Ideas - Astra Taylor's CBC Massey Lectures | #5: Escaping the Burrow

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

In Astra Taylor's final Massey Lecture, she offers hope and solutions. Taylor suggests cultivating an ethic of insecurity — one that embraces our existential insecurity. The experience of insecurity, she says, can offer us a path to wisdom that can guide our personal lives and collective endeavours.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

This is the fifth of the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, The Age of Insecurity, by writer, filmmaker and political organizer Astra Taylor. Everyone feels insecure these days. We are financially insecure, overwhelmed and anxious and worried about the future. overwhelmed and anxious and worried about the future. In the final of her CBC Massey lectures, Astra Taylor offers up some hope and solutions to our crisis of security. Human beings will never be totally secure, she argues, especially not on a planet that's been destabilized.

We need to find ways to cope and to build new forms of security together. 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 Kerner Hall in Toronto, the final 2023 lecture, Escaping the Burrow. Here's Astra Taylor. Wow, it is wonderful to be here with all of you tonight. So many faces I don't know and lots of old friends and family in the audience.

It's just a tremendous honor to be here. It's also a tremendous honor to be asked to deliver the Massey Lectures. And when I was asked to deliver them, I wanted to write something that really spoke about all of the intersecting challenges we're facing today. And so that's what I've tried to do. In the book, I distinguish early on between two types of insecurity. One is existential insecurity,

which is the insecurity we all feel by virtue of being mortal, fragile human beings. We're all vulnerable. We all need care. That existential insecurity is an ineradicable feature of being human. It's challenging, but ultimately, I think it's a beautiful thing that we can learn from and that we need to accept. In contrast, I talk about manufactured insecurity, which is a kind of insecurity that is imposed on us, that undermines our well-being, our mental health, our material security. And it's a kind of insecurity that is imposed in order to facilitate power and profit for the few. And this kind of insecurity is something I don't think we have to accept.

Indeed, I think we need to recognize how pervasive it is and work together to change it. And so here we are for the final lecture. I've made it this far, people. Thank you for being here with me for this it's called escaping the burrow franz kafka's novels and stories are famous and even if we haven't read them we at least know the term kafka-esque the metamorphosis and the trial as well as his letters and diaries have made him one of the most celebrated writers of all time. But these renowned texts are not all the prolific author wrote. For 14 years, Kafka was

employed at the Prague office of the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia, a semi-government agency where he penned countless reports, briefs, and speeches. These less illustrious texts, published between 1908 and 1915, include exciting titles such as The Scope of Compulsory Insurance for the Building Trade, Risk Classification and Accident Prevention in Wartime, and Fixedrate insurance premiums for small farms using machinery. These documents are every bit as tedious as their titles imply, and yet they also make clear how much Kafka's day job fed his incredible creativity. The nightmarish bureaucracies and harrowed characters he so memorably conjures were informed by his alienating

and stifling professional milieu. By day, Kafka was a diligent and dedicated functionary of a government insurance agency, and perhaps necessarily so considering the discrimination he faced. He was one of only two Jewish employees among a staff of 263. By night, he wrote from the perspective of outsiders trapped within inscrutable systems, crushed by Byzantine power structures, and helpless to escape or even understand their fate. Kafka had talent, and he also had a conscience. During his short life, he was known less as an artist than as a devoted industrial reformer. While on the clock, Kafka did his best to make the bureaucracy he represented more responsive to ordinary people and to make their lives less perilous.

The Prague Institute insured more than 720,000 workers, or about one-third of Austria's entire industrial workforce. And Kafka studied the conditions in which they toiled in minute and technical detail. One of his primary tasks involved mediating conflicts between employers and employees to determine liability in the event of workplace death or injury. Over the course of his career, Kafka championed the principle of mutuality, challenging employers' insistence on worker culpability. Bosses claimed that staff deserved blame for any on-the-job accidents. They saw workers as risk to their capital and often engaged in fraud to deflect responsibility.

In a 1909 letter to his friend and literary executor, Max Broad, Kafka expressed his mounting frustration with hazardous industrial conditions. Here's what he wrote. In my four districts, people fall off the scaffolds as if they were drunk or fall into the machines. All the beams topple. All embankments give way. All ladders slide. Whatever people carry up falls down. Whatever they hand down, they stumble over. And I have a headache from all these girls in porcelain factories who incessantly throw themselves down the stairs with mounds of dishware. Kafka wondered why workers did not rise up. As he said, instead of assaulting the company building and destroying everything, they submit petitions.

