Facts that Care about your Feelings: A Conversation with Astra Taylor

Astra Taylor | The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart | House of Anansi Press | September 2023 | 352 Pages

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Writer, documentary filmmaker, organizer, and former professional guitarist Astra Taylor is working across disciplines to advance a multi-container political and social project. As the Co-Founder of the Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtors union, Taylor works to build solidarity and community for American debtors, rallying them around the idea that people are not loans and should not be defined by theirs. In her documentaries Examined Life and What is Democracy?, she rigorously interrogates elements of our lives and politics that we presume are given, normal, or fixed. Her new book The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart targets the increasingly entrenched idea that systemic insecurities–of food, income, and housing–are an inevitable and ubiquitous part of contemporary American life.

The Age of Insecurity delivers a “cultural diagnosis” for our times. But Taylor isn’t pathologizing; instead, she suggests that in times of crisis–of mental health, ecological decay, and authoritarianism—responding by compulsively navel-gazing, over-exercising, or developing a 10-step skincare routine is not exactly illogical. These coping mechanisms actually make total sense; they’re mired in the logic of an ill-functioning social order that demands the most of our bodies and minds, promises instant fulfillment, then neglects to offer anything real in return.

So, to transform our pandemonium into a world of connectedness and, ideally, of raised consciousness, we have to get real about our feelings. Taylor conceives of our emotional worlds not as pests, interlopers, or problems to solve, but rather as complex agents which act upon us, whether we like it or not. These worlds have more to do with our material conditions, cultures, and communities than we may realize, credit, or be able to process deliberately. Her book presents a historically-grounded framework for holistically addressing this age of insecurity, touching on issues ranging from the enclosure of the commons to the Magna Carta to unschooling. 

In our conversation, Taylor and I discuss how over-identification with wealth, careers, and to a certain extent, professional identities, can be antithetical to producing meaningful work. We revive the longstanding fight over facts versus feelings (nobody wins by pitting them against each other!). We also discuss how closing ourselves off to curiosity about our own internal lives and those of others inhibits a broader view both of our true material and psychological conditions and of a progressive political project. 

Taylor talks about working from the heart and about how, no matter what form it takes, her work comes from the same place: her will to communicate and connect in the service of a better world. Finding a way forward, she insists, requires a collective, sustainable politics–no doubt an overwhelming project that demands a creative, fluid, and caring sensibility from all of us.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Caroline McManus: I really loved your book. And I’m coming to you as someone who admired your scholarship and organizing work. I initially wanted to ask you how you characterize yourself and your work, but then I read your New Yorker interview that came out yesterday, and you answered a similar question. So, now I’m wondering if you see utility in defining yourself in relation to your work, especially because, in the age of insecurity, marketing yourself is kind of a fact of professional life.

Astra Taylor: That’s a really great question, because I do often get asked: how do you define yourself? Because people often use the word “multi-hyphenate” to describe me. You know, Astra Taylor is a writer, and a filmmaker, and a political organizer. And a this, and a that.

I feel like they’re all one thing. Because it all stems from the same fundamental curiosity and political project, right? Though the forms might be different, the motivation for everything I do is almost one-dimensional. I’m just constantly thinking about politics in a certain way, thinking about the economy in a certain way, thinking about social change. That’s the content, and then the form flows from that, depending on what I want to do in the moment, what’s captured my attention. 

So to me, it doesn’t feel odd that occasionally this sort of intellectual and political project wouldn’t have to manifest in different containers. Right?

CM: Absolutely.

AT: But I think there might have been a point where, to your, to your branding question, I think the conventional advice that people get is to be incredibly consistent in form and content. You know, choose a kind of lane, stick to it, make it yours. 

That’s your domain, that’s what you’ll be known for. And you can be the go-to expert on the topic, or the go-to commentator. And I think that's actually bad advice. I mean, I haven't followed it, and I've been fine.

It’s also just such a boring way to live. Like, to define your career path by the thing that might be the most legible to the outside. Career-wise, sometimes we’re defined by our form, when I think it should be by the substance or the heart that’s driving it. 

I do feel that in the last few years, the audience I have recognizes that all my work is coming from one place. There are people who get what I’m doing, even though it has been a bit, like, roundabout or intuitive or whatever.

