The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (The CBC Massey Lectures)
Astra Tayloramazon.com
The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (The CBC Massey Lectures)
The opposite of agency is learned helplessness. If people believe that we can’t do very much to stop the world’s problems, it’s unsurprising that they’d be terrified to bring children into the world. But this seems like a mental trap that we can, and should, teach people to resist falling into. As Clare Coffey writes in “Failure to Cop
... See moreNadia Asparouhova • Cultivating Agency
As uncertainty and precarity become the new normal, so governmental regimes have shifted their focus from how to secure us to how to make us resilient. Security, and the longing for it, have become a kind of pathology. We are no longer to expect or seek certainty but rather to embrace and accept challenge and danger, a state of perpetual emergency…
Vincent Deary • How We Break
Capitalism is an insecurity machine, though we rarely think of it as such. Alongside profits, commodities, and inequality, insecurity is a fundamental output of the system. Neither an incidental byproduct nor a secondary consequence of the concentration of wealth, it is one of capitalism’s essential and enabling creations. “The bourgeoisie cannot e... See more
Astra Taylor • The Insecurity Machine
We feel paralyzed because we fear that our institutions and leaders are no longer able to operate and the solutions require many to act against their own immediate interests. We strive to make more people and communities capital-efficient and market-friendly even as the water level rises. The logic of the market has overtaken most of our waking liv
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