23 May 2021

Constructions of security

 The overt rise of private police has any number of people making distressed noises.

There's three practical ways to manage insecurity in general.  ("Attain enlightenment" is reported to be effective, but it's not practical.)  You can have control; you can believe that events are predictable; or you can trust that you're included in a collective system to produce security.

Nobody believes they're in the collective system; pick at least one of obviously unjust, indifferent, ineffective, overtly oppressive, unaccountable, and obviously owned.  Whoever the system is for, it's not you.

Control doesn't work; it's a popular approach, you can decide you know what's really going on or you can decide to believe you have enough money (you don't) or something, but there's one of you and a whole lot more in the way of just other people.  Control is not an option.

Predictability, well.  The reliable predictions are things like "the weather will get worse for at least the next century" and "there will be another plague".

The fallback, in a mammonite culture, is money; if I have enough money, I can get what I want,  and often "I want" is to remove the fear of uncertainty.  The fix for this is simple -- income and asset caps; if you can do that, it's not a mammonite culture -- but then you have to do something about membership in a collective something able to produce security.  Which would require a generally accepted construction of justice.  Which in turn requires replacing the extant power structure with something more just and better able to win systemic fights.

Which the people successful in the current system actively don't want.  So you get the effort to sell the illusion of security via a means unable to actually produce any such thing.