Living in a risk society remains an irreducibly risky life

Evidence

The speculative ethos that animates financialization is one intimately and irreducibly acquainted with the ontological realities of precariousness. “Risk” and “risk management” are, underneath all their trappings of quantitative and scientistic rigour, mythological constructs for engaging with, navigating through and manipulating the cultural fabric of precariousness. Investments are, at a certain abstract level, attempts to leverage precarious life into more advantageous outcomes. Finance, as a broad sphere of activities, is a mechanism by which individuals and society at large seek to gain agency over the precariousness and contingency of the future. It is a particularly perverse mechanism, and one whose logic and mechanisms are either occluded from sight, or so complex, rapid or vast to be fully grasped even by its primary engineers and agents. Yet it reproduces itself by cultivating and mobilizing the energies, creativity and hope of almost everyone in their attempts to thwart or diminish precarity, and aggregates all these individual and institutional actions into a system which, tragically, only drives greater and greater precariousness. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 234 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Aside from the fact that case stories are often fabricated, individual cases are never informative of statistical probabilities. But people generally have a hard time with these probabilities. We are very bad at realistically assessing dangers, fearing air travel more than car travel, for example, even though the numbers clearly show that there is a higher risk of dying in a car accident. Cows cause more deaths worldwide than sharks: the alpine pasture nevertheless seems to us a much safer place than the sea. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 183 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Rare but catastrophic events generate fear wildly disproportionate to actual risk; Utopian futures cannot be assumed and each institutional dimension carries life-threatening risks — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 399; Pre-modern life was itself fraught with anxiety and risk — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 254 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Risk management is a mythological construct for manipulating cultural precariousness #complicates (0.78) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 234
• People fear statistically rare dangers and ignore common ones #complicates (0.76) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 183
• Rare but catastrophic events generate fear wildly disproportionate to actual risk #complicates (0.75)
• Routine risk-taking makes the city feel less risky #complicates (0.71)