The Age of Insecurity Coming Together as Things Fall Apart

The best organizers are not the most knowledgeable, self-righteous, or even charismatic, but rather those most able to empathize experiment, and navigate uncertainty. Real organizing involves reaching out to people who don't already agree with you in order to expand your base and build a formidable coalition, which means that discomfort and rejection is always a possibility. It involves coming together with others to take a leap into the unknown,to attempt to change the future without knowing you'll succeed or what that future might hold. Challenging the centre takes power and strategy. It also takes a willingness to improvise and a large dose of humility.

Kairos, understood this way, is the time we seize. It is the time of those who turn their insecurity and anxiety into solidarity, knowing that every more of mitigation matters, that every bit of carbon we don’t release saves lives and buys time, and that without the sustained mobilizations of recent years, the catastrophe we face would be that much deadlier. Kairos says that time is of the essence and that it is not too late for the future to be changed in good and bad ways. The only way we risk a mismatch is by giving up and accepting our extinction as preordained. Kairos invites us to act now, whatever time it happens to be. It is the temporality of those who, even as they mourn, also organize—who vote, divest, strike, blockade, rewild, replenish, and sue.

Security is not something that we can achieve heroically or stoically through consumption or recycling, education, medicine, or mindfulness. We cannot breathe our way out of our thorny social problems, nor can we amass enough wealth to wholly buffer ourselves from them; social media sabbaths, however appealing and temporarily soothing, do nothing to change the insecurity-generating logic of the algorithms that deliver us content. These strategies all leave us embedded in systems designed to generate and profit from the very insecurities we hope to escape.

Manufactured insecurity reflects a cynical theory of human motivation, one that says people will work only under the threat of duress, not from an intrinsic desire to create, collaborate, and care for one another. Insecurity goads us to keep working, earning, and craving-craving money, material goods, prestige, and more, more, more.