk of a future that's impossible to control or know. It's the kind of insecurity we can never wholly escape or armor ourselves against, try as we might.

Like the Stoics before us, each and every one of us must wrestle with the tension this existential conundrum creates. We understandably orient our lives towards security. I know that I do, even if it is an elusive goal. We'd all like to care and to worry less. We'd like to have a secure home and source of income, to be insured of aid when we're sick or as we age. We want to feel confident in ourselves and in our sense of place.

But how to conceive of security in our era of unprecedented inequality when 8 billion people call our precious and collapsing planet home is a challenge that the Stoics could not have fathomed. We cannot afford to emulate Seneca, who sought his ideal of mental serenity while assisting and advising his former pupil and patron, the infamous Emperor Nero, who brought catastrophe on Rome. Caring for others while being at some point becomes our own self-interest. Our concern has to extend beyond our own private personal equanimity. How we understand and respond to insecurity is one of the most urgent questions of our moment because nothing less than the future survival of our species hangs in the balance.

The myth of cura reminds us that insecurity is our birthright, but it does not instruct us how to cope with this discomforting gift. Insecurity can cut both ways. It can serve as a conduit to empathy, humility, and belonging, inspiring what I like to think of as an ethic of insecurity, or it can spur defensive and destructive compulsions. We can run from insecurity, or we can learn from it, finding connection in our common fragility and reorienting our priorities in recognition of this existential fact. Cura has given us a gift, but it is up to us what we make of it.

Well before COVID-19 swept the globe, compounding suffering and leaving greater instability in its wake, insecurity was already everywhere. Millions of people had only precarious access to housing, health, food, and employment. Changing weather patterns increased the risks of fires and flooding, destabilizing communities and ecosystems, triggering ecological tipping points that will only intensify climate upheaval. Prior to the advent of social distancing, we hid behind doors, locks, gates, and border fences, afraid of public space and afraid of each other. Online, we fretted over information security,

devising passwords to access passwords. Fearful we might be hacked or maybe exposed. We were insecure in our schools, in our homes, in our relationships, and on social media. And of course, we felt and we still feel insecure about our very selves, about our appearance, our intelligence, our age, our health. Insecurity, of course, is not evenly distributed. Without a doubt, its sharpest edge is reserved for the most disadvantaged and discriminated against, and that's important. But it is still widely felt. We are all, to varying degrees, overwhelmed, apprehensive, worried about what tomorrow will bring. Some try to hide it, papering over self-doubt with self-aggrandizement while other people wear their vulnerabilities right on their sleeves.

Most people are preoccupied with struggling to make ends meet. But even the comfortable and well-heeled feel on guard, anxious, and incomplete. And so we try to cope. We give children security blankets. We purchase security systems for our homes. We fret over cybersecurity, wait dutifully at security checkpoints.

We extract fossil fuels in the name of energy security. We sacrifice the lives and freedoms of others and of ourselves in the name of national security. We work hard, shop hard, hustle, get credentialed, scrimp and save, invest, diet, 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 that it might one day help us care less.

Perhaps this is no surprise. Look at that existential insecurity the myth of cura revealed. How else should mortal creatures, creatures who spent millennia struggling to get to the top of the food chain, feel but insecure? When you might be a tiger's next meal, a tendency toward insecurity could give you a bit of an evolutionary advantage, prompting a useful instinct that keeps you alert and out of harm's way. And yet, even if existential

insecurity is indelible to being human, and I think it is, the ways we structure our societies can make us more secure or it can make us less so. And in Western societies, at least, material and emotional insecurity are now both on the rise. No doubt, insecurity is central to every hierarchical social system in some way. Autocratic and totalitarian regimes rule by fostering fear and threatening violence. Feudal systems kept peasants toiling by limiting opportunity and mobility. And of course, it's clear that people have long lived precarious lives. Otherwise, the Stoics and their quest for securitas would not have resonated so strongly during their time, and Buddhist thinkers would never have had to develop the concept of Zen.

