The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (The CBC Massey Lectures)

My point is that, for all the free market’s chatter about “choice,” in the absence of accessible non-market options for housing, real choice is something we rarely possess.

Fourth grade was my first encounter with what I call manufactured insecurity, the kind of insecurity generated to keep us competing and consuming, nudging us to act like materialists and compete for scarce resources, even if we might prefer to try to live another way.

What made my experience unusual was the fact that my sheltered life caused me to find my peers’ behaviour not just cruel but bizarre—and that I had enough remove to be curious about it, too. I simply could not figure out why little kids with allowances of a couple quarters a week were judging each other for what they did or did not possess.

As social provision shrunk, striving became a form of personal insurance against future risk; as employment became more precarious, education was advertised as the most reliable path to upward mobility. Competition was extolled as the most effective way to keep afloat, and the purchase of new products the surest path to self-expression.

Security means having some assurance of future stability and the ability to plan ahead.

When polls were conducted of incoming American freshman in the late sixties, a full 80 percent of respondents said it was essential to them to develop a meaningful philosophy of life; around 45 percent felt financial success was essential.43 For the students surveyed, university was less about career training than self-actualization.

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.

Curiosity is something we can safely be consumed by, since consuming knowledge enriches us without creating waste.

The idea that the “attainment is well worth all the toil,” Smith wrote, is a “deception”—a useful fallacy that propels capitalism forward. It is a ruse that “rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind,” motivating farmers to plow bigger fields, entrepreneurs to open factories, colonizers to seize other people’s territory, engineer