Designed Precarity
Precarity is not a flaw in the system but its central feature. When people exist perpetually on the edge—one illness away from bankruptcy, one missed paycheck from homelessness—they lose the capacity to resist. The exhausted cannot organise; the desperate cannot strategise. Their time horizon shrinks to survival, leaving no energy for revolution.
The genius of modern oppression lies not in forceful subjugation but in creating conditions where freedom itself becomes a burden too heavy to bear. By fragmenting communities and individualising struggle, the system ensures its own preservation. People trapped in survival mode lack the collective power to imagine alternatives.
This manufactured insecurity serves as invisible chains, more effective than any physical bondage. The truly insidious achievement is convincing the shackled that their chains are self-imposed—that their suffering stems not from systemic design but personal failure.