But insecurity plays a unique role in the liberal capitalist order that dominates today, a role underscored by the fact that the word insecurity actually entered into the English lexicon in the 17th century, just as our market-driven society was coming into being. Only by revisiting this history and the central role insecurity has played in capitalism since its genesis can we understand our present situation and see how more recent developments, for example, the deregulation of finance and business,

the decline of the welfare state, have intensified insecurity and left no one, working class or wealthy, unscathed. Capitalism, as economists from Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes to Thomas Piketty have understood, is prefaced on producing a profit, which is then reinvested to make more profit. It is, in philosopher Nancy Fraser's terminology, voracious, relentless in its pursuit of new markets and

growth. 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. Those new ones, of course, can only be met through additional consumption. Consumption of new lifestyles, experiences, products, upgrades, and apps with features we didn't know about last week but we suddenly cannot live without. Capitalism thrives on bad feelings, on the knowledge that contented people buy less. An insight the old American trade magazine Printers Inc. put bluntly all the way back in 1930, stating, satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.

Consumer society thus capitalizes on the very insecurities it produces, which it then prods and perpetuates, making us all insecure by design. It had never occurred to me, for example, to fret over the buckle fat in my cheeks. I didn't even know how to say buckle fat until I recently saw it described by The Guardian as a, quote, fresh source of insecurity to carry into the new year. No matter how much we have, we are ensnared in systems that are structured to trigger insecurity, propelling us to endlessly strive for an ideal that we will always fall short of. This is why no advertising or marketing department will ever look at you and say,

you're actually okay, it's the world that needs changing. This kind of insecurity is what I call manufactured insecurity. It's quite unlike the existential insecurity that is inherent to human life, This kind of insecurity is what I call manufactured insecurity. It's quite unlike the existential insecurity that is inherent to human life, that is at the core of that myth that I just spoke of, the myth of cura. Where the latter is an ineradicable feature of our being, the former is a mechanism that facilitates exploitation and profit and is anything but inevitable. Indeed, the insight that capitalism is a kind of insecurity-producing machine, that insecurity is not an unfortunate side effect,

but a core attribute of the system, is one that these lectures will return to and examine through different lenses. Only by reckoning with how deep manufactured insecurity runs will it be possible for us to envision something different? My perspective is shaped by the years I've spent focused on the topic of inequality and its pernicious effects on culture and democracy, both in my work as a filmmaker and writer, but also as an activist. Nearly a decade ago, I founded with friends an organization called the Debt Collective. It's the world's first union for debtors. And it's become a bastion for people who are broke and overwhelmed. Inequality is indeed out of control.

And this is critically important. 10 billionaire men possess six times more wealth than the poorest 3 billion people on earth. But numbers do not capture the true nature or extent of the crisis. Insecurity, in contrast, describes how inequality is lived day after day. Where inequality can be represented by points on a graph, insecurity speaks to how those points feel, hovering in space over a tattered safety net or over nothing at all. Part of the insidious and overwhelming power of insecurity is that unlike inequality, it is subjective.

Sentiments or how real people actually feel rarely maps rationally onto statistics. You don't have to be at rock bottom to feel insecure because insecurity results as much from expectation as from deprivation. Unlike inequality, which offers a snapshot of the distribution of wealth at a specific moment in time, insecurity spans the present and the future, anticipating what's going to come next.

In my years as an organizer, what I've come to realize is that economic issues are always also emotional issues. The spike of shame when a bill collector calls, the adrenaline you feel when the rent is due, the foreboding when you think about retirement. But where my organizing work is focused primarily on the problems endured by the poor, debtors generally have negative net worth, after all, my conviction is that our current economic arrangement also harms people who have means, and the pervasiveness of insecurity is evidence of this fact.

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. Unlike inequality, insecurity is more than the binary of have and have-nots, where inequality encourages us to look up and down, right, to note extremes of indigence and opulence. Insecurity encourages us to look sideways and to recognize potentially powerful commonalities. Recent years have produced an abundance of scholarship demonstrating the negative effects of inequality on health and happiness across the board. Rising inequality and the

insecurity it causes correlates with higher rates of physical illness, depression, anxiety, drug abuse, and addiction. Living in a highly competitive, consumerist society makes everyone more status conscious, more stressed out, and more sick. No one is totally immune to anxiety and bad feelings, no matter how high they sit on that income graph, just as no one can totally insulate themselves from the ecological and economic shocks to come. And this is important, because recognizing how we are all made insecure improves our odds of devising a just collective response to our era's intersecting crisis, and we need one. Yet one challenge organizers like myself face is the fact that many people who would like to see progressive social change feel stuck on the insecurity

