It’s a feature, not a bug

Apologies to CBC Ideas and Astra Taylor for my half-baked musings on and possibly poor recounting of her stimulating and inspiring presentation, in service of my need to exercise my writing and reflection muscles.

Unlike the Greek myth of Prometheus which suggests human exceptionalism, the Roman story of Curia’s gift in equipping humans is that makes insecurity an inescapable part of the human condition.

“We are fated to worry,” says Astra Taylor, at this year’s Massey lectures (2023).

Security, by etymology, is the absence of care: sine curitas. Without worries.

But we carry our creator Curia always with us, and so we live in a state of existential insecurity.

It cuts both ways, says Astra Taylor. We are by nature dependent on others, for good and ill. We are by nature vulnerable to psychological wounding – again, for good or ill. Insecurity can inspire in us compassion, stemming from our own vulnerabilities, or contempt of them that leads to all sorts of compulsions to obviate or transcend.

Manufactured insecurity, however, a feature of capitalist societies, is less ambiguous.

A capitalist society is not set up to meet our current needs but rather to generate new ones, so we can keep pouring our resources into its voracious, cannibalizing system that seeks its own prosperity at the expense of ours.

The market economy encourages us not only to look up and down to see our relative place in terms of equality but to look sideways and entangle our emotions and wants into our perception of needs.

Astra Taylor took us beyond the predictable industrial revolution to find the root of the disease in 12th century England. In the days when common was not just an adjective but a verb. Before increasingly restrictive enclosure laws (a trial run for Indigenous displacement in Canada) pushed peasants into cities and third party toil, folks could access community resources individually and collectively and together forge subsistence lives of meaningful work.

(Only England was mentioned which begs the question whether they set the tone for Western Europe, followed a trend set by neighbours, or were part of one of those moments when an idea’s time has come, simultaneously but unrelatedly emerging in several places around the same time.)

Manufactured insecurity thinks we work best under duress. It’s a scarcity mindset that suggests my prosperity is assured by extracting it from others.

This creates a “fear of losing,” Astra Taylor quotes Jeremy Bentham’s term, which leads to “fractal inequality” – a spiral of comparison and suffering self worth which is just as undermining to those who have more as those who have less, because each is undermined by the comparison to the former.

It leads to the security paradox where the systems we buy into for their promise of security actually undermine it.

Always ask, Astra Taylor cautions: security for whom? The security of what? What cost are we paying to achieve this security and what do we gain by it?

Returning to the inspiration of the commons, Astra Taylor suggests there is another way. If we are willing to reimagine social and economic systems, we can forge an alternative path that does not solve our existential insecurity but manages its challenges and opportunities. “Nothing in nature becomes itself without being vulnerable,” she quotes Gabor Mate. In giving ourselves to the vulnerability of the security of the commons, we may find an antidote to the manufactured insecurity of the hegemony of market forces.

“Collected security is rooted in care and concern,” she says. Cooperation, altriumm and compassion are just as much human instincts as greed and selfishness. The small acts of watching out for each other that we perform every day without thinking, without notice, are evidence that we could be capable of another way. Solidarity is an important form of resistance.

And on that note, the lecture came to an end, held in suspense until November 20 when the full series – of which this lecture was the first – begins to air on CBC Radio’s Ideas.

An audience member asked the question that has been ringing in my mind throughout: what is the role of religious and faith in all this.

To her credit, Astra Taylor responded: “I don’t know!” Raised without any religious background, she doesn’t have enough framework to comment.

Perhaps I am trying far too hard to make every good idea fit in the religious framework that has shaped my formation and continues to shape my life even as I question more and more of the assumptions I was given. Nevertheless, throughout the lecture, I couldn’t help but see my own Anabaptist religious framing as providing an antidote to manufactured insecurity. The humility of accepting one’s interdependence; of embracing vulnerability and humility as guides to compassion, empathy and solidarity. The resistance to the siren call of more, the constant sideways glance and attendant fractal desire. The solidarity of the commons. The third way that imagines transformed society and systems that seek the flourishing of all living things. And a very key message buried in one of the last Q&A answers: more with less. A shift in our values that finds joy in public luxury where we consume less (things) and find more (joy/fulfilment/solidarity).

I can’t wait to tune in and hear more.

PS: also buried in the Q&A was a remark on UBI (universal basic income) that we need not only a floor – this much income is needed for people to live with some measure of security to unleash their potential creativity, ingenuity and productivity – but also a cap. Nobody is really deserving or well served by that much money. The suggestion was greeted with cheers.