Our success was predicated on keeping others down. Accolades, good grades, and opportunities all seemed to be in short supply, and as with all competitions for resources, there were winners and losers. But in school this competition is particularly absurd: knowledge, unlike food or water, can’t be used up, and the desire to learn isn’t a need that evolved to be satiated. The boundlessness of curiosity is what makes us learning animals; it is what makes us human. Curiosity is something we can safely be consumed by, since consuming knowledge enriches us without creating waste.
Security is not something that we can achieve heroically or stoically through consumption or recycling, education, medicine, 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; social media sabbaths, however appealing and temporarily soothing, do nothing to change the insecurity-generating logic of the algorithms that deliver us content. These strategies all leave us embedded in systems designed to generate and profit from the very insecurities we hope to escape.
In their dedication, the Stoics revealed a fundamental contradiction: securitas, care’s absence, can only be achieved with effort. That is to say, with care.
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 to Tellus, freeing us from Cura’s influence. In other words, as long as we are alive, we are destined to exist in a condition of what I’ll 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 illness or wounding; and, of course, from being mortal. It’s the insecurity of randomness and risk, of a future that is impossible to control or to know. It is a kind of insecurity we can never wholly escape or armour ourselves against, try as we might to mitigate potential harms.
This kind of insecurity, which I’ll call “manufactured insecurity,” is quite unlike the existential insecurity that is inherent to human life, as the myth of Cura underscores. 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 chapters will return to and examine through different lenses.
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.
Manufactured insecurity reflects a cynical theory of human motivation, one that says people will work only under the threat of duress, not from an intrinsic desire to create, collaborate, and care for one another.
The cost of wealth maintenance is cognitive dissonance: these are people who purport to hold progressive ideals while benefiting from a highly regressive tax code that they find morally objectionable. (In Canada, lax codes mean billionaires can pass their fortunes to their children essentially tax-free; America’s billionaires use a variety of accounting tricks to achieve the same result.) Our possessions, monetary and otherwise, have a way of possessing us and turning us into people we may not actually want to be.
Insecurity, both as a feeling and as a lived material experience, is what keeps the vast majority of people scurrying to catch up. The command to live life according to market priorities is so persuasive precisely because it is coupled with threats—threats of unemployment, destitution, shame, loss of status, and respect. Rapid economic changes and new technologies have multiplied our insecurities while also raising our expectations, increasing the risks of failure as a result. We follow the prescribed course—work, consume, save, strive—because we want to make our lives better, which is not the same thing 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.
We need the right to things, not just protection from threats. It is not enough to be granted the right not to be abused by our governments without the corresponding right to receive assistance; not enough to possess civil and political rights without social and economic ones as well.
Private options appear to offer a quick, practical path to short-term security, but over time, they corrode the public system on which most people rely. It is what the ancient Greeks called a pharmakon, a word that refers to elixirs both noxious and healing, simultaneously poison and cure. This is the paradox of market medicine: even as it saves lives, it is structured to benefit from insecurity and suffering, and so simultaneously aggravates these underlying conditions while soothing the symptoms.
In the sixth century B.C., Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu warned: “Fill your bowl to the brim, and it will spill. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.”
A sensitive and astute observer of emotions, Smith believed that the basic human desire for approval and admiration (in his words, “to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of”) is what makes people yearn for material things in the first place. Thus, consumption and capitalism have always been less about stuff and self-interest (let alone efficiency and innovation) than they are about insecurity and self-esteem. Those who envy others wish themselves to be envied in turn, thinking it will bring them happiness and security. It is this social aspiration, Smith thought, not solipsistic greed, that pushes people to truck and trade.
Our society assumes that we all need a promise to chase, some extrinsic incentive to drive us—an Instagrammable beach vacation, for example—lest we cause the wheels of commercial society to stop turning and economic growth to stall by lollygagging in the sun on the roadside. Sure, the system is based on a lie and makes even the winners miserable, but that’s why, Smith thought, it works so well.
Capitalism thrives on bad feelings, on the knowledge that contented people buy less—an insight the old American trade magazine Printers’ Ink stated bluntly: “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.
Where conventional Western education focuses on decontextualized knowledge and disembodied expertise, Nishnaabeg education, in Simpson’s words, emerges out of a “compassionate web of interdependent relationships that are different and valuable because of that difference.” Children learn as they live, observing their surroundings and their elders, who answer questions and ask them in return. As Simpson describes it, the result is a mode of learning that is both deeply communal and highly individualistic—an individualism that is not selfish or competitive but secure and collaborative.
In a roundabout way, postmaterialists had prompted a right-wing resurgence. As Inglehart ruefully observed in 2017, paraphrasing Marx and Engels, postmaterialism had become “its own grave-digger.” Focused on making society more open, less discriminatory, and free during the 1960s and 1970s, postmaterialists ignored the first levels of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. Taking a baseline of material security for granted, they emphasized the importance of social inclusion and environmental sustainability over rudimentary bread-and-butter concerns.
The question before us, really, is quite simple: Do we see ourselves as barons or commoners?
In today’s world it can be hard to tell, largely because we are encouraged to see ourselves as barons-to-be.