Insufficient social security guarantees produce desperate cravings for simplification

Evidence

Life full of risks, the incurably risky life without reliable knowledge of what the future may bring and without the possibility to control the outcomes of one’s own actions (that conditio sine qua mm of all rational choice), is an unnerving, disturbing, anxiety-generating condition. Perhaps modern life started, as Sigmund Freud suggested, from surrendering a large slice of individual freedom in exchange for collectively endorsed security. In its present-day phase, though, the offer of social guarantees of individual security has been withdrawn or is no longer trusted. This state of affairs is a recipe for a life of insecurity and anguish; and also for the desperate search for a genuine or putative, but trustworthy-looking, promise of a great simplification of a world too complex to walk safely through. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 434

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘desperate search for simplification’ anticipates the book’s central argument about the Holocaust as extreme order-making — and echoes my notes on pathological order-seeking.
• SEED: Article angle: how the withdrawal of security guarantees drives authoritarian simplification promises across today’s populist politics.