Despite incessant complaints that his job got in the way of his creative writing, Kafka also confessed, quote, that the whole world of insurance interested him greatly. And he was right to be fascinated. the world of insurance interested him greatly. He was right to be fascinated, not only because his job provided fodder for his fiction, but because of its social and political implications. The insurance field grapples with profound and urgent challenges. How to prepare for an unpredictable future, how to cope with threats and vulnerability,

and how to compensate for past harm. Insurance is often described as a technology for managing risk, which is another way of saying it is a technology for managing insecurity. We are all vulnerable, not only to aging and illness and bad luck, but also to injustice, to systems designed to oppress and exploit us. The struggle, then, is over how risk is managed and apportioned. Who and what is exposed? Who and what is covered? Is insurance a commercial product, like a standard auto policy, or a public good? Think Social Security. Who is deemed risky, whether a credit risk or a risk to someone else's security or

property? Who is held responsible? Who evades liability? Though it's hard to believe, given its current bland associations, the word insurance once had a radical ring. In the early 20th century, the idea of sharing risk across the entire population was revolutionary. New forms of social insurance would provide millions of people with unprecedented material security. Coverage not only against workplace accidents, but also sickness, disability, and old age, creating the bedrock of the modern welfare state. Early proponents of these government programs believed they would help ordinary people live as free as gods or kings. As an early French enthusiast extolled, one of the first and most solitary effects of insurance is to eliminate from human

affairs the fear that paralyzes all activity and numbs the soul. In 1913, Isaac Rubino, America's leading authority on social insurance, called it, quote, a new concept of the state as an instrument of organized collective action instead of class oppression. In hindsight, we now know that the future refused to be disciplined so easily. Threatened by the prospect of a secure working class that might demand better wages and treatment, economic elites have relentlessly attacked the principles and policies of state-subsidized security and care, shifting risk and responsibility back onto individuals

instead of sharing burdens across the whole society. The corporate sector's war on the welfare state has brought back conditions of generalized insecurity, including an explosion of personal debt and the criminalization of poverty. Today, the idea of worrying about workers dropping dishes or falling off ladders seems quaint. Far greater anxieties now afflict us. of ladders seems quaint. Far greater anxieties now afflict us. In 1986, the influential German sociologist Ulrich Beck coined the term risk society to describe the world

of compounding threats we currently inhabit. A broiling planet, diminishing biodiversity, infectious diseases, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, cyber attacks, deepening inequality, the erosion of democracy, the list goes on. He was clear, however, that the dangers we face are not simply the unintended consequences of industrial progress. They are not, in other words, mere accidents. For a well-positioned few, multiplying hazards are market opportunities. 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. Every one of us has to cope with the unknowability of the future. At its most capacious, this is what insurance is about. Finding ways to protect ourselves and one another in the face of life's inevitable perils and uncertainties. Risk can be individualized and commodified or shared and treated as a kind of commons. We can approach risk reactively, covering past losses or in ways that are preventative, reducing the chance that specific harms will happen. This is the crux of the issue. We can pursue defensive and fearful forms of security, or we can adopt what I have called in these lectures an ethic of insecurity,

creating systems of support and care that acknowledge our fundamental vulnerability. As Kafka knew, managing risk is as much about economics as it is morality. It speaks to questions of cost, blame, safety, justice, and solidarity. Most of us think of insurance as dull and tiresome, the province of policy wonks and maddening bureaucrats. In fact, when we're talking about insuring against future threats, we are talking about ourselves, about the kind of people we hope to be

and the kind of world that we want to live in. On a personal level, insurance forces us to reckon with our own frailty and mortality. Collectively, it presents us with a choice. Will we leave each other to sink or swim, or will we buoy strangers through life's rough waters, knowing that one day we might be the ones who need rescuing? Will we take the risk of counting on others, combining our fortunes to make people more secure and more free, or instead, subscribe to the doctrine of personal responsibility?

These questions cut to the heart of my inquiry. How will we respond to the inevitable fact of life's insecurity? Around a decade ago, I found myself walking a small but spirited picket line, shouting at risk profiteers. Our action was part of a larger chaotic demonstration marking the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It was a crisp September day, and we were doing tight loops near the entrance to the offices of the insurance giant American International Group Incorporated,

more commonly known as AIG, a firm that helped trigger the 2008 financial crash by insuring vast tranches of overrated mortgage derivatives. When the bets went bad, the company was saved by a massive government bailout and the perpetrators let off the hook. They're crooks! They're crooks! They cook the bloody books, we shouted. A man wearing a suit caught my eye

as he walked toward the revolving door and licked his lips. And they tasted good too, he sneered. And just so you know, we didn't say bloody. We said a word you can't say on CBC Ideas. Maybe afterwards we can all shout it together during the Q&A. It's cathartic. That day, bankers repeatedly shouted at protesters to get a job, ignoring the fact that their profession was the reason so many of the demonstrators were unemployed. Millions of

people across the country had lost their homes and livelihoods while half of black Americans' collective wealth evaporated. The global financial crisis and the imperious attitudes of the financiers who brought down the economy informed my abiding interest in finance, risk, culpability, and security. Today, commercial insurance is one of the biggest industries in the world And climate change, more than any other field, reveals how deep the contradictions run Insurers are some of the biggest investors in fossil fuels Using the massive pool of money they've amassed to pay future claims These investments, of course, only intensify the odds of calamities and losses. And so they have developed new ways to hedge their bets by purchasing reinsurance or devising various forms of insurance-linked securities, including so-called catastrophe bonds. These debt instruments, which package and then repackage ecological risks,

have been likened by experts in the business to the now notorious mortgage-backed securities that brought down the global economy in 2008. As if their investments weren't enough, commercial insurers also underwrite all of the world's carbon-spewing coal mines, fracking sites, and oil and gas pipelines. Their coverage literally makes these projects possible. If they were not insured, they could not be built or operated. By now, it should hardly surprise us that an industry hawking security increases overall insecurity. Commercial insurers make the world more perilous and then sell insurance to guard against the problems they help spawn. As a capitalist business model, it is brilliant.

