Abstract

There is a widespread perception that protection against global and catastrophic risks is imperative and yet cannot be adequately guaranteed, given our psychological constitution and the state of our democratic societies, both of which explain the impossibility of taking effective action against them. Against this diagnosis, it is proposed that we rework the logic of the scales of risk and descend into the ordinariness of lives at risk in order to find resources and an ordinary competence that are also crucial in episodes of disruption of an entire form of life, as in the cases of social violence documented in the work of Veena Das, in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and in the so-called existential risks facing humanity.