The Fetishization of Safety
Post 39 | Coddled and Swaddled
Your safety is our top priority. Be safe. Travel safe. Stay safe. Safety first. Safety above all. Safety is job one. Here for your safety. Keep our communities safe. Hands up for safety. Safety is no accident. Safety first, last and always. The most important thing is your safety.
Safe words. Safe spaces. Safe zones.
Good grief, but we must be in constant danger with all this safety stuff coming at us - right?
Or are we?
As young boys we regularly used power tools and heavy equipment, chopped wood, climbed trees, worked on roofs, jumped bikes off homemade ramps, and rode without seat belts sometimes with a chin propped on the metal dashboard.
We shlepped to school on a road without sidewalks or shoulders. At recess we played murder ball, or helmetless on the outdoor rink in winter.
We fired guns and shot arrows straight up to see where they’d land, drove on bald tires, perched in the open flatbed or on running boards, ventured deep into bush roads with unreliable vehicles and never checked the weather before committing to outside activities.
Hockey equipment offered a mere suggestion of safety rather than any real protection, in days when hard body checking was encouraged.
Through teenage years we went everywhere without worrying about checking in or having an easy out if we ran into a spot of trouble.
Moving away to university brought its own interesting new activities starting with frosh week - but I’ll leave it there for now.
By today’s standards, much of this might be called unsafe. And readers of a certain age will surely have their own list that would now be frowned upon.
But while these experiences were unique to a time and place with some perhaps clouded by nostalgia, I am convinced it was healthier than our current safety-obsessed and risk-averse society.
Until recently, safety referred to our bodies being kept from physical harm or death – whether in the home, workplace or on the road, and where the definition of harm would have been looser a few generations prior.
We now live in virtual bubble wrap.
Compared to almost any time in history we are safer when measured by deaths or injury rates. Traffic deaths, weather deaths, malnutrition deaths, sporting deaths, shooting deaths – you name it.
Glaring exceptions in Canada are two self-inflicted mortality causes – drug overdoses and MAID, as we shamefully lead the world by a mile in those choosing to die.
Indeed, some crime statistics are up in Canada after the 2019 catch and release Bill C-75 amendments, a runaway drug problem and a current rash of carjackings. But these are largely failings of policy and law enforcement.
Meanwhile…
Vehicles are like bomb shelters protecting us in a crash, assuming the alerts and sensors allow it to occur.
Playgrounds are homogenized and safety-scrubbed to avoid even a splinter, while stripping away some childhood joys like merry-go-rounds.
Kids playing hockey can barely stand up after falling given the monstrous equipment strapped on - like marshmallows on skates. They can’t move, but they don’t get hurt.
Parents ensure children clutch cell phones on their way out the door and shuttle them everywhere for safety - rarely allowing solitary meandering down the street or unaccounted whereabouts.
We are legally required to don helmets on motorcycles and compelled to wear them downhill skiing and cycling. And while it’s true they statistically decrease head injuries during bad falls, what are the wee chances of our doing so? How many would prefer to ride without a helmet but are mandated for their own safety? – even though if you wrap yourself around a tree doing sixty, a it won’t help much.
Each time a fluke injury or death occurs – whether vehicular, home-based, at a school, playground or in a sporting event – a new safety regulation or piece of equipment gets added. But few note that the same activity has been performed likely billions of times prior, leaving the likelihood of a repeat at the tiniest fraction of a percentage point. We just create more rules backed by the platitude of, one death is too many, rather than considering a greater good theory before adding more stifling regulations.
Back up beepers are on every dump truck, loader, backhoe, forklift, garbage truck, delivery truck, scissor lift, and construction vehicle – all under the guise of safety. Our neighbourhoods and job sites are awash in beeping – producing constant noise pollution while doing little for safety. Good data is not readily available on their efficacy but I venture it’s near negligible, while driving us insane from the constant noise.
Covid was the ultimate example of safety gone mad as our country was shut down, while we were forced to huddle inside and hide behind masks for months – many still unable to break that dependency. It was driven by the government mantra that their number one priority was to “keep Canadians safe” along with, “we’ve got your back”.