CM: The way you put it, about defining your career as something legible to an external audience versus as something intrinsic–as you said, following your heart–I think that’s really interesting. 

AT: You know what I mean? I haven’t done it in a few years, but I show my films and go to colleges and speak. And there’s always wonderful, earnest students, but there’s also always a few that are like, I want to be a filmmaker, I want to be a writer. And my response to that is, well, what do you want to make films about? What do you want to write about? To me, the form is irrelevant if you don’t understand what you're filling it with, and the lens that you’re bringing to the world.

CM: Totally.

AT: So, I would advise people to train their minds in something else. Become someone who knows a lot about science, or even statistics or astronomy or ethical philosophy, and then bring that to these mediums. Because form without content is nothing. I didn’t grow up and think, like, oh, I want to be a filmmaker, I want to be a writer. It’s like, I want to say these things and communicate ideas and communicate with other people, and that’s my motivation.

CM: Yes, that totally makes sense. I think there’s a real pressure for professionalizing our interests.

AT: The pressure is ratcheting up, as you said in the beginning, too, because there aren’t institutions that can shepherd you through a career path, especially in the arts. There’s all the more pressure to professionalize and become a brand and make your mark in a legible way. 

So I don’t think those questions are always coming from bad places. 

CM: Of course.

AT: I think the economy is designed to make it so people can’t just explore and get in touch with what it is that they want to fill those containers with.

CM: I think this leads pretty naturally into the next question I had for you, which was that your book makes clear that this overwhelming sense of insecurity doesn’t escape people who are at the top of professions or who have amassed power and wealth. 

You acknowledge that head-on. It’s not only completely true, but also very much in the interest of persuasion. I was curious if you had more to say about the decision to include that in your argument, instead of focusing more narrowly on people who are harmed in more material ways. Like, whether they have a negative net worth or whether they don’t have a house.

AT: Yeah, you know, how can we talk about our commonalities without erasing our differences? This is something that really interests me and reappears as a theme in a lot of my work. 

It’s a major theme of the next book that I have coming out in March, which I co-authored with a friend, on solidarity. How can we build a big tent, a big movement that has space for people with all kinds of lived experiences that bonds us without erasing the very different opportunities and inequities we've experienced.

Because those differences are profound. Even over the last decade, I went from being someone who defaulted on my student loans, who saw their future as financially doomed, to getting really lucky: my husband went on tour and paid off my student loans in one fell swoop.

And that is just absolutely not available to everybody. You shouldn’t have to rely on the grace of your partner to pay off your loans, or on the luck of having been born into a family that has the wealth to do so.

So now, I’m in a different financial boat. I’ve continued to work with the Debt Collective to try to create conditions where everybody can have that liberation that I was able to experience—to experience randomly, really. 

I’ve spent ten years absorbing the stories of traumatized debtors and thinking about what it is to have negative net worth. But I’ve come into contact with all kinds of people because I have one foot in the film world, another in the cultural world because of my writing, another in the music world–and because I’m just a human being who talks to other people. And I can see that even folks who are making it are incredibly anxious!

I was sitting yesterday outside of a cafe in Toronto. And these two women who looked very professional—you know, late forties, upwardly mobile—were talking about how their interest rates are being raised. And in Canada, peoples’ mortgages are structured differently, so you don’t have a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage. 

Their mortgages are suddenly jumping by $1,500, $2,000, $2,500 a month.

CM: Wow, oh my god.

AT: It’s happening across Canada right now. There are all these stories of people who are suddenly cutting down on their retirement savings, taking their kids out of summer camp, selling their vehicles. And these are people who are middle class, who are property owners in the most expensive housing market in the world, or one of them. 

Suddenly, they’re in a state of financial precarity. As I was sitting there listening to them, it was clear that they didn’t have a structural analysis: they’re like, this thing is happening, everyone we know is now financially pinched, we're gonna have to cope with it. 

And in my mind, I’m like, well, why is it like that? Why can your finances suddenly be decimated? And why do you have to make these impossible choices between keeping the roof over your head and providing extracurriculars for your kids? 

