Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is David Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine, and I am joined today by the great Astra Taylor. She is one of the co-founders of The Debt Collective. She is also a documentary filmmaker and writer. She is the author of books like Democracy May not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone. She is co-author of the upcoming book, Solidarity, The Past, Present and Future of a World Changing Idea, co-authored with Leah Hunt Hendricks, and she's also the author of the new book that we are here to talk to

her about today based on her CBC Massey lectures. It is called The Age of Insecurity Coming Together

as Things Fall Apart, which Rebecca Solnett calls a stunning work of social theory.

Astor Taylor.

Thank you for joining us at Carter Fares.

Thank you so much for having me.

Excited to be here.

Well, so your lectures are oriented around this dichotomy between security and insecurity.

And we'll talk about insecurity, but the word security kind of fascinates

me because it's so often associated with the political right. You think security, you think security

systems, you think national security. The people who are most obsessed with security seem to be,

well, you know, those who are fearful and paranoid, but you

articulate a concept of security that you think the left ought to embrace. So tell us a bit more

about what you think security ought to mean when we hear that word. In general, I'm first

struggling over words. I think we need to struggle over words. And you see this

in a lot of my books. So my work on democracy, I made a film called What is Democracy? And then

wrote a companion book. Democracy may not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone. Democracy is a tainted

word, right? And I went into that project thinking, maybe we need to throw out this word democracy.

I know you and I both like the word socialism.

How many times have you heard somebody say, we need a new word?

It's like, no, we have a word.

What we need to do is struggle over it and imbue it with meaning, struggle to realize it.

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