Integrated Version (with Berlant + Lorey woven in)

There is also a gearing up for crisis and emergency and not for the more common, less exciting but no less agonizing, quiet desperation. By defining problems we shape solutions, and once framed as “crisis,” we become inclined to rush unnecessarily; provisional or stop‑gap measures and short‑termism are favoured, and thoughtful deliberative democracy yields quickly to faster, simpler managerialism and the managerial drivel that accompanies it. Lauren Berlant would call this the normalization of crisis ordinariness: the slow, grinding emergencies of everyday life—economic precarity, bureaucratic strain, shrinking futures—become the ambient atmosphere of the present. Crisis ceases to be an event and becomes a condition, one that habituates us to constant adjustment rather than collective transformation.

Charles Eisenstein describes this inclination to rush in terms of an artificial scarcity of time, attention, and patience—a scarcity that dovetails with a broader moral scarcity logic. Michael Sandel, citing Kenneth Arrow, notes the economist’s claim that “we do not wish to use up recklessly the scarce resources of altruistic motivation.” Time and “altruistic motivation” are treated as money. Arrow imagines virtue as a finite resource, like fossil fuel, depleted with use; this leads to virtue (or a facsimile of it) being carefully metered with the frugality appropriate to a scarce commodity—much like our institutional responses to distress. Sandel counters that virtues are better understood as muscles that strengthen through exercise; as such, it would be preferable to normalize or institutionalize the practice of virtue and altruism. Achille Mbembe, in his EGS talk on “Technologies of Happiness in the Age of Animism,” similarly critiques the neoliberal production of scarcity—especially scarcity of relationality, joy, and shared capacity.

Isabell Lorey extends this logic into the political domain, arguing that precarity itself becomes a mode of governance. Precariousness—the shared vulnerability of living beings—is transformed into precarization, an active political strategy that distributes insecurity unevenly and uses it to shape behaviour. In this sense, the very atmosphere Berlant describes is not merely endured but produced: insecurity becomes a disciplinary tool, encouraging self‑responsibilization, competition, and compliance. People govern themselves through anxiety, and crisis becomes both the justification and the method.

Gilmore Wilson’s analysis of crisis can, at a push, be synopsized as follows: anti‑state states manufacture crises in order to impose new modes of governing on populations with the intention of resolving, managing, or hiding underlying crises of capitalist accumulation. See Wilson’s Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and the “No Natural Disasters” campaign.

In this light, the normalization of crisis and the political production of precarity are not accidental but structurally aligned. It might also be the case that insecurity is generated and implicit threats made in order to sell security.

Mark Neocleous pushes this argument further by showing that “security” itself is not a neutral good but a political project: a way of organizing social life around fear, danger, and the promise of protection. In his account, the state does not respond to insecurity so much as produce it, cultivating a permanent sense of threat in order to justify its own expansion. Security becomes a fetish that obscures the violence required to maintain capitalist order, and the demand for security becomes indistinguishable from the demand for more policing, more surveillance, more managerial control. In this sense, the crises we are encouraged to fear and the securities we are encouraged to desire are two sides of the same governing logic—one that thrives on scarcity, precarity, and the perpetual deferral of collective flourishing.