spawn. As a capitalist business model, it is brilliant. As a way of managing risk, it's horrific. This is the dynamic that Ulrich Beck was getting at when he described risk as the inexhaustible engine of demand that economists have long dreamed of unleashing. In Beck's words, hunger can be sated, needs can be satisfied, but risks are unsatisfiable and infinite. Because risks can be infinite, which means insurance premiums can be too, we need to push for security for the many, not just the wealthy few. In Canada, an alliance of indigenous organizers and civil society groups has been pressuring insurers to keep their distance from the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline. In 2021, Trans Mountain asked regulators for permission to keep its insurers anonymous, lest, quote,

targeting and pressure result in a material loss to the company and prejudice the competitive position of its insurers. And their wish was swiftly granted. Undeterred, activists kept pushing insurers to cut ties, highlighting the project's high economic and environmental costs and the dangers posed to nearby communities. Trans Mountain's plea for secrecy shows that the protesters were on to something.

The company is scared and for good reason. At least 18 insurers have ruled out working on the pipeline. In this way, organizing can be thought of as a kind of social insurance program. By bringing people together to challenge and transform the energy and financial sectors, it safeguards the future. The same day we walked the picket line outside the offices of AIG, my friends and I passed out pamphlets to protesters and passers-by. We had spent the previous three months researching and writing the Debt Resisters Operations Manual,

a financial literacy handbook with a radical edge. In a little over 100 pages, we tried to provide our fellow debtors with everything they needed to know to stay afloat. Short, pithy chapters explain the basic operations of student debt, credit cards, payday loans, medical bills, mortgages, municipal debt, bankruptcy law, debt collection, and credit scores. These topics, I admit, sound about as exciting as the memos Kafka wrote on the intricacies of insurance over 100 years ago. But they have a profound effect on most people's lives, which is why the 5,000 copies we had printed on cheap newsprint were soon gone, and the online version was downloaded more than 100,000 times in the weeks after its release. hundred thousand times in the weeks after its release. This was the beginning of the group I helped found called the Debt Collective, the world's first union for debtors. Over the last

decade, we have put the demand for debt cancellation, particularly student debt cancellation, on the political map, and we have helped win tens of billions of dollars of relief for struggling borrowers. Though the repercussions I felt were not particularly severe, the bad behavior of bankers and corporate insurers changed the course of my life. Like millions of others, I became strapped for cash when the economy crashed. I couldn't keep up with my student loan payments, and so I defaulted. As punishment for my inability to pay, my principal ballooned by 19%, and my credit score was shot too. I cried tears of hot shame as I confessed

the depth of my predicament to my partner. I was $42,000 in the hole, but over the next decade or two, I told him, I'd likely have to pay over six figures before I was free. I was standing on the equivalent of economic quicksand. The more I paid, the more I owed. It was only when I got caught up in Occupy Wall Street that I realized my situation was not unique. Almost everyone who gathered in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park and at the thousands of encampments across the world was in the same insecure and sinking boat. We had all taken on debt for necessities, to get an education, to see a doctor, a dentist, to buy a home, or even to have food to eat, only to realize that what had been sold as a lifeline

was in fact an anchor, dragging us down with compounding interest and fees. Today, a growing number of people have no choice but to rely on what is sometimes called the plastic safety net. Debt today functions as a kind of makeshift insurance scheme for people without recourse to adequate wages or social assistance, pushing household borrowing to record highs. or social assistance, pushing household borrowing to record highs. Canadian households now have the worst debt ratio of any G7 country, outpacing even the U.S. As the debt collective often says, too many people are in debt not because they live beyond their means, but because they are denied the means to live. Our monthly interest payments, meanwhile, enrich the investors who hold our debts as assets, a wealth transfer that fuels inequality, corrodes democracy,

and further destabilizes the economy. The erosion of the welfare state and the individualization of risk and responsibility ensures indebtedness and insecurity will continue to spread, unless we come together and demand relief. Today, we tend to see being in debt not only as a financial failure, but as a moral one. The German word for debt, Schuld, a word that Kafka used liberally in his fiction, also means guilt and blame. For millennia, however, it was creditors, not debtors, who were regarded as immoral. In politics, for example, Aristotle describes usury as hated and unnatural.

