The posters that launched the great campaign for the safety of senior citizens, the audio-visual spots: all this indoctrination is widely broadcast in old people's homes, clubs, hostels like so many orders for police mobilization, all of it furnished free for the asking.
For other social strata, manipulation of the need for security takes diferent forms. Since antiquity, precious metals, the gold standard, has been a "refuge value," a remedy for anxiety, and thus a symbol of individual security-this "insurance" value having been, as we know, freely transferred to a multitude of exchange systems. Nonetheless, the current questioning of the gold refuge as basic standard of the monetary system is quite reminiscent of the events of the Law Bank shortly before the French Revolution. It contributes to the collapse of social "security;" and we find here, in the midst of the nuclear status quo, the reasons that made the Spartan State refuse the use of precious metals as one of the consequences of non-war. (The State, careful to put the people's vigilance in defense to full use, deprived individuals of the means of protecting themselves other than by becoming totally engaged in the Lacedaemonian war machine.)
The Consumption of Security
I 1 43