Safetyism

What—no helmet?! (My cousin Aaron, back in the day.)

People of a certain generation will recognize my childhood experience: in the summers, my brother and I and our neighborhood friends would roam (or ride bikes) anywhere within a three-block radius of home until street lights flickered on or we heard Mom’s distinctive “woo-woo” loon call, signaling it was time for dinner or bath. This freedom has largely disappeared, with a specific turning point in my home state of Minnesota being Jacob Wetterling’s abduction, a deeply disturbing event that shattered people’s assumptions about safety and trust. Thus “helicopter parenting” and “stranger danger” emerged, creating a world where children are driven everywhere and rarely leave their parents’ sight unless supervised by fingerprinted, background-checked adults. (Jonathan Haidt explains this cultural shift well in one of his recent books.)

Of course we achieved peak “safetyism” during the pandemic, but the wheels were set in motion long before that. This rise was/is a nuanced and multifactor phenomenon:

• News media (and now social media) amplified one-off crimes or accidents, and created the impression that threats are everywhere and all the time. (Basically the above.)
• Smaller families (from declining birth rates) meant greater focus on each child.
• Prosperity allowed for the purchase of safety (as a feature): e.g., safer cars, houses in safer neighborhoods, air purifiers, organic foods, etc.
• Technology enabled our safety obsession: wireless cameras, location tracking, etc.
• Attenuation of our institutions (civic/religious) that helped us trust each other, and process risk and mortality
• Insurance and legal systems incentivized extreme risk aversion and “safety theater;” the highly visible, well-documented precautions that may or may not meaningfully reduce risk, but do protect against liability claims (i.e. actual safety versus documented compliance with safety protocols). (Our former corporate daycare was amazing at this.)

And what have we purchased with safetyism? For a time, quite a bit: seatbelts, lead-free toys, etc. produced measurable improvements. And let’s just concede that we did have a small crime problem in the US which was addressed—although some of the improvement was the result of demographic, economic, and social shifts¹.

But then came the negative externalities:

• Postponed adulthood. Grown children living with their parents indefinitely, being insured by their parents, and even having have their parents phone their manager if there’s a problem at work.
• “Safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” “microaggressions”. What began as concern and sensitivity has evolved into a doctrine of emotional safety; first normalized, then celebrated, and finally codified in our universities, corporations, and government agencies.
• Hombres emasculados. As institutions and bureaucracies replaced men’s traditional role as protectors, they stripped away a core source of meaning and identity. This void helped create Jordan Peterson, who speaks to young men who find themselves obsolete in a world where safety comes prepackaged.

On that last point, Peterson’s doctrine of personal responsibility entails ditching your comforts and taking on sufferings and burdens as a means to personal growth and meaning. A few men from my church and I just embarked on this faith-based fraternity program together, and I noticed it right away how good it is to have quality guy time—and not just drinking buddies, but something that goes a little deeper.

And, in fact, this program is based on asceticism, which leads me to my spiritual/religious points: our safety culture has made us a little weaker and softer, but it’s a vicious cycle because that weakness/softness makes us desire (and demand) that someone else take us of us with comforts and safety. Even comforts like snacking—guilty right here—starts out as an innocuous indulgence, but the “we are what we repeatedly do” aphorism applies equally to virtue and vice. Pope Benedict XVI tells us, “The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.”

Apart from any religious tradition, people intuit that character is built through suffering, which includes:

• Physical suffering (immediate, concrete): e.g., the current ice bath craze, or the popularity of Stoicism or
• Psychological suffering (potential suffering): i.e., ditching your psychological safety in favor of adventure (e.g., the hobbits leaving the comfort of the Shire to go on their adventure, or Twelve apostles leaving their families and livelihoods to follow Jesus).

Did Christ Himself play it safe? Clearly not, hence the Cross. But “to love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise,” says Fyodor Dostoevsky. And what’s the opposite of love? Hate, right? No, apathy. Or perhaps acedia, which the desert monks believed to come from being “too safe” in their cells. Or what Pascal called divertissement: the things that distract us from the life’s greatest questions and its purposes.

But the other sin it relates to is idolatry: worshipping one’s own life or safety or comforts above all else (e.g., the present longevity movement of which Bryan Johnson is the poster child). Rather, propter vitam vivendi perdere causas, roughly translated as “to lose the reasons for living, for the sake of life.” As Christ retorts to the devil, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”²

Alexander Tytler Cycle predicted this stage for us—well, for everyone: after abundance comes complacency and apathy, then dependence, and finally bondage.

And isn’t it true that safetyism is a classic “first world problem”? The craziest things that happened with regard to psychological safety came about during our recent zero interest rate environment (i.e. good times); whereas when the economic winds blow the other way, it’s more like “okay, yeah, get back to work”.

How do we right the ship?

It has to happen at multiple levels, but subsidiarity demands it begins with me and my household:

Local

• Seek out high-quality information and news media as a means of quantifying risks (distinguishing from hype).
• Adopt Nassim Taleb’s Anti-Fragile (Stoic?) framework: do hard things (advertisities make you grow), go through life as a “flâneur”, and develop an anti-education.
• Employ parenting strategies that foster resilience (e.g., my own take on a Hunger Games of sorts?).

Global

• (Concomitant with #1 above) Have mechanisms to score the trustworthiness of information sources. (Easier said than done…)
• Reform legal liability in the US
• Borrow whatever it is that allows Japanese children to commute by subway, while combating the forces that shout down the families that try to engender the same kind of independence in their children.

To be clear, safety is not a terrible thing—Maslow filed it under “basic needs”—but we’ve crowned it as one of the highest goods and outsourced to a nanny state. Let us swing the pendulum back the other direction. But ‘til then…

Stay safe,

— ᴘ. ᴍ. ʙ.

First published: 2025-02-22 | tweet | cast

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