For, he says, money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase its interest. The Christian church saw charging interest as sinful, associating usury with avarice and sloth. The Bible, after all, commands debts be forgiven. And making money through interest without lifting a finger was thought to be an insult to the Lord, who said, by the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat. Economists have described these longstanding prohibitions as, quote, a kind of social insurance and a check on inequality. Poor people had access to emergency funds on terms they could afford, while the

ability of the rich to grow their fortunes was constrained. In the modern world, however, usury is not only legal, but arguably the foundation of our highly financialized economic system. This understanding developed over several centuries as the rise of modern industry and capitalism ushered in new theories of risk that challenged time-honored religious restrictions on lending and interest. In the 18th century, as commerce boomed, a double standard emerged. Where corporations and their elite backers were concerned, the occasional default was reframed as the cost of doing business,

insolvency an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of an entrepreneurial risk-taking. but unavoidable consequence of entrepreneurial risk-taking. For the poor, in contrast, default was taken as a sign of moral failure, with debtors imprisoned or publicly humiliated. Born to aid the rising merchant class, these new theories did not see risk as something to be managed collectively, but rather as a mechanism for amassing wealth and exercising social control. And so it continues today, the double standard more entrenched than ever.

Banks, big corporations, and wealthy individuals routinely receive government bailouts or engage in strategic defaults and are shielded from risk and responsibility, while poor debtors are shamed, punished, and sometimes even imprisoned for their inability to pay. The criminalization of poverty has its roots in the centuries-long process known as the enclosure movement. The society transforming change in land ownership that displaced peasants from once common fields and forests

that had sustained them for generations. As enclosure and privatization gained steam, old traditions of subsistence were turned into offenses punishable by death. Thomas More's 1516 book, Utopia, blasted the nobility not only for seizing land for the wool industry and pauperizing the peasantry, but also for responding to their desperation with policing and state violence. Peasants had no choice, Moore wrote, but to beg and steal and, quote, so to be hanged. A popular folk poem called Attention to this Grave Injustice. The law locks up the man or woman

who steals the goose off the common, but leaves the greater villain loose, who steals the common from the goose. The law demands that we atone when we take things we do not own, but leaves the lords and ladies fine who takes things that are yours and mine. Wealthy proponents of enclosure rationalized their misdeeds by insisting that increasing poverty had public benefits. The material security of the commons, they thought, made people lazy, and the threat of

destitution and punishment would spur them to work diligently. This is the beginning of manufactured insecurity. Economic elites have been busy manufacturing insecurity ever since, prodding us along while claiming it is for our own good. Time and again, we are told that caring for people poses unacceptable risks, or what economists call moral hazard, a concept borrowed from the field of commercial insurance. If we are too lenient with people, this line of thinking goes, they will be tempted to commit more crime. This line of thinking goes, they will be tempted to commit more crime.

If we give our fellow citizens an inch, they will take a mile. Providing robust systems of social insurance and public welfare, this logic says, creates perverse incentives. Encouraging people to shirk on the job, visit a doctor more than is needed, spend money instead of saving for old age, or study something impractical like foreign languages, history, or God forbid, painting or poetry.

The hazard, in other words, comes from the possibility that millions of people might be less stressed out, more secure, and more free. If we truly want to be liberated from insecurity, we need to redefine security for ourselves. The real threat comes not from caring for our fellow citizens, but from the systems and entities that undermine the public good for private gain. The unregulated financial sector creating derivatives markets capable of crashing the economy. Lenders willing to destroy people's lives to collect a debt, employers colluding to cheapen the price of labor, fossil fuel companies profiting from

the atmosphere's destruction, privatizers who want to enclose the welfare commons. Commercial insurance and policing, mass consumption in the military, capitalism and human supremacy, like the mythical symbol of the Ouroboros, many security-promising systems wind up eating their own tails, devouring the future as we race to escape the insecurity they generate. Just as urgently, we need to reject the idea that ordinary people's security is something to fear, an idea that flies in the face of both ethics and evidence. Consider a universal basic income, or UBI, an idea enjoying something of a renaissance. The idea was first proposed in the United States in 1966 by the Black Panther Party in their 10-point program,

and then picked up by Martin Luther King Jr. and the National Welfare Rights Union. and then picked up by Martin Luther King Jr. and the National Welfare Rights Union. During the same period, the Canadian federal government also flirted with UBI, calling it an idea whose time had come. Yet public officials were predictably worried about moral hazard. What if people stopped working? To figure out what would happen, they funded an enormous social experiment. Beginning in 1974, every resident of Dauphin, a small agricultural town in western Manitoba,

was eligible for a minimum annual income, a little over $23,000 for a family of four adjusted for inflation. The project became known as MinnKom. In 1979, as progressive conservative governments came to power, the project's funding dried up. As a result, the data was not analyzed until 30 years later, when Evelyn Ferget, a professor at the University of Manitoba, visited the archives and found 1,800 boxes of records. She began crunching the numbers and contacting people who had been part of the program and learned that it had left a remarkably positive impression. Residents of Dauphin told Forge that, quote, the money acted as an insurance policy. Dropout rates waned, hospitalizations fell,

and people's mental health improved. Kids went to the dentist for the first time and their moms took longer maternity leaves or pursued higher education. People still worked, but they worked a little less in order to spend time with their families or maybe to study. When teenage boys turned down jobs, it wasn't because they were slacking. It was because they were staying in school. More people turned down employment that underpaid or humiliated them, and some started their own businesses. According to a 2020 analysis, both property crime and violent crime significantly decreased. It turns out that improving financial security is an effective way to improve public safety,

and to do so peacefully, without relying on punishment and criminalization. In her article, The Town with No Poverty, Verge shows how everyone in the community benefited from what she calls the reduction of risk, including those who did not receive payments directly. What's known as a social multiplier effect to cold. The ability of some teenagers to stay in school, for example, influenced their classmates so that they did the same.

