One of modernity’s fundamental promises is not only physical or economic security, but ontological security: the promise that the self will be stable, present to itself, and securely situated in a knowable world. Yet because this security can never finally be guaranteed, the very promise of secure presence generates chronic insecurity.
Modernity offers secure presence as one of its highest forms of security. But because presence is never actually secure in any final sense, this promise produces a permanent background of insecurity, and an endless need for apparatuses that try to stabilise what cannot be fully stabilised.
In short, we feel so insecure not despite modernity’s promise of secure presence, but partly because of it