treadmill. They're too afraid of losing what little they have to step off and challenge the status quo in a substantive way. Constant insecurity helps keep us in line, while the conventional methods of achieving security are destroying us. Consider the hip Brooklyn cafe that my sister worked at until a few years ago. The place has a vintage and vaguely Parisian aesthetic, kind of retro and low-tech, and there were, of course, regulars, including a medievalist who liked to chat. On a slow day, a barista on duty was exchanging pleasantries with the medievalist when her phone rang. The owner was watching the security

camera live feed on his laptop, and he told her to stop being so talkative, but there were no other responsibilities or customers for her to attend to. When I asked my sister how many cameras were installed in the small space, she identified at least eight and said there could be more. The charming cafe was, in fact, a panopticon, the boss able to tune in from any angle at any time and see what was going on. Even when all they wanted to do was show a bit of kindness and community to a local eccentric, the workers were perpetually worried about being fired. The security cameras hadn't been installed to make the staff safer. They were there to make them feel insecure about holding on to their jobs.

And that sense of insecurity, it has to be said, can have devastating consequences. The mere fear of job loss, research shows, causes ill health and losing your job or experiencing unwanted unemployment increases the risk of death. Deploying cameras in this way is nothing new, even if today's models are networked or have artificial intelligence. In his book, Security Capital, a Carleton University law professor, George Rigacos, recounts his time working in a Toronto bakery in the 1990s. The staff regularly took home broken loaves, which was a perk of an otherwise exhausting and low-paid occupation. For years, management just looked the other way, tacitly permitting staff to take these unsaleable products. But that changed when rumors circulated that the bakery was soon to

close. The owners installed security cameras to catch workers in the act of taking bread, and they did it in order to have a reason to fire them without offering benefits. Lifelong employees were summarily fired, losing their retirement support along with their jobs. Rigakos writes, the security crackdown must have saved the company thousands upon thousands in severance and pension dollars. It also cost the workers their security in old age. Without a doubt, the workers are the sympathetic characters in the stories I just told, but it's important to recognize that their antagonists, the bosses looking over their shoulders, are not acting in a vacuum. They too are spurred on by insecurity,

even if they do not have to endure its worst indignities. All it takes is a devastating enough crisis to reduce the once fortunate to a state of precarity or poverty. Business could suddenly drop or dry up. A job could be automated or offshored. The stock in a retirement account could crash. Home values could plummet. A family member could be diagnosed with a serious illness. A storm could wreak havoc. Another more

deadly pandemic could hit. These stresses don't excuse behavior like spying on or sacking employees, but they can help us understand what propels it. Conventional wisdom suggests that greed alone is driving the boss's behavior. The problem is that a few avaricious bad apples are ruining things, right? This is the simple moral logic of many common children's fables or popular parables. Think of the greedy farmer who killed the goose that laid golden eggs because he wanted all those riches at once. Or the famously covetous King Midas who meets the god Dionysus and is cursed by his own request to increase his wealth with a touch

that turns everything into gold. Such parables offer good advice. So if you ever happen to meet a god who's willing to grant a wish, be very careful how you phrase it. I personally would just ask them to wire money into my bank account. But in reality, the problem is much broader and more systemic than a few insatiable individuals.

Forces less magical and more materialist are at work. The problem is market forces. These forces have been gathering strength for a very long time, since well before the invention of the automobile or even the steam engine. Unlike greed, which afflicts specific individuals because it's a character flaw, market forces impact every one of us. They touch and mold even the most intimate facets of our lives. To understand how these forces operate and why insecurity is so central to them, we need to follow the historians who trace capitalism's murky origins

to the English countryside, the place where modern insecurity first became endemic. You're listening to the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures on Ideas, on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films,

and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I devour books and films and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. While we were on the Massey tour, we recorded interviews about the kinds of insecurity we see today, specifically housing and food insecurity. We'll be playing excerpts from those interviews throughout the lectures. In Winnipeg, we met with Louise Simbandumwe, co-director of Seed Winnipeg, who works on projects around financial empowerment. She's a former refugee who was born in Burundi.