But this beneficial effect is precisely why the program ended. As was the case with the income supports provided at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, supports that, among other things, slashed child poverty rates in the U.S. and Canada. Politicians and business leaders saw the absence of fear as a threat to their own security. 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 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 Toronto, we met Maria Karuska, who helps prepare meals for unhoused people at a West End church. It's Saturday, and she and her team are expecting up to 100 people for lunch tomorrow. Okay, so what we can do is we have those collapsible things. Let's use the bottom ones. This is too big. Let's do one for cans and one for other. Any cookies can go in the pantry. When I walk into this kitchen on Sunday morning, I'm 70 years old. I have a pain in my back. I have a pain in my knees. My bottom of my feet hurt.

But when I walk into this kitchen, half of my pain goes away. When I get home at the end of the day and can barely walk, I think to myself, how many people have I put a smile on? How many people have I fed today? How many people have I fed with a sense of dignity? What if I was in that situation? What if I was on the other end of this line? Wouldn't I like to be treated with dignity? It's okay. My life has changed. I need a warm meal, but at least give me some compassion. So I started encouraging our volunteers to be more friendly, to welcome people so that if ever the tables were turned and we were needing the free meal, that it would make us feel like we were welcome and like, okay, this is just a phase and things will get better. and like, okay, this is just a phase and things will get better.

It's changed me in that I'm able to change others around me. I'm slowly teaching my volunteers that they're not just volunteering, that they too are changing somebody's life. Maria Karuska getting a hot meal ready for unhoused people in Toronto. And now back to the 2023 CBC Massey lectures, The Age of Insecurity. In the fifth and final of her CBC Massey lectures, Astra Taylor offers up some hope and solutions to our crisis of security. The experience of insecurity, she says, can offer us a path to wisdom, a wisdom that can guide not only our personal lives,

but also our collective endeavors. Here's Astra Taylor with the final lecture titled, Escaping the Burrow. One of the last stories Kafka wrote takes place in an elaborate underground fortress. The burrow is narrated by a creature, maybe a mole, he doesn't say, who spends his days fortifying his home, pacing the maze of tunnels, inspecting his abundant food supplies, and warding off potential threats. There are thieves or maybe predators to thwart. It's never exactly clear what

kind of danger lurks. The reader is in the den and also in the narrator's head. The burrow is spaced at once physical and psychological. As the restless protagonist constantly monitors, assesses, and frets, he laments, any wound to it hurts me as if I myself were hit. And yet no matter how desperate his efforts to escape what Kafka calls an uncertain fate, a sense of safety remains elusive. Even in his own burrow within the burrow, or what he calls his castle keep, my castle which can never belong to anyone else, the mole feels ill at ease. The story becomes increasingly claustrophobic in classic Kafka fashion.

The mole fixates on a sound, a distant whistling that he can neither identify nor find the source of, but which he believes must pretend a threat, a hungry beast, or perhaps a dangerous enemy. The creature sets about redesigning his stronghold, working ever more obsessively. He says, the burrow does provide a considerable security, but by no means enough. The creature's luxurious accommodations become a kind of cell, a holding pen for his mounting anxiety. The story offers a warning about the risks posed by the quest for individual security. It portrays the perils of accumulation, how wealth and possessions become things we need to jealously guard. It also invites us to question our own feelings. What makes us insecure and anxious?

Are our fears real or are they imagined? What I've called existential insecurity, along with its companion fear, are, of course, core components of the human condition. companion, fear, are, of course, core components of the human condition. Our species' existential insecurity has long been the focus of nearly every venerable spiritual and philosophical tradition. The Stoics of antiquity sought tranquility, or what they called securitas, by trying to let the future be what it will be. As Seneca proclaimed, cease to hope and you will cease to fear. But today, few of us, no matter how rich or how poor we happen to be, can afford to simply kick back and accept whatever comes our way. Given the risks we face, economic meltdowns, cyber warfare, pandemics, and a burning planet, worrying about the future seems wise and pragmatic. We must find a way to live on what Ulrich Beck called

the volcano of civilization without suffocating from fear or the poisonous vapors it emits. Kafka's own approach to security offers one route to a more humane and appealing alternative. His response to employers who sought to deflect responsibility for workplace accidents was to try to stop accidents from happening at all. He conducted an in-depth study of the conditions at quarries, analyzing blasting practices and the process of erratic boulder

extraction, and proposing remedies to keep workers alive, including an end to Boss's cost-saving measure of paying wages in brandy, which he sensibly noted made blowing up massive rocks a lot more dangerous. His study, Measures for Preventing Accidents on Wood Planing Machines, contained diagrams, drawn by Kafka, of both tools and workers' fingerless hands. He offered plans for saws that would merely cause lacerations. With these contributions and others, Kafka insisted that insurance need not only be retrospective, but that it could also be preventive and protective. Why compensate workers or their widows for lost appendages or lost lives when you could spare them suffering in the first place?

