Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear. Security without freedom means slavery. So, each on its own is awful; only together they make for a good life. But, a big "but": being both necessary, complementing each other, they are nevertheless virtually incompatible.
Zygmunt BaumanState governments seek local remedies for the globally fabricated deprivations and miseries in vain - just as the individuals-by-the-decree-of-fate (read: by the impact of deregulation) seek in vain the individual solutions to the socially fabricated life problems.
Zygmunt BaumanIn "solid modernity" difference was tolerated as a temporary irritant only, expected to disappear tomorrow, when "those aliens" will become like us. "Living with strangers" was therefore not something to last and did not call for developing appropriate arts and skills. Now, however, it looks like that diasporic context of our living will not go away - it will be there forever, so learning how to live with strangers day in, day out without abandoning my own strangeness is high on the agenda.
Zygmunt BaumanThere are, by the most conservative counting, two grave and deeply regrettable collateral victims of the peer-review gruesome stratagem: one is the daring of thought (wished-washed to the lowest common denominator), and the other is the individuality, as well as the responsibility, of editors (those seeking shelter behind the anonymity of "peers", but in fact dissolved in it, in many cases without a trace).
Zygmunt Bauman