Insecurity has become a "defining feature of our time," says 2023 CBC Massey lecturer Astra Taylor. The Winnipeg-born writer and filmmaker explores how rising inequality, declining mental health, the climate crisis, and the threat of authoritarianism originate from a social order built on insecurity. In this episode, Astra Taylor answers audience questions about insecurity from the cross-Canada tour. 

Insecurity has become a "defining feature of our time," says 2023 CBC Massey Lecturer Astra Taylor. The Winnipeg-born writer and filmmaker explores how rising inequality, declining mental health, the climate crisis, and the threat of authoritarianism originate from a social order built on insecurity. In her first lecture, she explores the existential insecurity we can’t escape — and the manufactured insecurity imposed on us from above.

In the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, Astra Taylor argues our social order runs on insecurity. But we’re also guaranteed the right to “security of the person.” The wealthy barons of the past and present have defined what security means for themselves — but the rest of us, ordinary commoners, have fought for something else instead.

It’s a paradox — we live in the most prosperous era in human history, but it’s also an era of profound insecurity. In the third 2023 CBC Massey Lecture, Astra Taylor suggests that history shows that increased material security helps people be more open-minded, tolerant, and curious. But rising insecurity does the reverse — it drives us apart.

The burning of fossil fuels causes the past, present and future to collide in destructive ways. In the fourth 2023 CBC Massey Lecture, Astra Taylor tells us that as the climate alters, evolved biological clocks erratically speed up or slow down, causing plants and animals to fall out of sync. In a world this out of joint, how could we possibly feel secure? But there is a path forward.

Human beings will never be totally secure, especially not on a planet that has been destabilized. In the final 2023 CBC Massey Lecture, Astra Taylor offers some hope and solutions. She suggests cultivating an ethic of insecurity — one that embraces our existential insecurity. The experience of insecurity, she says, can offer us a path to wisdom — a wisdom that can guide not only our personal lives but also our collective endeavours.

A Netflix series called Ancient Apocalypse claims that a thriving civilization was wiped out during the Ice Age by comets and floods, but left humanity with science and technology. Experts call this "pseudo-archaeology." IDEAS unearths how pseudo-archaeology has been used to advance political and cultural ideas. *This episode originally aired on Feb. 7, 2023.

How does the act of dehumanization pave the way for exploitation, humiliation and ultimately killing? In this episode, experts and survivors discuss dehumanization during war and whether there's a way back when the killing is done.

Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander muses about the interplay of jazz, physics, and math. And cosmologist Katie Mack unpacks the latest thinking about the mysteries of dark matter, as part of the Perimeter Institute Public Lecture series.