His efforts, scholars agree, averted untold injuries and unnecessary deaths. While health and safety standards on work sites have certainly improved since Kafka's time, at least in sub-countries, his basic proposal of prevention remains a worthy lodestar. Why cancel student debt when education could be free? Why criminalize people for sleeping on the street when society could house them? Why let corporations and billionaires exploit us

instead of prioritizing equality and democracy? Why endure environmental catastrophes when we can pursue sustainability? Where some insist that the real risk lies in taking care of others, I see moral and political opportunity, not a hazard. As the Dauphin experiment illustrates, having a baseline of material security is about more than money. It increases people's dignity and autonomy. The fact is, most of us do not want to be spurred to work and scramble and earn until we die when the pew charitable trust conducted a poll asking if people would prefer financial stability

to upward mobility more than nine out of ten respondents said they would eagerly abandon the pursuit of wealth for security yet as kafka's reminds us, perfect security is an impossibility. More robust social insurance programs can cushion us from shocks and setbacks, but they cannot eliminate risk entirely. When Kafka was a young man, his sympathy for workers was sparked by his experiencing managing the small industrial factory his family owned. Though he bristled at the indignities employees suffered, he had no way of knowing the true scope of the danger they faced. It's a danger now obvious from the business's name, the Prague Asbestos Works.

As we unleash new technologies, we are more like the poorly paid women unknowingly spinning toxic yarn than we might care to admit. Time passes, risks proliferate, and things fall apart. But even amid the rubble, we can always reimagine, repair, and rebuild. Accepting our fundamental insecurity is the first step toward escaping our fear-filled burrows and ensuring our collective freedom, safety, and well-being. filled burrows and ensuring our collective freedom, safety, and well-being. I open these talks with the myth of the Roman goddess Cura, an intriguing and mysterious character whose name, which literally means care in Latin, is the etymological root of the words insecurity and security. According to that ancient story, Cura stops by a river to mold a human figure

from clay. In a spontaneous and generous act of creativity, she conjures our species into being, calling on Earth, Saturn, and Jupiter to provide crucial assistance. Kira gives us the gift of life, which is, at the same time, the gift of finitude and fragility. As long as we breathe, there is the inescapable fact of our mortality, our existential insecurity. Cura fates us to need care and to care in turn. To be vulnerable and dependent on others is not a burden to escape, but the essence of human existence, as well as the basis of the aforementioned ethic of insecurity, a potentially powerful source of connection, solidarity, and social transformation. We are, as the philosopher Cornel West once told me,

beings toward death, featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. Kira's gift invites us to face and embrace this rather than flee from it unnerved. When we accept our vulnerability, we can begin to rethink conventional ideas about what security is and how we might attain it. Instead of retreating to the security of the burrow or the bunker, fortifying ourselves and our possessions, we can forge a different path, recognizing that real security comes from taking care of one another. And yet, accepting Kira's gift is not easy to do. This is especially true when insecurity envelops us,

a feeling captured poignantly in the second coming, the poem echoed in the subtitle of these lectures. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere. The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats composed these memorable lines in 1919, a period of heightened tension and upheaval, both political and personal. The aftershocks of the Russian Revolution, the recent strife of the First World War, and the Spanish flu pandemic that had left the writer's pregnant wife close to death. Traumatized and spiraling, Yeats hammered the events overwhelming him into potent verse that has provided a century of companionship to readers who feel marooned by chaos. A composition for people beset by forces they neither comprehend nor control but fear and

grieve. It is a poem steeped in the terror that insecurity can bring, and one that yearns for an impossible solidity, for a center fixed and stable. Yeats longed for order and permanence, for the falcon to once again hear the falconer's command. In my own way, I wrote these lectures in what felt like a vortex, amid the myriad social and political crises that I talk about, as well as further troubles that hid closer to home. Not long after I started writing, my husband received an unexpected diagnosis. A visit to the doctor revealed he had cancer. While drafting the first lecture, I had briefly mentioned cancer

as a common source of insecurity, an example of the ways our lives can be suddenly derailed. I had imagined it as the kind of misfortune that strikes other people, not something in my family's imminent future. We waited for test results and surgery while I wrote lecture three. As I sat at the keyboard to formulate intellectual arguments about insecurity as a systemic phenomenon, worst-case scenarios played out in my mind, my anxiety manifesting as room-spinning vertigo.