We're walking in a little park beside the river in Winnipeg. This is an important place for you. Yeah, this is one of my favorite areas it's on Waterfront Drive in Winnipeg to the back of us are some very expensive condos but during the pandemic I did a lot of walking in this area a lot of solitary walks and it was then that I started noticing just how deep the crisis in homelessness was and just the scale of the encampments along the river. And for me, it was shocking, but also sad. Growing up as a refugee, obviously our family was very much at risk of homelessness, but also witnessed a lot of people

in really difficult situations. And I didn't think I would see that, definitely not at this scale here in Canada. It is still here. What I saw is still here. And I would say it's even worse. Right now it is hidden by the trees. But once the leaves fall off, what will be very visible is many, many encampments along the river, including in the winter. And the systems and that safety net that used to provide that floor below which no one was supposed

to fall, there are bigger and bigger holes in that safety net. So more and more people are falling through. And in some places it doesn't exist at all. Which is why we end up with the encampments along the river. That was Louise Simbandumwe in Winnipeg. And now back to the first of the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, The Age of Insecurity. Astra Taylor explores the human condition of existential insecurity. We're dependent on others for survival, and we're vulnerable to physical and psychological illness. But today, we also live in an era of what she calls manufactured insecurity. Consumer society, she argues, capitalizes on the very insecurity it creates.

Here's Astra Taylor with Cura's Gift. Capitalism did not just appear fully formed, like a spirit conjured by an incantation in a myth or a legend. Instead, it evolved slowly, taking form over hundreds of years as England's feudal system underwent a social and economic transformation that would come to define the modern world. For generations, the peasantry had exercised customary rights to land held in common, rights to graze their animals, to collect kindling, to glean, to plant, to fish, and to survive by accessing meadows, rivers, and woods they did not own outright, but rather shared with others. Beginning in the 12th century, these traditional rites and ways of life came under attack to make room for a new emerging order of commerce. During the prolonged and varied process

now known as the enclosure movement, communal fields and forests were privatized, literally enclosed with fences and with hedges, displacing commoners from the land that had sustained them and fueling an unprecedented change. Now, the word commoner here has a double resonance. The people in question were common in that they were not aristocrats, but they also engaged in commoning, a word that is a verb, an action, a mode of survival, and a way of relating and being in the world. Commoners lived off land they collectively stewarded as a matter of, quote, common right. It was commoning that helped them achieve a baseline

of material security and independence, and it was the loss of commoning that made them insecure in the capitalist sense. Locked out of the pastures and woodlands that they attended to and gathered in for generations, people could no longer meet their own subsistence needs and had to turn to the market for survival. Where commoners had once tilled crops and made items for personal subsistence and for their local lord and community, they now had little to sell but their own labor. The resulting social upheaval was particularly devastating for women who had played a vital role in subsistence agriculture and who had passionately resisted enclosure.

With forced migration came slums and squalor, city centers crowded with people desperate for employment, women and children among those forced to work in the new and dangerous factories and commercial mills. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, so did the intentional and methodical devastation of old ways of life. In 1735, an anonymous pamphleteer called the commons, quote, a security for those whom fortune should frown on. And he noted that enclosure caused pauperism, a dire form of poverty previously unknown. For landowners, this was the point. They understood that the demise of the commons and the desperation and dislocation of the peasantry would yield a more pliable labor

force, and they had the power to make laws towards this end. Between 1760 and 1870, so just over a century at the tail end of the enclosing process, Parliament usurped ownership of approximately seven million acres of once common land, basically one-sixth the area of England. land, basically one-sixth the area of England. Elites condemned commoners as lazy, barbaric, assorted race, and compared them to Muslim infidels in his colonization of the Americas advanced to Native Americans, and claimed enclosure would improve both agricultural practices and public morals. Enclosure was thus a kind of trial run for the dispossession of indigenous peoples who used a variety of communal land management practices to govern their territories. In 1807, landowner Thomas Rudge recommended fencing with hedges that did not bear fruit,

so those hedges could not be put to life-sustaining use. He didn't want people to be tempted to eat for free. In his words, the idle among the poor are already too prone to depredation and would still be less inclined to work if every hedge furnished the means of support. Today, we take for granted that we must work a proper job to earn a wage in order to provide for our basic needs, and we structure our entire lives around this fact. The history of enclosure reminds us that this arrangement is anything but natural. Before the wage earner could emerge as our society's paradigmatic subject,

a condition historian Michael Denning calls wagelessness had to be imposed. Capitalism, Denning writes, begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living. In other words, it begins with manufactured insecurity, insecurity in its new modern economic sense. It would take until the early 20th century for more secure forms of employment to become the norm, at least for a subset of mostly white men, and only after decades of sustained and often militant labor organizing. Vulnerable and exploited workers

forged solidarity from insecurity, demanding better wages and treatment from bosses and protection and assistance from government. During the Great Depression, an unlikely assortment of trade unionists, communists, social reformers, and visionary politicians highlighted insecurity as a central and unjust component of laissez-faire capitalism and mobilized to remedy it. The 1933 Regina Manifesto, the founding document of Canada's Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the CCF, the influential precursor to the NDP, as you all know, offered a forceful critique of labor insecurity that helped pull the country leftward.

