To feel safe is a human right
Yet our current prevailing story is spun around scarcity. It is baked into the industrial neoliberal view. We need workers to do terrible jobs at a minimum wage. We need to keep these workers in fear of poverty to keep them working. Often the people who say yes to these jobs, without complaint, are those most at risk.
It is not the immigrant who has taken jobs, it is the demand for people who will work at any price. This is what profit and growth at any cost mean. The state of work is unsafe for maybe half the population of Spaceship Earth, if not more.
All of this is changing, of course, with the rise of AI. Add to this mix the beginning of the great human migration, where billions of people will have to move as a result of climate change, and we will have to rethink work and society. Even those with steady jobs might be on the path of climate tipping and massive disruption.
The math shows clearly that it is going to be cheaper to pay people to move whole communities than to continue to repair whole communities as a result of floods.
No legal entanglement protects absolutely. If you have enough money and power almost any contact can be broken. A contract doesn’t make you safe.
There is no safe world when we have weapons of catastrophic destruction. The only possibility is zero nuclear anywhere.
The future of safety will be very different from what it means to be safe today.
Photo taken August 6th 2022