We were fortunate to have health insurance and the ability to pay the bills it didn't cover. And like many of the people I organized with, we didn't have to go into debt to receive life-saving treatment, which spared us the added strain of financial hardship. Friends offered support, helping me think through material that, once clear, was now swirling. Thanks to good luck and the prompt and capable care of doctors and nurses,

my husband was cured. The episode resolved nearly as quickly as it started, leaving us stunned and grateful. My equilibrium returned, now tinged with a deeper appreciation of life's tenuousness and unpredictability, and a renewed commitment to transforming how our society relates to vulnerability. None of us are strangers to insecurity, whether it's the kind of panic inspired by my husband's illness, the pang of self-doubt felt at school or on the job, or apprehension about the state of the world. But insecurity, as we have seen, is more than just a subjective state of mind.

It also describes objective material circumstances, lack of access to health care, unstable income or employment, precarious housing, extreme weather patterns, and more. Insecurity thus spans the psychological and physical, emotional and economic, and in doing so reminds us that these seemingly distinct registers are in fact entwined and inseparable, an entanglement Yeats' poem movingly conveys. Insecurity is not only in our heads, even if it is a core aspect of the human condition. It can also be imposed upon us in ways that amplify rather than tend to our fragility. It is, to borrow a phrase from feminism, personal as well as political. It is, to borrow a phrase from feminism, personal as well as political.

Throughout these lectures, I've tried to show how our economic system depends on manufacturing and security to create more pliable workers and insatiable consumers. Economists have long commented on capitalism's tendency towards crisis and instability, a feature Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified in the 19th century. Market society, they wrote, is defined by the constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation. Capitalism generates change and rupture. It's a system in which, as Marx and Engels put it, all fixed, fast-f, frozen relations are swept away. All new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.

For centuries now, insecurity has kept us scrambling, serving as an engine of striving, buying, and endless expansion, a motor propelling us toward the cliff of ecological calamity. But amid this incessant turbulence, some things remain remarkably consistent. It is inevitably the most vulnerable who bear the brunt of volatility. The privileged find ways to shield themselves from risk,

turning periodic shocks to their advantage, while claiming that material insecurity is required to keep everyone else toiling and productive. And yet, they've rigged a game that can't be won, one that keeps even them stressed and miserable. The privileged, too, have much to gain from adopting an ethic of insecurity, one that, instead of fueling inequality and feeding feelings of inadequacy, asserts a universal right to human security.

That's a right guaranteed to us by international and domestic law, but one that too often languishes unheeded on the page. This right has been undermined, in part, by our culture's denial of cura's gift. Instead of understanding the desire to give and receive care as an essential human motivation, we rely on coercion and punishment to keep society moving. Instead of creating systems that prioritize care,

we stigmatize it while also undervaluing the labor caretaking entails. Just compare the income of a hedge fund manager or tech executive to a teacher, custodian, or home health worker. manager, or tech executive to a teacher, custodian, or home health worker. We valorize production, the paid work performed in offices or factories, for example, while ignoring social reproduction. Think child rearing and homemaking, tasks which fall disproportionately, though not exclusively, on women. Capitalism tells us that security flows from physical health and financial success, from able-bodiedness and wealth, and we consider people who possess these traits to be secure and self-sufficient. In contrast, those who obviously rely on others, and especially on assistance from the state, are denigrated as weak, dependent, and deficient. This is a lesson I first learned from

disability movements. We all need care throughout our lives, from birth to death, not only when we are struck by illness. What the writer Rebecca Solnit has called capitalism's ideology of isolation encourages us to ignore all of the ways we are, in fact, mutually dependent. When we are shamed into denying the gift of care that we all need, we turn inward and put up defenses, which only makes the world seem more inhospitable and hostile, and ourselves more adrift and more lost. In reality, other people are our best and most reliable form of security, the security of working with others to create a more caring society. Yeats' poem ends with an image of caretaking, but an ambiguous one.

A cradle rocked by social disintegration, upheaval, and perhaps renewal. The darkness drops again, but now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. At once prophetic and open-ended, the poem evokes both despair and redemptive possibility. It condemns the ruinous and deadly forces that modernity has unleashed, and the complacency of those best positioned to resist. But who has loosed anarchy and violence upon the world? And what is the nature of the rough beast who will be born to confront it? Yeats' personal views, it should be noted, were far from equivocal, for he was quite politically

engaged, serving for six years as one of the first senators of the Irish Free State. For a time, at least, he was convinced that nationalism and authoritarianism could slow or halt the widening of the gyre and force the center to hold. Faced with the tumult and uncertainty of life, Yeats rejected Cura's gift, preferring the promise of security offered by the strongmen he admired, including Benito Mussolini, over what he considered the instability of equality and democracy. Unlike Yeats, I fear business as usual more than anarchy. I do not want the center to hold, and certainly not the center that the esteemed poet longed for. Sometimes we need to decentralize and encourage other centers