Here's their manifesto. The specter of poverty and insecurity, which still haunts every worker, though technological developments have made possible a high standard of living for everyone, is a disgrace which must be removed from our civilization. In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt observed that the, quote, civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial

changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. He denounced insecurity as, quote, one of the most fearsome evils of our economic system, and went on to invoke security as the justification for the New Deal. These policy measures formed the foundation of the American welfare state. The old age social insurance programs known as social security, health care supports through a mix of public and private benefits, public higher education, progressive taxation, mass unionization, and more. Wealth inequality reached historic lows as employment stabilized, and in 1940, the Canadian federal government introduced the Unemployment Insurance Act,

the nation's first national social security program. But even this modicum of institutionalized material security for ordinary people proved intolerable for economic elites who required social insecurity to do what they deemed acceptable business. Over the past half century, corporations and their allied politicians have launched a series of coordinated attacks on the gains of the post-World War II welfare state. In an attempt to shake themselves free from the rights and protections that labor unions won in the 1930s, much the way proponents of enclosure liberated themselves from the peasantry's customary right to the common centuries ago.

As a result of this big business-led backlash, a growing number of jobs today are contract gigs, lacking predictable full-time schedules. Even if they are well compensated, as many of the gig jobs in tech or television might be, they are short-lived and lack benefits. In a sense, the unsettling process of enclosure has never ended, but it has been rebranded. First is creative destruction and now disruption. Insecurity is now manufactured with the help of high-tech software and apps,

which relentlessly track and rate workers as they race across warehouse floors, check on patients, serve fast food, and navigate delivery routes. Insecurity, it turns out, is not a byproduct of our economic system, but a desired product. Or as the techies say, it's a feature, not a bug. Consider Jack Welch, the former head of General Electric, who made his reputation advising companies to intentionally stoke the fear of job loss to keep employees on their toes. Companies Welch maintained should lay off 10% of their workforce every year to, quote, improve performance, an insecurity-producing tactic used as readily on middle management as on blue-collar workers. In 2022, Fortune magazine

reported that Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told his staff he was, quote, turning up the heat to weed out underperformers. You might decide this place isn't for you, and that's okay with me. With the days of lifetime employment and good pensions long gone, well-paid white-collar workers cannot afford to rest unless they want to risk being laid off. But there was a brief moment when it was otherwise. Boosted by pandemic assistance programs and an abundance of jobs as economies reopened after the COVID-19 lockdowns, people felt less pressure to please their employers and more emboldened to seek out better compensation and treatment, even as rates

of inflation and costs of groceries, gas, and rent spiked. Emergency welfare measures had an immediate and remarkable impact on people's lives. The Canada Emergency Response Benefit, usually called CERB, provided millions who had lost work with a humble $2,000 a month. But even that small amount led to an almost 20% drop in overall poverty, while reducing child poverty by an astonishing 40%. In the U.S., the combination of stimulus checks, expanded unemployment insurance programs, and child tax credits prevented wide-scale destitution and caused child poverty to reach a record low. As a result of the sudden increase in federal income support, millions of people, my sister among them, felt materially secure enough to leave jobs where

they felt disrespected, abused, unhappy, bored, underpaid, unable to advance, and this led to a historic quit rate. Employers were less than thrilled. The Financial Post reported in late 2022 that the actions of a newly, quote, empowered workforce had caused, quote, a growing sense of anxiety among bosses. Part of capitalism's power has always been the insecurity produced by the pink slip and quiet quitting as the phenomenon came to be known was a sign that that fear was finally diminishing. Official monetary policy in the U.S. and Canada helped strengthen the boss's hand. While ostensibly aiming at fighting inflation, central bankers in both countries pursued measures that increased worker insecurity. In 2022, Tiff Macklem, governor

of the Bank of Canada, argued that, quote, an increasingly tight labor market was driving inflation and called for restoring what he called labor market balance, a way of saying that he aimed to decrease workers' bargaining power. While Macklem acknowledged that the process of increasing interest rates would not be, quote, painless, he emphasized that it would bring prices down, including the price of labor. In other words, it would suppress wages by making job insecurity intense enough that workers would stop asking for more. 800 years after the privatization of the English commons commenced, the old logic of enclosure reverberates from the current centers