Hogwash, malarkey, fiddlesticks, and bullshit.
COVID led to more than 53,000 deaths in Canada, slotting us in the 70th percentile per capita mortality worldwide. This despite a compliant population who agreed to severe restrictions and boasted one of the world’s highest vaccination rates. Our governments did everything BUT keep us safe as they cratered the economy, stunted children’s growth, enforced poorly tested vaccines, condemned our elderly to die alone, downplayed viable pharmacopeia options, caused untold societal ills that will haunt us for years and stoked fear at every opportunity.
“Out of an abundance of caution…” has become government and corporate safety-speak preceding the declaration of questionable risk management policies. It was again trotted out to justify school closures during the recent solar eclipse - for safety reasons - rather than using the opportunity to teach kids a few basics of astrophysics along with common sense.
Weather apps routinely affix the red warning triangle to any modest rain, snow, wind, heat or cold event – and some are now accompanied by an explicit message to “stay alert” and “be safe”, whatever these mean. Shall we huddle inside our homes on all but sunny days, peeking warily out the curtains?
Marketers leverage safety in their ads on everything from appliances to clothing to outdoor gear to furniture - most of it nonsensical. Your running shirt will not make you safe because it wicks moisture, nor is your refrigerator safe because it sends you a Wifi warning when the door is ajar. And much of what’s called safety in vehicles and equipment might just be called gadgetry.
At some point airline announcements began prioritizing safety with, “We’re here for your safety and comfort”, perhaps to take our mind off the degraded service and lack of comfort, though I’ve seen little to indicate we’re any safer - or needed to be.
Been through an airport in the past twenty years? Do you feel any safer after we’ve deposited shoes, belts, laptops and toothpaste on the conveyor? It alarms me how such performative measures soothe people. If someone wishes to do harm, they will easily find a way.
Fetishize (Def): To consider something or someone important, interesting or attractive to an unreasonable degree.
This fetishized safety comes at a cost.
Every new rule or regulation requires some group, committee, advisory board or department - of a school board, township, city, province or federal body - to be involved. It requires people, bureaucracy and taxes to develop and administer, with the opportunity cost of personnel, time and money unable to be spent elsewhere.
It has an insidious impact on freedoms and personal choices as we are increasingly mandated and compelled - legally and societally.
It creates a tangle of overlapping rules and regulations that often make little sense when viewed in whole.
It creates a dreaded sense of things being unsafe, so we demand yet more protocols in a vicious cycle.
It makes us fearful.
It makes us less aware, less alert, less sharp and lazier in body and mind.
It convinces us that safety must always be the top priority - the first principle. And that risks, unknowns and dangers are always bad things - stifling exploration, creativity, discovery, carefreeness, and the beauty of chance.
Undoubtedly we did some dumb things in years past that didn’t promote long term species propagation. But we survived, thrived and adapted. Some regulations and safety standards were a necessary part of that adaption, but we long ago overdid it.
Intoning safety is now more often a crutch, an excuse, a diversion or a marketing ploy. The word safe evokes powerful emotions and has become a reliable go-to in making a case for almost anything.
Being prudent is not always the best course. And being this safety obsessed is not healthy.
Humans adapt partly through stressors. Our muscles adapt when put under tension and our metabolism adapts when stressed by heat, cold and inputs. Similarly our brains rewire and learn from experiences that include risk and fear. We can’t grow or adapt when constantly swaddled.
It’s particularly hell on men. We are more inclined to be risk-takers, driven partly by testosterone. This hyper focus on safety dampens our tendencies to aggressive or risky endeavours whether physical, financial or other - inclinations that have served society well for generations. And in a western world that correlates any aggressiveness to being dangerous or toxic, elevating safety to first principle has contributed to crippling male well-being. This has borne out in the stunted development of young men, confusion about their role in the world and shocking suicide rates.
The fetishization of safety is now also entrenched in the non-physical domain.
In their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt provide a powerful case that youth have been indoctrinated with destructive ideas over the past few decades, poorly serving them and society. Much of it is centred around the concept that safety should now be readily applied to thoughts and feelings and not just physical wellbeing.
