Writer, filmmaker, and organizer Astra Taylor takes a curious, critical, and ultimately hopeful look at the uniquely modern concept of insecurity.
These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially precarious, overwhelmed and anxious, and worried about the future. While millions endure the stress of struggling to make ends meet, in reality, the status quo isn't working for anyone, even the affluent and comparatively privileged; they, too, are deeply insecure. What is going on?
The Age of Insecurity exposes how seemingly disparate crises -- our suffering mental health and rising inequality, the ecological emergency, and the threat of fascism -- are tied to the fact that our social order runs on insecurity. Across disparate sectors, from policing and the military to the wellness and beauty industries, the systems that promise us security instead actively undermine it.
We are all made insecure on purpose, and our endless striving shapes how we feel about ourselves and others -- including what we believe is personally and collectively possible. The Age of Insecurity sheds new light on our contemporary predicament, exposing the psychological and political costs of the insecurity-generating status quo, while proposing ways to forge a new path forward.
Industry Reviews
Taylor asks us to contemplate a better world ... This ethic of insecurity, collectivism and egalitarianism should be on the forefront of every educator's mind.
* Winnipeg Free Press *
The ideas that Taylor puts forth are not only radical, but world changing ... The Age of Insecurity is exactly the right book at exactly the right time. That time is now.
* The Tyee *
Taylor makes the case for clearing away capitalism's distracting, destabilising regime; Keltner for expanding and more clearly valuing our connections to each other, to our own depths and capacities, and to the grandeur and order of the world beyond.
* New Statesman *
A handbook for a new way forward.
* Literary Review of Canada *
Astra Taylor's The Age of Insecurity made me feel I understood something obvious that I had overlooked before ... that we on the left can (and need to) offer a different, better conception of security.
* Current Affairs *
The Age of Insecurity doesn't tackle those challenging questions. What it does, instead, is explain why our world hardly allows them to be posed and hardly gives us the breathing space to think about them. It is, yes, a readable and insightful analysis of our present. But we have a lot of those-maybe too many. What makes this book worth the reader's time is its idiosyncratic blend of the personal and the public, the emotional and the economic.
* Commonweal Magazine *
A must-read.
-- Peace News