of government and high finance as they impose insecurity on ordinary people for the benefit of current and future employers. Government shut down the pandemic assistance programs as quickly as they had started up, not because these programs were too costly or ineffective, but, I am arguing, because the material security they provided was a threat to the economic status quo, maybe even a greater threat than COVID-19 itself. Large corporations, meanwhile, have managed to mostly insulate themselves from insecurity, reveling in the image of risk-taking entrepreneurialism, even as they foist instability on others, a good worker remains an insecure worker. Even at a moment when corporate profits break records,

in 2022, after-tax profits were the highest percentage of Canada's GDP they have ever been, with margins climbing sky-high in the U.S. as well. And yet those who appear to be winning are setting themselves up to lose. In the long run, no one is safe from this ravenous, growth-obsessed approach. Insecurity also gnaws at the people on the very top, too. Over 200 years ago, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote about the fear of losing and how wealth itself becomes a source of worry.

Assets must be guarded and grown, after all, lest fortunes and reputations be diminished or lost. He put it this way. When insecurity reaches a certain point, the fear of losing prevents us from enjoying what we possess already. The care of preserving condemns us to a thousand sad and painful precautions,

which yet are always liable to fail of their end. He was referring to money and objects, which can be ported away by thieves, but he could have also been talking about status, which is impossible to steal and yet is never secure. In a world of economic extremes, even the most prosperous are afraid of losing rank, of falling in both net worth and self-worth. It is this insecurity that keeps them scrambling, scrambling ever upward. Economists call this fractal inequality. The person who is in debt

looks to the person with zero dollars, who looks to the person who has $50,000, who looks to the person who has six figures, who looks to the person who has half a million dollars, who looks to the person who has a million dollars in the bank, who looks to the person with twice as many assets, and on it goes. At a recent party at a penthouse apartment in Manhattan, I met a woman who spoke of being caught in the fractal's vertiginous snare. I was there making a pitch to potential donors on behalf of an independent magazine. It was clear, simply from her attendance at this event, that she had means, a fact she confessed that she would normally be at pains to hide. When I asked what had brought her to the event, she told me that she had joined a network of wealthy people who pooled their funds to support social justice causes. She sought the group out after having received a

substantial inheritance. Initially, she had been overwhelmed by her windfall, a trust fund of money that she had done absolutely nothing to earn. She wanted to be emboldened to give a good portion away. But the main effect of coming to know other wealthy people, she told me, was that she felt poor and insecure in comparison. Her good fortune suddenly paled next to the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars that these other people had. The dysphoria of feeling you don't have enough, even when you objectively have a lot,

is not simply a spontaneous reaction to seeing others with more, a kind of lizard-brained lust. It is upheld as the only rational way to behave in an insecure and risk-filled world. One of my younger friends also inherited a substantial amount of wealth. When he advocated for liquidating his share of the family's portfolio, he found himself stymied by a battalion of financial advisors, what Chuck Collins, an heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune, calls the

wealth defense industry. For obviously self-interested reasons, the advisors were dead set against the idea of giving anything but a percentage of the earned interest away. My friend's parents, who are avowed liberals, who ostensibly support progressive taxation and government regulation, were also opposed, invoking the threat of a global recession or an unexpected illness. Our possessions, monetary and otherwise, have a way of possessing us and turning us into people we may not actually want to be. As Diogenes, the cynic, the former slave-turned-philosopher observed 2,000 years ago, a man keeps and feeds a lion, the lion owns a man. Left unchecked, or rather untaxed, the fractal spiral never ends.

We see this in Silicon Valley's parade of billionaires jockeying for fame and dominance. Like a modern King Midas who doesn't realize that he's cursed, Elon Musk chases wealth, investing in electric vehicles and rocket ships, and he fleetingly became the richest man on earth, a coveted position that he lost when his compulsive online displays of arrogance and bigotry caused the value of his previous companies and personal net worth to suddenly plummet by a record-breaking $200 billion. Just a reminder that money will never buy your way out of insecurity, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response to his antics. But if Musk on his own can't buy his way out of bad feelings, then what hope do the rest of us have? This just underscores that pursuing security on our own

is not a viable strategy. What's more, it's actually a self-defeating and socially damaging proposition. The main mechanisms by which we are told to gain security for ourselves, making money, buying property, earning degrees, saving for retirement, often involve being invested in systems that rarely provide the stability we desire and often cause harm. What do I mean?