They outline three Great Untruths. The Untruth of Fragility - What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning - Always trust your feelings. And the Untruth of Us Versus Them – Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
Apparently this really took root around 2015 at Columbia University with the introduction of safe spaces and the urging of trigger warnings on any literature that offended students’ fragile worldviews. The book lays much of this flight to safety at the feet of adults – educators and parents – for their coddling and promotion of these ideas.
Campuses have always been places for dissent but the authors write, “What is new today is the premise that students are fragile. Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection.” But given reasonable guidance, youth are far more resilient than they are being treated, to the detriment of us all.
Our governments and institutions amplify the fear and victimhood with their constant talk of safety being the priority - taking precedence over analysis, critical thought and debate. It has been further solidified in destructive DEI, hiring, and funding policies.
Among the many consequences is to obscure when issues truly are matters of safety - like the boy who cried wolf. This has been unfolding in the past weeks of Palestine-related university activism, some of it blatantly antisemitic, and involves real issues of physical safety and harassment of Jewish students. But given our numbness to the barrage of claims over the years for all manner of perceived harms, real concerns such as these now barely break through the noise.
Government has done nothing to create the conditions for national unity and common courtesy, but will now performatively hold safety hearings around the university campus harassment. It may end in yet more regulations while going nowhere near the underlying issues at heart, as they hide behind safety as the primary issue.
Meanwhile it is now commonplace to have forced training in government and corporate environments regarding how to behave, leveraging new age concepts such as microaggressions, safe spaces and triggering based on thin and disputable academia.
So, adding to countless physical safety constraints, we have now institutionalized and legislated a whole new basket of emotion and thought-based safety rules. Canada’s proposed new Online Harms Bill C-63 is a horribly perfect example of this.
How much awareness and resiliency do we lose in a society crafted to be risk free, offense free and danger free?
How much innovation and productivity is lost to stultifying rules that attempt to head off every conceivable bump in the road?
How much safer are you really? And how much safer do you feel?
The more we cower in fear from the world around us, the less we learn and adapt with it, to it, or make our own adaptive presence felt upon it. Fear lives on us like a stink that can’t be washed away, and safety fetishization is both a contributor and product of that fear.
Despite being safer, many feel it is a more dangerous time than ever – stoked by the catastrophizing online world and our institutions. Our society has become infantilized, with fewer people having much experience or concept of real physical dangers and many now convinced that safety extends to their thoughts and feelings, which must not be infringed.
Some of my life’s best experiences have been in taking roads less traveled – literally and figuratively - sometimes where unknown risks and dangers lurked. Not all worked out perfectly but they’ve provided me a reasonable consciousness of the world and its realities, as I’ve learned from the frights, bumps and bruises.
This is not about chasing a dopamine hit or adrenaline rush, though some dismissals of safety produce that wonderful effect. It is about recognizing the safety straitjacket we are living in as it gets cinched tighter - something I personally chafe against.
I acknowledge risk tolerance is very different for everyone so I offer no specific advice on how others might peel back some of their own protective layer, if they choose to do so. But choice can come only with a recognition of how constrained our lives have become and the trade offs involved.
In that spirit, I wish you an unsafe day. I’m going to run with scissors.
Stay tuned and stay pragmatic.
[I note and pay tribute to journalist Rex Murphy who died on May 9. Thank you Rex for your constant defense and celebration of Canada. You wrote and spoke of this country with knowledge, passion and a wit few will equal.]
Dealing with student mental health issues has become a significant pre-occupation of the post-secondary sector. My hypothesis? This is directly related to the obsession with safety, sheltering, and "snow-plowing" away any barriers or adversity our children may face, leading to a lack of resiliency, confidence, and fortitude in the face of any adversity. The response is more such measures and practices, which just feeds into this downward spiral.
An absolute home run!! The slippery slope started decades ago and we are now in a full free fall. The sad truth is that we are unfortunately like the frog in the water completely oblivious to the danger (I do get the irony of using that word) to our society and the pleasure that we get out of life. It may already be too late but I hope not.