In Defense of Fuzzies

There are two kinds of security, wrote David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything. “There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.”

I can’t get this off my mind. The second kind of security entails the question of love, but it’s a very focused and active kind of love, and one that admits of doubt. To have the security, you don’t have to explicitly be loved; you have to “know there are people in the world who care deeply” if you’re hurt. It’s probably easier to know there are such people if they’re right in front of you, doing lovey things, rather than far away, or doing ambiguous things like seeming to smother or neglect you, but in the end “knowing there are people in the world who care deeply” is an inside job. You just decide at some point that you know, and you stop looking for proof or keeping the people who say they love you on probation until they prove that they do. The second kind of security is the security of faith.