The stock in our retirement account, if we're lucky enough to have one, all too often supports industries that poison the planet. The tech company we work for undermines democracy or renders entire industries obsolete. The rising price of the home we own makes it harder for others to stay housed. Across disparate fields, from housing and pensions to the wellness and beauty industries to the education and energy sectors to policing and the military, the systems that promise us security often, in fact, undermine it.

And so the quest for security becomes a kind of roundabout suicide pact. If that metaphor seems overwrought, consider the example of the American love of handguns, which takes the logic of the individual security mindset to a tragic extreme. Often purchased to safeguard a person and their property from intruders and other threats, the weapon itself becomes a hazard, harming the very people it's supposed to protect. There was a study in 2022 that looked at 600,000 gun-owning households in California and found zero evidence of any kind of

protective effects of gun ownership and ample evidence of risks. People who live with handgun owners, particularly if these people are women, have a much higher rate of being fatally shot by an intimate partner than those who don't. The pursuit of security can also backfire at the geopolitical level, where the stakes are even higher. Think of the Cold War, with its decade-long obsession with enemies both domestic and foreign, which inspired anti-communist witch hunts and destroyed thousands of lives in wars that left millions of people dead across the world, or the advent of the proliferation of nuclear weapons driven by the logic of mutually assured destruction as a deterrent strategy. International relations scholars call this conundrum the security paradox,

which is an all-too-common absurdity that unfurls whenever attempts to increase one's own security lead to the heightened insecurity of others, prompting strong counter-reactions that leave everybody worse off in the end. The fact that I spent my intellectually formative years under the shadow of the war on terror may explain why this security paradox speaks to me, and also why the word security, despite my commitment to rethinking the concept here, still gives me pause. I was in lower Manhattan the day the Twin

Towers fell and watched mouth agape as the dust clouds rose skyward and the city shut down in shock. Many Western governments seized that moment of insecurity, of profound fear and of grief to wage illegal and inhumane wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wars that ultimately killed more than 900,000 people and displaced many, many millions more. They did this all while instructing the public to sacrifice civil liberties, democratic accountability, and moral integrity at security's altar. September 11th and its aftermath taught me that we must always ask, security of what, for whom, and at what cost? At the time, I did not realize this-off between liberty and security was actually a centuries-old motif one brought to us initially or at least most influentially by the philosopher

thomas hobbes in his book leviathan published in 1651 he made an argument that has been pivotal in shaping our modern conceptions of security and shifting the dominant understanding away from that stoic concern with mental calm toward the need for physical security in a strong centralized state. Personal safety, Hobbes insisted, can only be achieved by forfeiting personal freedom and submitting completely with no reservations to an authoritarian ruler or sovereign who will protect us. The alternative, he argued, is to exist in a brutal state of nature in perpetual war of all against all. Here's how he put it.

The cause of men's fear of each other lies partly in their natural equality, partly in their willingness to hurt each other. Hence, we cannot expect security from others or assure it to ourselves. Hobbes was notoriously cynical about human nature and an apologist for absolute monarchy, but his contention that political communities are essential to security and that security can only be achieved collectively holds

true. We will not become more secure if we just go it alone. Fortunately, instead of the Leviathan, Hobbes envisioned, modern states are supposed to provide us security as a matter of democratic right, a right we do not have to sacrifice any of our civil liberties to receive. And yet few people likely realize that we are all legally entitled to security

no matter where we live. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is unambiguous. It says, everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person, as well as the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond our control. The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights further emphasizes our right to security, including the basic means of survival, such as food, clothing, and housing. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Canada ratified into law in 2021, pledges

that Indigenous individuals have, quote, the rights to life, physical and mental integrity, liberty, and security of person, in addition to the collective right to live in freedom, peace, and security as distinct peoples. The concept of being secure also runs through a good number of domestic constitutions, including those of South Africa, Jamaica, the United States, and Canada. As Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms proclaims, everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of the person, and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice, a sentence ripe for philosophical interpretation and, I believe, laden with political potential.

The right to security has its roots in the long struggle over the commons and the principle of material provision for all. In Canadian jurisprudence today, security is explicitly understood as having physical and psychological dimensions, and there is a strong case to be made that it should include a right to a healthy environment too. As a dedicated organizer, I'm really struck by how rarely this legal entitlement to security is mentioned or discussed. Perhaps it's because the incongruity between the principles on the page and the reality of our day-to-day lives is too much to bear. It feels like an impossible dream.

