In fact, the government's deliberately terroristic manipulation of the need for security is the perfect answer to all the new questions now being put to democracies by nuclear strategy-the new isolationism of the nuclear State that, in the U.S . , for example, is totally revamping political strategy. They are trying to recreate Union through a new unanimity of need, j ust as the mass media phantasmatically created a need for cars, refrigerators . . . We will see the creation of a common feeling of insecurity that will lead to a new kind of consumption, the consumption of protection; this latter will progressively come to the fore and become the target of the whole merchandising system. This is essentially what Raymond Aron recently said, when he accused liberal society of having been too optimistic for too long! The indivisible promotion of the need for security already composes a new composite portrait of the citizen-no longer the one who enriches the nation by consuming, but the one who invests first and foremost in security, manages his own protection as best he can, and finally pays more to consume less.
Tl1e Consumption of Security
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