to proliferate. Things falling apart can pretend doom, but it can also presage regeneration, allowing new possibilities to emerge amid the ruins. Many of the most inspiring chapters in modern history consist of marginalized people accepting Cura's gift, finding power in their shared experience of insecurity to challenge an entrenched and oppressive status quo. We have the right to vote, weekends and minimum wage, laws against sexual harassment and racial discrimination, and basic, though

inadequate, environmental regulations because ordinary people caused what the powerful took to be mayhem, like the disabled activists who stopped traffic with their wheelchairs to demand accessibility, or the indigenous organizers who blockade pipelines to protect their territories. blockade pipelines to protect their territories. Time and again, history shows that falcons have to defy the falconers' authority if they want to be free. Though I always wanted to be an activist, I spent a long time on the sidelines. It took years before I found the confidence

to begin organizing seriously. Partly, I was shy, but I also didn't know where to begin. It felt risky to throw my lot in with causes other people dismissed as impossible or naive, and that some people insisted would reduce my journalistic and intellectual credibility, as if objecting to injustice signals a lack of objectivity. But while organizing can benefit from certain skills,

like being able to phone bank or run a tight meeting, I quickly learned that mostly it requires embracing insecurity. The best organizers are not the most knowledgeable, self-righteous, or even charismatic, but rather those most able to empathize, experiment, and navigate uncertainty. Real organizing involves reaching out to people who don't already agree with you in order to expand your base and build a formidable coalition, which means that discomfort and rejection are always a possibility. It involves coming together with others to take a leap into the unknown, to attempt to

change the future without knowing you'll succeed or what the future might hold. In his 1844 book, The Concept of Anxiety, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard writes that our ability to shape the future is a cause of both dread and exhilaration. Our ability to act, even without the guarantee of success, is a source of existential insecurity. In his words, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. It's an insight that philosophers have pondered ever since. Today, many people respond to insecurity, to the dizziness of freedom Kierkegaard described by donning masks of superiority and invincibility. They denounce snowflakes who need safe spaces while taking shelter behind bigotry,

clinging to a center that oppresses the periphery. An ethic of insecurity seeks to mitigate this tendency, aware that history shows that more materially secure and egalitarian conditions make people less reactive and more tolerant. When we shrink the welfare state because we expect the worst from people, we end up hurting ourselves and those we care about, creating a vicious cycle that stokes desperation and division. When we extend trust and support to others, we improve everyone's security, moving from a culture of fear and scarcity toward one of abundance, generosity, and stability. As the French feminist and existentialist Simone de Beauvoir pointed out, this interconnected approach is the way of true

liberation. As she wrote, freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. Finally, realizing our right to security will enable more people to adapt to change instead of recoiling from risk and uncertainty. This is the kind of strength that comes from flexibility. Like the massive trees that stay standing because they are both rooted in the ground and have the ability to sway. Sometimes their roots intertwine with other trees for mutual reinforcement. And as the Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard discovered, they also share nutrients through underground networks. This is not the competitive capitalist freedom of the self-made individual,

but the kind of freedom that is enabled by community. It is the security that helps us pursue what the psychologist Albert Maslow called higher needs, beauty, self-expression, and creativity. This creativity can be cultural and political. Our social systems are human creations, which means that we can change them. It reminds me of the words of my late friend David Graeber, the ingenious and mischievous anthropologist who helped launch the debt resistance movement. The ultimate hidden truth of the world, David said, is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. Like Kira fashioning a figure from mud, we can work to refashion our societies.

And like Kira, we will need to call on others to assist us in this monumental task. For decades, progressive organizers have been working to advance a different paradigm. One that resists the ideology of isolation by acknowledging the fact of our interdependence. There are nurses, teachers and domestic workers mobilizing for better wages and environmentalists fighting to decarbonize our societies. The essential and life-sustaining labor of caring for people and the planet, they argue, cannot be automated or outsourced,

which means that care work has the potential to be the meaningful, well-compensated and secure work of the future. Caring for communities, institutions and ecosystems could be the foundation of an expanded version of what is often described as a care economy. An expansive and inclusive care economy is one possible expression of an ethic of insecurity. Instead of profit-hungry recklessness, a care economy would proceed cautiously, taking care of people in the planet by doing less harm

and by seeking to repair the damage that has already been done. Viewed in this light, taking care is a revealing phrase. It implies forethought and vigilance while also reminding us that by providing for others, we are at the same time receiving something in return. When we say we are taking care, we mean we are being careful or, alternatively, that we are giving care. To take care of a person, animal, plant, or place is to protect or nurture something beyond ourselves. But as we all know from experience, this is not an entirely selfless enterprise. Taking care of others rewards and replenishes us and helps ensure that we are cared for in return. By giving the gift of care, we take care of ourselves too. We are all endowed with Kira's gift and also with Kira's power. By tending to

each other, we can crack the center, widen the gyre, and create the world anew. Thank you. You've been listening to Escaping the Burrow, the last of the 2023 CBC Massey lectures, The Age of Insecurity, by writer and political organizer Astra Taylor, delivered at Kerner Hall in Toronto. 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. 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.

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