Political types like myself tend to talk far more about the principles of freedom, equality, and democracy than security, and have come to believe that this is a serious strategic mistake. Security, particularly the material security of reliable access to food, water, shelter, medical care, welfare, protection from violence, and a habitable environment, must be understood as foundational to freedom, equality, and democracy, understood as foundational to freedom, equality, and democracy, not an afterthought. In contrast to Hobbes, I believe that freedom does not exist in opposition to security, but rather is one of material security's most important rewards. The security of having our needs met allows us to have real autonomy and creative agency in the world. Is insecurity something we always need to flee? Is security something that we always need to chase? We need to think carefully about the patterns we're stuck in

and the options before us and how best to proceed. Insecurity and misguided pursuits of security define and help drive so many of the problems that plague us today. The concentration of wealth and poverty, crises of healthcare and housing, looming environmental calamity, pandemic and climate denial, racist policing, and the revival of fascism. To use a phrase coined by the Zen-influenced writer Alan Watts,

I believe there is a wisdom of insecurity worth trying to access. Our existential insecurity, our inevitable fears and anxieties can be invaluable if very challenging teachers. But where some might counsel individual awareness and acceptance, my position, organizer that I am, is that we need to work together to change our circumstances. In my view, one of the most troubling things about manufactured insecurity is that it upholds a cynical theory of human motivation, one that says people will only work under the threat of duress, not from an intrinsic desire to create, collaborate, and care for one another. Manufactured insecurity goads us to keep working, earning, and craving, encouraging us to amass money and

objects as surrogates for the kinds of security that cannot actually be commodified. The kind of security we can only find in concert with others. Security is not something that we can achieve heroically or stoically on our own, whether through consumption or recycling, education, ambition, or mindfulness. We cannot breathe our way out of our thorny social problems, nor can we amass enough wealth to wholly buffer ourselves from them. As things stand, we follow the prescribed course. We work, we consume, we strive, we save, because we want to make our lives better, and that is not the same as being selfish. In the absence of new pathways to security, we can only continue along the old routes,

even as they are collapsing beneath our feet. But there's another way. Rather than something to pathologize, I want us to see insecurity as an opportunity, an opportunity to come together and create alternative routes and more fulfilling destinations. An ethic of insecurity can provide a powerful moral framework to help us reimagine and reorganize our social and economic

systems. The simple recognition of our mutual vulnerability, of that fact that we all need and deserve care throughout our entire lives, has potentially revolutionary implications. Indignation at the way insecurity is fostered and exploited under capitalism can help strengthen existing movements and galvanize new ones, coalescing powerful coalitions with the capacity to expand and fight for collective forms of security. Security based in compassion and concern instead of desperation and fear. This communal and collaborative form of security is not something we have to create from scratch. It is here now. Every time we watch out for each other, when we help and protect vulnerable friends and neighbors,

when we organize against oppression and dispossession, when we resist the erosion of the welfare state, when we fight companies contaminating air and water and encouraging self-loathing and shame. Security in these instances is both a noun and a verb, a web of material supports and social relationships. It is the security of the commons updated for our modern age. This is Cura's gift. Insecurity is what makes us human, and it is also what allows us to connect and change. Nothing in nature becomes itself without being vulnerable, writes physician Gabor Mate in The Myth of Normal. He says, the mightiest tree's growth requires soft and supple

shoots, just as the hardest shelled crustacean must first molt and become soft. There is no growth he observes without emotional vulnerability. While Maté is speaking of individuals, the same applies to societies. Recognizing our shared existential insecurity and understanding the ways that it is currently used against us can be the first step towards creating solidarity. Solidarity, in the end, is one of the most important forms of security we can possess. The security of confronting our shared predicament as humans on this planet in crisis together. Thanks. Thank you.

You've been listening to Cura's Gift, the first of the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, The Age of Insecurity, by writer and political organizer Astra Taylor, recorded at Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg. Your local bookseller will have the book version of the lectures, The Age of Insecurity, Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, published by House of Anansi Press. Our partners in the Massey Lecture Series are Massey College at the University of Toronto and House of Anansi Press. The Massey Lecture Series is produced by Philip Coulter and Pauline Holdsworth. In Winnipeg, special thanks to Marcy Mercouza. Online production by Alfea Manassan, Ben Shannon, and Sinica Jolic. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Our senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of the Massey Lectures and Ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayed.