Risk management is a mythological construct for manipulating cultural precariousness

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘risk management’ as a mythological technique rather than a quantitative science — a reframing central to the financialization-of-culture thesis.
• XREF: Direct precursor to deWaard’s cultural argument that finance colonizes imagination and everyday life; risk-as-mythologized-contingency bridges to the goal of this reading. — connects to: Corporate culture serves as an ideological cover for risk-shifting management strategies — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 290; Risk discourse retroactively moralizes outcomes whose causality it denies beforehand — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 342; Securitization connects financial risk management to militarized cultural politics in everyday retail. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 47
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that finance mobilizes everyone’s energy against precarity yet the aggregate only deepens it is a dense, paradigm-shifting one-sentence condensation of the whole book’s thesis.

Broader Connections

• Corporate culture serves as an ideological cover for risk-shifting management strategies #corroborates (0.85) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 290
• Risk discourse retroactively moralizes outcomes whose causality it denies beforehand #expands (0.82) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 342