There are material factors that I lay out in the book that affect people in the middle. For one, the fact that we’re encouraged increasingly—and this is true in Canada and the US—to rely on investments for our retirement. Those are just inherently unstable; that’s the nature of the stock market. 

But there are psychological components, too. These economic structures create a kind of affect, or emotional orientation where you know that the rug could be pulled out from under you, in that your 401k could suddenly be worth a third of what it was worth a month ago. You just sort of can never psychologically rest. 

And then for the people at the very top, it’s profoundly damaging in ways that most of us don’t understand. We’re not in that income bracket. 

CM: Haha, right!

AT: People become so identified with their wealth. And I think it’s toxic. This is why I’ve joked that dispossessing billionaires is for their own good.

Certainly, insecurity’s harshest edge is experienced by people who are the most disadvantaged, the most discriminated against–who are subject to structural racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism. I mean, that is all absolutely true, and has to be front and center. 

But I think insecurity can also help us recognize that even people who appear to be making it have a lot to gain from a transformation in values and socioeconomic structures.

CM: Thank you for that really comprehensive answer. I appreciate you talking about the degree to which we internalize these things and then take them on as our own. 

Obviously, people often don’t have much of a choice. Like, if you do have to pay X more dollars for your mortgage now, I guess you do have to cut something, and maybe that’s your kid’s camp. But your book helps present an opportunity to help us question that a little bit more. Like, to what degree do we internalize problems, making systemic ones personal? 

AT: One of these women I was sitting next to seemed to be really professionally doing well. I shouldn’t be eavesdropping. The other was planning for van life, with this kind of optimism. Like, I’m going to live in this . . . what’s another word for RV?

CM: Camper?

AT: Yeah, I’m gonna live in a camper and it’s gonna be cool, and I’m gonna save up money to buy property. 

It had that positive spin. And maybe it was great. But part of me was like, we’re sitting here at this cafe in the most absurd housing market in history, and people have the facade that they’re doing okay. And when you scratch below the surface, a lot of them aren’t. Yes, a lot of people are walking around with a lot of money in the bank; I don’t want to discount that. But a lot of people are actually really precarious and have done a lot of things, quote unquote, right, and are still not going to be able to retire with dignity–are going to be working into their seventies, or who knows, eighties. If nothing else, I just wanted to provide a framework that might jumpstart a more honest discussion. Where are we actually at?

CM: Right. An honest discussion, a reappraisal of a lot of this. That leads me to a question about the sort of the feelings aspect of internalizing this instability. 

I really liked that, in the book, you talked about walking on common land when you were in England and feeling like you’re going to get in trouble. Because in the US, walking on someone’s yard is so unheard of. It could even be dangerous. I thought you were thinking about yourself in relation to space and how discomfort can be conditioned. 

And that made me wonder, how do you choose which parts of your personal experience or life experience to include? How do you conceptualize using vulnerability in your work?

AT: Gosh, it’s like, the fun part, but also not . . . part of the terror of writing this book was that I was on a really tight deadline. And I am someone who’s never made a book deadline in my life. I always turn things in late. 

So the executive producer of CBC Ideas, on the Canadian Radio Network, called me a year ago and said, “Would you consider being the 2023 Massey lecturer?”, which blew my mind! Because I think of that as being, you know, an honor bestowed on scholars, in their seventies—so I was like, are you sure that you have the right person?

To give the Massey Lecture you have to write a book. It had to be done by April, and the call came in September. I was already writing a book and I had multiple articles due; I also spend a lot of time working with the Debt Collective, and we were deep in the student debt cancellation fight with the Biden administration. 

I wasn’t able to clear my desk and start writing till January. So I knew I was writing a book that would be relatively short and would have a wide audience via the broadcaster, CBC Radio Network. I wanted to reach for something that could resonate with a CBC listener, as opposed to someone who’s maybe coming to my work because they are a fellow democratic socialist, or someone I’ve organized with, or a scholar who is interested in my work on political theory. 

And so the intense time factor, plus knowing I wanted to reach people who didn’t really know me or where I was coming from just kind of made me write from the gut more. 

So it just felt appropriate to weave some personal stories in there. I mean, a) insecurity is personal and it’s political. I felt that that gave me license to just say, okay, if I want to spark a conversation about insecurity as a psychological and political phenomenon, I kind of have to put myself out there, too, right? I can’t just expect other people to do that.

It’s funny, people are like, oh I really like the personal parts! Maybe you should write an autobiographical memoir! And I’m like, I don’t really have that interesting of a life. I’m such a nerd: I just sit at home and read a lot.

And when is there something universal in your anecdote, right? Because you want a personal story to serve as a parable. The particularity gives it texture, makes it feel specific. But there has to be the bigger meaning that comes out of it. 

And I think the personal also can be really good for wrestling with the tensions—like the part about the commons that you mentioned. I’m so steeped in a culture of privatization that for me to even experience a taste of the commons made me uncomfortable for a minute. When I was walking on these paths in England, which I had the right to do, I felt that I was violating some other person’s private property. 

In that chapter I also talk about owning a house, and my own mixed feelings about it, but also the way that I am constrained—just like everybody else is, right? I can either rent, buy property, be unhoused, move into my parent’s basement—I mean, I have the same options that everybody else has. And so I tell that story and surface those tensions in order to say, look, this isn’t really about our individual choices or our hypocrisies, or our successes, right? This is about the fact that we’re all making choices under conditions that exist and that we didn’t choose, and that we can make collective choices so that maybe future people will have more options than we do. 

CM: Yes. 

AT: I’m also trying to say: look, I’m not trying to guilt-trip or shame anybody for the choices they make, because we’ve all got shitty options, especially where housing is concerned, you know? 

 CM: I read your New York Times Op-Ed on insecurity, too, where you write about our level of awareness of these conditions and address the ambient fatigue we have with the word inequality, even. A lot of people know that the richest one percent of the population has two-thirds of global wealth, but what does that really mean? It almost has this funny way of inspiring passivity. 

You also write that “insecurity is about feelings as much as facts.” And that actually, funnily enough, reminded me of the conservative commentator (if you can call him that) Ben Shapiro, saying, “Facts don’t care about your feelings!” When clearly they do! So I was wondering, how do you think about building a bridge to someone who thinks that way? Who feels that way?

AT: Right? I’ve been in debates with right-wingers where they’re saying things that are not true. I was on a televised debate with a right-winger about student debt cancellation earlier in the year and he’s like, “Facts don’t care about your feelings!” And I was like, dude, your facts are not correct!

I think that's interesting because, in contrast to that catchphrase, the right wing is actually really good at mobilizing people around emotions. And the main emotion that they stoke is fear. Fear and insecurity—it’s a politics that emphasizes threats and then misdirects people. So, the threat is not corporate power, the threat is not climate change, the threat is not the future pandemics that are that are potentially going to derail our society again–but immigrants, trans people, woke professors, students who want to create safe spaces, protesters for racial justice, the defund the police movement, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

And then the left has a kind of more chaotic approach to tapping into people’s emotions. I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, but I think often relies a bit too much on shame. 

CM: Yeah!

AT: Right? Whereas I think the emotional alchemy that progressives and left wing people need to do is one that turns shame and insecurity into solidarity. Obviously, we want to emphasize the threats that are facing us, but, okay, in people’s day-to-day lives, how do they feel? 

They feel vulnerable, they feel apprehensive about the future, they feel threatened. Instead of repressing that, so it comes out sideways, in some toxic way, let’s be honest about it. Other folks can relate when we start talking honestly about these real material struggles in emotionally honest ways. 

And then we can be more analytical. Why is it that you feel like the rug can be pulled out from under you? Oh, it’s because actually, you don’t have any basic labor rights at your job. It’s because you’re actually objectively underpaid. It’s because these corporations have huge war chests that they’re using to make sure that they’re not regulated, that they can continue predatory business practices. And then we can build solidarity and strategy out of that. 

The left’s emotional and intellectual approach is just more complicated than the right wing’s. The right wing is all about inspiring fear, keeping people insecure so that a handful of people can rule in the interest of making as much money as possible. 

And that’s actually an ancient playbook. I mean, they do it in all sorts of ingenious ways by taking over the courts and bribing elected officials–but the basics of it are just really simple. And despite the claims about facts, they’re perfectly willing to lie, as long as those lies serve the political project of instilling fear and concentrating power. And the left I want to be part of is committed to the truth, which is much more complicated. We’re trying to ultimately build a coalition that shares power widely, and you have to work to weave that coalition together. So, you know, we have a much harder political project, but I think we’re making it more difficult than it needs to be by not having an approach that, honestly, speaks to people’s insecurity and begins from there.

We are feeling beings. And maybe it’s just American culture, I don’t know, but there are so many realms where there is this kind of separating, right? Even when people speak about the psychology of economics, it’s in the sense of behavioral economics; it’s not like, how do you fucking feel day to day because you can’t pay your bills?

I just find it really strange. Or if you’re in the world of philosophy and you think that we’re all just brains in vats having these abstract debates, and that somehow, philosophical conversations are totally severed from our embodiment. I think one thing you can see in my work over and over is that I’m like, no, we’re heads and hearts. And we are bodies and minds. I refuse that separation.

CM: I love that. That resonates with me on many levels. 

AT: Maybe it’s also patriarchal, that emotions are feminine and the intellect is masculine, so if we want to be serious intellectuals, then we just have to abstract things from both their real world contexts and their sort of human, messy, emotional context. And I’m just way more interested in where ideas meet the ground. How are they put into practice? How are they internalized, to use your word? To me, that’s where things get more interesting. And yes, they get messier. That’s also where they matter. I don’t get the separation.

CM: Pretending there is a separation, or forcing people to believe there is one, is also a tool of the very same things you’re talking about.

AT: I think you’re right; like, it is pretending. Because ultimately, in people's day to day lives, there isn’t a separation. The person who’s claiming to be talking about facts without feelings or ideas without empiricism is just lying to themselves, really. Let’s just get in the mess, and hash things out there.

 CM: We're talking a little bit about where certain structural realities become concretized. 

And I really liked your argument in the book for recovering, re-energizing this positive conception of security, which you point out exists in the Magna Carta and in the somewhat forgotten Charter of the Forest. How taking the purely negative approach pushes people to seek solutions according to the same logic that created their very problems. So, why do you think this positive conception is worthwhile?

AT: The conceptual scheme of the book divides insecurity into two components: existential insecurity and manufactured insecurity. 

The first is insecurity that comes from being a mortal mammal! We are just insecure innately because we are living beings who are fragile.

And there’s manufactured insecurity, which is the kind of insecurity that facilitates the concentration of power and profit, the kind of insecurity imposed on us by our economic and political system. 

In the book, I distinguish between different approaches to security. One is a kind of defensive security of the bunker. I’m conjuring these billionaires who are anxious about climate change and so are building fortresses where they can hide out in the apocalypse–but they’re never safe. People might have seen the article by my friend Douglas Rushkoff a couple of years ago where these billionaires called him wanting his advice on what they would do in these bunkers, and how they would prevent their staff from turning on them. 

CM: I love that article!

AT: Oh my god, right? It’s just such a good example of, at a certain point, these people have created their own hells to live in.

But so, that’s a defensive, negative kind of security, versus what we could think of as a more communal, caring, collaborative form of security. The kind of security that comes not from withdrawing from the community but from actually connecting with other people and realizing that our fates are interlinked. 

Anyone who took a Philosophy 101 class—not that I ever did—will probably be familiar with Isaiah Berlin’s famous article where he distinguishes between negative and positive freedom. It’s this old idea that the safe kind of freedom is freedom from—so basically, freedom from an oppressive government. Like, all we need is just to not be tyrannized, to have the government off our back. You know, don’t tread on me! And he contrasts that with what he thinks of as dangerous, socialistic freedom, which is the freedom to. The supports that enable us to do things. 

And I argue in my book—and I really believe—that we need both. Yes, of course, we need freedom from a tyrannical government. But I’m also not free if I am sick and I can’t access healthcare because I don’t have the money to pay for it. I’m not free if I cannot access safe shelter, secure housing. That’s not freedom. 

