Insecurity’s Susceptibility to Authoritarianism
The recent blog post on values, “Are There Universal Values?” progressed to a discussion of security and insecurity. People who feel insecure, physically or economically, are apt to embrace traditional values of family and religion and have lower levels of trust and tolerance. Authoritarian regimes exploiting those insecurities promise protection while reducing personal freedoms.
Age of Insecurity, a recent book by Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, and activist Astra Taylor, examines in depth the insecurity that grows from liberal capitalism. Because capitalism relentlessly pursues growth, it is engineered “less to meet and fulfill our current needs than it is to generate new ones.” These needs can only be met “through additional consumption – consumption of new lifestyles, experiences, products, upgrades, and apps with features we suddenly can’t live without.” Taylor refers to this kind of insecurity as “manufactured insecurity.”
The liberal capitalist order, Taylor asserts, has ushered in a decline of the welfare state over the last fifty years. She compares the security that comes with civil and political rights (called negative rights – “freedom from” rights) to positive rights: “the right to a decent home; to medical and mental health care; to education; to support in disability and old age; to meaningful and remunerative work; to a healthy environment, and so forth.”
Citing Ronald Inglehart’s 1977 book, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics, she reviews his early surveys that became the quadrennial World Values Survey (WVS). His surveys found older people valued “maintaining order in the nation” and “fighting rising prices.” Their children valued “giving people more say over political decisions” and “protecting free speech.” As a by-product of increasing post-World War II material security, Inglehart believed that so-called “higher” social needs gained prominence.
Taylor maintains that Inglehart’s surveys revealed “that varying levels of insecurity and security can have profound cultural and political consequences. Security or its absence can usher along the forces of reaction or of progress. It can stifle democracy or strengthen it.” Inglehart attributed the rise of authoritarianism to spiraling insecurity. Taylor concludes, “If we want to mitigate authoritarian threats, we cannot repeat the postmaterialist mistake of ignoring economic concerns… When people feel insecure, it is easier to convince them that immigrants are taking their jobs, that vaccines are a conspiracy, and that professors are indoctrinating students with ‘gender ideology.’”