The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart by Astra Taylor. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781487011932. 344 pp. Paperback.
Every day, all around us, it feels like things are falling apart: as if the world of rules, restraint, honour, reasonableness, kindness, caring, and yes, good taste, is fast collapsing. It doesn’t matter if we live in North America or South America, somewhere others might perceive as “in-between” or “elsewhere”, like the Caribbean and Latin America, Asia or Africa—though Chinua Achebe’s classic 1958 novel Things Fall Apart can’t help but come to mind in its attempt to remind us, as W.B. Yeats first suggested in his 1919 poem “The Second Coming”, of the ongoing challenge humanity faces of getting the centre to hold while not giving in to desperate acts.
All this and plenty more remain ripe for reflection in The Age of Insecurity by Astra Taylor. Three years on from the presentation and publication of her essay as part of the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, two since being nominated as a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, her book, subtitled Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, still very much has us asking the question: How did we get here? The terrains we’re navigating and the people we’re dealing with seem so different to what we expect or like—or what we claim to expect or say we would like. After all, who are we dealing with if not our counterparts? Who are they reacting to if not our own energy and demands?
In his celebrated Davos speech at the World Economic Forum in January 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney noted, “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” and “if we’re not at the [negotiating] table, we’re on the menu”. It’s easy to blame Trump, Americans, and an unabating authoritarian age certain leaders the world over are doing their best to take advantage of. Yet Carney didn’t; at no time in his speech did he mention the US President’s name. And I’ve always thought Saul Bellow’s judgement—let’s call it that—in his essay collection It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future (1995), a just prescription: “It is we who set up and we who knock down. If we are imposters, we are also those who expose imposters. This ‘being human’ is our very own shown.”
And what a spectacle we’ve made of it. Especially when you consider, as Taylor does from age to age and various viewpoints, that our lives needn’t be so harsh or siloed or as insecure as they are. The Winnipeg-born filmmaker, writer and political organiser/activist, who is based in the US and is also the author of American Book Award-winning The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (2014), opens with the myth of the Roman goddess Cura, noting how it “reflects on the human condition. Care and anxiety, concern and worry—the multiple meanings of the Latin word cura—are part of what makes us who and what we are. It is hardly a self-aggrandizing narrative”. Cura, unlike her fire-stealing “counterpart” Prometheus, “doesn’t give us any special traits or tools to ease our troubles. Instead, she worries over us and cares for us—she acts thoughtfully and ponders, the story says—and so fates us to worry and care and ponder in return”.
But Stoics of Ancient Rome, such as Cicero and Seneca writing during the first century BCE, “extolled imperturbability in the face of chaos and uncertainty. ‘What is the blessed life?’ Seneca asked. ‘Security and perpetual tranquility,’ was his reply”. And this has been humanity’s pursuit: a state of calm amid all the anxiety.
This raises many thoughts. One is about the true state of humanity. To be falling apart, repeatedly, seems to be our recurring, dominant theme. Mind you, this may be more of a Western view than, say, African or First Nation. “In their dedication [to their philosophy], the Stoics revealed a fundamental contradiction: securitas, care’s absence [or anxiety’s banishment] can only be achieved with effort. That is to say, with care [or anxiety].”
Taylor believes “[to] be human is to be perpetually insecure”. She calls this condition, which endures unto death, “existential insecurity”. This is all the result of our dependence on others, our vulnerabilities and our mortality—our lack of control over our reality and its trajectory, i.e., our destiny or fate. We all “orient our lives toward the pursuit of security…. But how to conceive of security in our era of unprecedented inequality, when eight billion people call our precious and collapsing planet home”, is increasingly unclear. Presumably.
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It should be understood that long before the COVID-19 pandemic, or any pandemic; authoritarian regimes; the day’s wars; natural or economic disasters; or the loss of social cohesion brought about by digital connectivity, “insecurity was everywhere”, a fact of life, a state of being or existence. We have felt “insecure in our schools, in our homes, in our relationships…. And…about our very selves…” and each other. No one, wealthy or wanting, public servant or private citizen, is immune from feeling “on guard, anxious, and incomplete”, a feeling that is “on the rise” in the Caribbean alongside gun violence, foreign debt, education systems failing our boys, climate-change resilience, bad roads, poor food security, overburdened healthcare, and pompasetting politicians.
The term insecurity gained currency in the 1600’s, “just as our [Western] market-driven society was coming into being”. Our sense of insecurity in the West and elsewhere has “intensified” noticeably with “the decline of the welfare state over the past fifty years”. Built on the need for needs, on wanting to want, “capitalism thrives on bad feelings”. Our consumer societies—and all of our societies are consumer societies, or at least consuming societies—thrive on “making us all insecure by design”.
It might not be the world that needs changing, rather us. A recurring theme in The Age of Insecurity is that “insecurity results as much from expectation as from deprivation”. Research shows that “[l]iving in a highly competitive and consumerist society…makes everybody more status-conscious, stressed out, and sick”. Today’s “manufactured insecurity”, Taylor argues—long ago traded for the commons (i.e., a healthy mutual regard for the environment that freely sustains us all) so as to benefit a classed few economically—is neither “ineradicable” nor “inevitable”.
Nothing is “preordained” when it comes to where we are now or might be in a number of years. “Insecurity can also inspire a more hopeful response” than the prejudice and fear-mongering we’ve been witnessing in too many democracies, let alone those that have never sought to hide their policy of persecution. Thankfully, that inspiration can be found in many sources.