Martin Luther King was brilliant on this: what is equality, what is freedom, if you desegregate the lunch counter but Black people cannot afford to eat because we live in an economy that is incredibly stratified? And where there’s still structural discrimination because of material inequities. 

Security is bound up in these conversations, and it’s bound up in it in legal discourse, because we actually have a right to security in international and domestic law in various ways. And the debate really is: is this form of security defensive? I need to be secure from illegal searches and seizures by the state, for example, that’s a phrase in the Bill of Rights.

But the point is, can a right to security actually mean, hey, I should have the material security that I need so that I can be more free? The material security of housing, education, healthcare. That baseline of security is actually the foundation of autonomy and freedom. I traced these debates back to the Magna Carter and the Forest Charter, so that’s going back to the 1200s. Possibly, they’re older than that. But right now, the negative conception of liberty and this defensive conception of security are kind of winning the day. 

My little, modest intervention is to attempt to shift the conversation to ask, what would a more positive, holistic, sustainable conception of security look like? And let’s not buy into this idea that that would somehow undermine our freedom. Let’s actually enumerate all the ways that it would enhance it.

CM: It’s so worthwhile. I just have one last question. I love your scholarship on unschooling, including your lecture at the Walker Art Center—and that comes into the book, too. I have some awesome cousins who are almost unschooled, and they’re amazing, so I’m very interested in it. And now, having this background, you’re delivering the Massey Lectures, living as a public intellectual, pursuing public scholarship. 

And I was curious if in your process of delivering the lectures, with your unschooled background, you had any new ideas about what public scholarship means.

AT: One of the mantras of my unschooling youth was that the world was our classroom. And so one way we distinguished ourselves from homeschoolers, specifically from Christian homeschoolers, is that–unlike those families who are trying to cut their children off from the negative influences of the outside world, to shelter them from learning about evolution, or gender equity, or whatever liberal tropes that we’re afraid of–our mission was actually to say, well, nothing should be off limits, right? We’re entitled to learn beyond the typical scope of a classroom. It wasn’t fear based. It wasn’t about shielding us from certain ideas but rather about actually expanding the kinds of ideas and things we’d be exposed to. 

And so I think, for that reason, I have always felt like the world is my classroom. Because my intellectual development wasn’t shaped by the classroom, it always felt a little awkward to limit myself to trying to speak just within that realm.

I taught one or two classes early on, and that really formal setting didn’t suit me. My approach is more like, hey, I’ve gone out in the world and engaged with all the subject matter that I really care about. I’ve woven it into a book, or a film, or an essay, and here it is; I’ll share it with you whoever you are. Not, “I will profess it to you, as your teacher.” My version of being a public intellectual, if I qualify as one, is that my imagined audience is just someone in the public. Just because you’re not enrolled in an academic institution, or you’re not teaching at one, doesn't mean that you don’t have an intellectual life.

I will never forget, I was going around with my film Examined Life, and people would come up to me afterwards and be like, “Wow, I haven’t had this kind of conversation since college!” And they would be like, thirty-five or forty-five. And I thought, why the fuck aren’t people having these kinds of conversations about ideas every day? 

There’s nothing stopping us. But somehow we’ve relegated intellectual pursuits to this one realm of life. AndI think that’s really sad. I think that intellectual pleasure and epiphany should be available to us all the time.

So I do think there’s a correlation between unschooling and the path I’ve chosen, in that I didn’t feel that the academy was my natural home. At the same time, I do think it’s important to say, so much of my organizing work is about the university. 

Because as a citizen, I think the university is an incredibly important cultural institution. I’d like to see universities expanded, not diminished.

It’s a place we should be able to dip our toes into and return to, just out of curiosity—not out of the need for instrumental career training. So, I say all this stuff about knowing the limits of the classroom with a lot of love, and with respect and admiration for academics, whose work I rely on, and out of a recognition of their cultural importance—which is why so much of my organizing is focused on making education a democratic right, and on canceling student debt and reinvesting public money in higher education. I’m just really grateful that I’ve been able to carve out a place for myself. Because, to go back to your initial question about careers: on paper, I think what I’m doing really shouldn’t work, you know?

CM: I’m grateful for you, honestly, as an example of someone who is following what they want to do!