A big cultural message throughout my life (culturally middle-class, educated, white, East coast of the USA) has been that “good” and “smart” people prioritize security.
In fact, I know some people who would clutch their metaphorical pearls if this next sentence didn’t bring this back around to reinforcing the goodness and smartness of such a position. After all, it’s not a bad thing to think ahead, plan for contingencies, and keep oneself and loved ones safe. Security is good—right?
The problem is how many barriers and implied falsehoods this limited priority set creates. If good and smart people plan ahead for security, then good and smart people can’t be poor. They can’t experience housing or food insecurity. They certainly can’t face the broad ambiguities inherent in moving to live in a new country or region, because they’d never do anything so inherently insecure.
According to this flawed concept, people who are poor, unhoused, injured, etc. aren’t good and smart, and therefore might not even be worth helping. I reject this entirely.
I’ve experienced only a tiny bit of food and housing insecurity, for a very short time, and it had me in a blind panic—and I still had credit cards to rely on. The source of my panic (I realized many years later) is that if I was experiencing this insecurity, I must not be a good person.
This conflation is a terrible problem in itself, because it’s a framework that doesn’t allow even acknowledging the effects of systemic inequities, historical advantages, or just bad luck. It appears throughout our language as “you deserve this” when good things happen, and “they got what was coming to them” when bad things happen.
It’s the kind of fear that keeps people in jobs that they’d otherwise quit. In the USA, if you don’t have a job, you have very limited access to health insurance. Even with that insurance, medical debt causes two thirds of bankruptcies here, and about one third of the population carries medical debt.
The cultural message that “security = being good” means that we even stay in jobs where we’re asked to do bad things. Because we can’t face the prospect of walking away from security, because, by the transitive property, we’d be giving up on “being good”.
This is the way cultural beliefs work: they are attached to our sense of self, of being a good person. But it’s damaging in yet another, more pernicious way: it’s difficult to even imagine the contrasting values that we might otherwise prioritize.
Everywhere on the planet, humans today have more security than most humans who have ever lived. And yet, companies and employers still try to profit off of our anxieties about a lack of security.
I’m learning to consider additional priorities. When I consider an action, whether that’s a move for my career or business, spending money for my home or family, my civic acts like voting, or my acts as a shopper, volunteer, wife, and partner, I want to consider: will it increase connection with others? Add to the beauty of the world? Decrease world suck? Make the barbaric yawp unique to my one wild and precious life?
Even if the actions that you and I prioritize don’t solve the human-made problems that destabilize the human world, we can still do them, and they still matter.