Taylor is clearly partial to history and mythology, apparently less so to other similar forms of storytelling. I disagree with her take on the lessons fairy tales, fables and folklore impart. Even if their emphasis appears to be on “individualistic” action, the lessons to be learned are for the benefit of all. Maybe her view is very much a Western one, which explains her perception. As a student of mine put it—in his early 20s, an undergraduate in graphic design, sitting in a Research Methods classroom in Barbados Community College—everybody wants change, but nobody wants to change themselves first. His perspective was more, say, Anansi than history lesson, and all the more instructive for that.
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If this being human is our very own show, that includes “market forces”. We can trace much of our insecurity in our own homes, nationally and abroad to the loss of the notion of the earth being “a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men”, when “private property became a cornerstone of the new liberal capitalist state” post King Charles I (1600-1649). The result was the control of land, labour and laws by a privileged few.
Women and children bore the worst of the new world order, “forced to work in the dangerous new factories and commercial mills”. Pauperism was identified as “a dire form of poverty previously unknown” in 1735. This “new liberal capitalist state” would go on to birth or aid and abet all kinds of other dangerous, racist views, which would then be exported to the New World by colonisers, enforcers, and imperialists of all persuasions claiming to civilise, incentivise, modernise. “Enclosure was thus a kind of trial run for the dispossession of Indigenous peoples” the world over.
It’s not about romanticising commoners or our agrarian past, rather about being clear-eyed about how our capitalist cultures and economies have cultivated insecurity, encouraged it to grow and take root like so many choking weeds. The desire of most of us is to survive, be happy, thrive, on our own terms, by our own means, not to be rich. Enough is indeed enough if more control of our destiny is in our own hands. That was—and for many still is—the natural order. It’s just that most days we do what we have to do for ourselves and our family to get by, not so much what we want to do, or ought to do. We proceed “with the imperative to earn a living”, and all the unnatural insecurity that can bring.
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In the last 50 years, we’ve seen “corporations and their allied politicians”, as Taylor puts it, trying to erode or erase the social, employment and trade union gains of a century with everything from contract jobs (gigs with great pay and few benefits) to service sector jobs (positions with “middling” pay and “non-existent” security). “This means that many people work multiple jobs or live in households where everyone of age has to work.” Much of this is indeed “out of necessity, not choice”, with “insecurity…used to pit worker against worker, usually along lines of race, immigration status, and nationality”.
Political scientist Ronald Inglehart describes a leaning toward authoritarianism as “the closing of ranks behind strong leaders in reaction to perceived threats and grievances”. In other words, “[t]he insecurity of an unequal and volatile economy tilts some people rightward”. Taylor mentions terms like “creative destruction” and “disruption”, which can be fuelled by foreign war games or attacks on valued homegrown institutions—both have been part of President Donald Trump’s playbook. Caribbean leaders, past and present, have not been above their own tactics of distraction and destabilization, often still executed along party, class, colour, and gender lines. They are meant “to keep people compliant, anxious, and striving”. When people are fearful, or insecure, “it is easier to convince them” of the worst and present yourself as Auntie Saviour or Brother Daddy.
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“Insecurity gnaws at the people on the very top, too.” The need to realise bigger profits “keeps them scrambling ever upward”; but toward what when all “[o]ur very imaginations…been enclosed”? Taylor’s list of the damages related to “[i]nsecurity and misguided pursuits of security” is substantial: “the revival of fascism”; the neglect of security as a fundamental human right; the prioritizing of negative/prohibitive rights over positive/enabling rights; global homelessness; the avoidance of a universal basic income (a Black Panther Party proposal dating back to 1966); the fuzziness of meaningful goals; self-esteem battered by social media; the loss of biodiversity. The Age of Insecurity is not a gloomy book, however. Where we are now, in our state of “disequilibrium”, is not where we need to stay forever. Taylor encourages us to “recognize the trick being played on us. Manufactured insecurity encourages us to amass money and objects as surrogates for the…kind of security we can find only in concert with others,” she contends, through “connection, camaraderie, meaning, purpose, contentment…”.
Many of us are encouraged to do the wrong thing ethically or morally despite having the means not to. “Our possessions, monetary and otherwise, have a way of possessing us and turning us into people we may not actually want to be.” But it’s more than that. “We live in a world today where people call out people for everything, for misogyny, for sexual assault, for all kinds of behaviour,” noted Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley. She was speaking at a conference in Ghana in June 2026 to advance Africa’s efforts for reparatory justice from former colonial powers and other enslaving institutions. “But yet we have not found the moral courage to state unanimously across humanity that this grave crime against humanity that persisted for centuries ought to be declared so by all.” Our prospects for a sustainable future, particularly for our young in places like the Caribbean, may be worsened by a pandemic, climate crises and global conflicts, but all these situations highlight is the need for us to come together at last and not fall apart.
Contrary to the message of so many government and business “leaders” and their acolytes, “There is no growth…without emotional vulnerability.” Understanding, caring, kindness, concern, a sense of unity—these are the kinds of constructive human responses certain groups wish to suppress since they do nothing to advance their anxious agenda or to help them maintain power. What Taylor reminds us throughout her very timely book is that “[s]olidarity, in the end, is one of the most important forms of security we can possess”. For this to hold as it should, “[o]ur concern must extend beyond our personal equanimity.”