Manufactured insecurity
By 
Here’s an interesting essay, adapted from her forthcoming book, from Astra Taylor, about what she calls “manufactured insecurity.” Rather than insecurity about existential questions having to do with survival, death, ultimate meaning and the like, manufactured insecurity is a product of modern consumer capitalism:
Existential insecurity is not my focus here. The ways we structure our societies could make us more secure; the way we structure it now makes us less so. I call this “manufactured insecurity.” Where existential insecurity is an inherent feature of our being — and something I believe we need to accept and learn from — manufactured insecurity facilitates exploitation and profit by waging a near constant assault on our self-esteem and well-being. In different ways, political philosophers, economists and advertising executives have pointed out how our economic system capitalizes on the insecurities it produces, which it then prods and perpetuates, making us all insecure by design. Only by reckoning with how deep manufactured insecurity runs will it become possible to envision something different.
Manufactured insecurity is far from inevitable, and yet it is intensifying. The same developments that have supercharged inequality in recent decades — including the deregulation of finance and business and the decline of the welfare state — have heightened insecurity and left no one, wealthy or working-class, unscathed. While the relatively privileged seek ways to shield themselves from risk — and even turn periodic shocks to their advantage — the fact is they’ve rigged a game that can’t be won, one that keeps them stressed and scrambling, and breathing the same smoke-tinged air as the rest of us. Which means they, too, have much to gain from rewriting its rules, including reimagining what new forms of security might entail.
The whole essay is interesting, and I only have time for a few quick observations:
(1) Part of what Taylor is talking about here is gendered in a fundamental way, in that for women a huge amount of manufactured insecurity is about the aesthetics of bodily self-presentation. The whole “obesity” panic consists of 3% valid medical concerns, and 97% manufactured insecurity to make people, overwhelmingly women, unhappy with their bodies, for the purpose of selling things.
(2) When I was looking at Harry Truman’s finances, I was struck by how in 1944, before FDR chose him to be on the presidential ticket, Truman had a net worth of about $150,000 IN 2023 MONEY. He owned no real estate, and almost no financial instruments: his wealth consisted of cash and a few government bonds. He was 60 years old and had no profession other than politician. He had no Senate pension, since none existed. His social security payments were going to be almost nothing, because he had been paying into the new system for just a few years. He had an Army pension that added up to about $1,500 per month in 2023 dollars, but that was it. If he had lost his re-election bid in 1946, as he probably would have as it was a wave election for the GOP, he would have been a really dire financial situation in short order, as he had an unemployable wife and a daughter going to an expensive private college. And Truman was a two-term U.S. senator! That was the level of economic precarity you could find even very near the top of the USA’s SES pyramid a couple of generations ago.
(3) I’ve pointed out before that in a country that’s eight times wealthier per capita than it was when Truman was elected to the Senate, the precariousness of genuine poverty is 100% something we choose to allow to continue to exist. The notion that we somehow can’t “afford” a basic minimum level of economic security for everyone in our society is an atavistic holdover from the mentality of societies in which scarcity was an absolute, as opposed to a political, phenomenon.