It is becoming a cliché. I speak of the phrase, “I didn’t see that coming”. Now there are about fifty triggers in any given week for saying it.
To take one example, among many. Now at Woolworths – at least in my part of the world, and apparently across the Northern Territory and Queensland – you have get a staff member (if you can find one) to unlock the cabinet that contains spray deodorant. Yep, they have locked up the Rexona. In hot places in summer – at the very frontline of the climate emergency, you might say – you decidedly need your Rexona.
I didn’t see that coming.
Another example. This week, McDonalds in various Melbourne outlets went cashless. You can now only get a Mac with a card. Those of us who still use cash – and it should be many more than those who currently do – will have to traipse off to Hungry Jack’s or the Colonel.
Despite all the current moves abroad to cash-free egged on by central banks, globalists and corporates, and all the nudging, I didn’t see that coming.
A third example. Now readers at Mass in the Catholic parish to which I belong have to sign police check-type forms and undertake training – yes, training – in order to continue as lectors.
These examples have one thing in common, and it isn’t just ludicrous over-reaction. They are enacted to ensure someone’s “safety”. Whether it is chromers, Melbourne Mac eaters, or the children of St Carthage’s living in mortal fear of stranger-danger in the form of possibly creepy lectors at Mass, the shared theme is perceived safety at any cost. I say “perceived”. Given that most Mass readers are probably pretty safe, that hardly any children go to Mass these days and there is nil interaction between lectors and anybody else in the church, it is all a bit OTT. Those who work in just about any capacity for the churches are paying for the sins of a tiny minority of clergy committed (mostly) a long time ago.
All these things are part of an emerging picture and a likely future. Of course, these are mostly tiny and localised examples of a new and sinister trend in society, the biggest example of which (of course) has been the Covid plandemic. Call it Plandemic One. There will be others. More on Covid below.
But governments are doing it all the time, if you pause and consider it. Just look at proposed “protections” in relation to “online safety”. Aka censorship and the destruction of free speech. Or, look at the former NSW Liberal Government’s reaction to a couple of attacks in Kings Cross. Under the leadership of Mike “back in the news” Baird, they created lock-out laws (rescinded years later, after the night economy of the city had been all-but-destroyed). Guess what the elites said when the idiot laws were lifted?
Impacts of lifting Sydney’s lockout laws must be closely monitored to protect public health and safety (emphasis added).
They also claimed:
The effects of the lockout laws have been extensively reviewed and the evidence shows conclusively that Sydney is a safer place as a result. Robberies are down 57%, assaults by 50%, sexual assaults by 20%, as well as reductions is other serious crimes, and with no increase in assaults in adjacent areas.
Why ignore the evidence? Why risk a return to the bad old days and the inevitability that Sydney’s streets will again see increased levels of violence, resulting in serious injuries, or worse, and putting pressure back on our already-stretched police and hospital system?
It’s a huge risk for a government to put its economy ahead of the health and safety of its citizens. This conundrum has played out for all to see over the past year, in how different Australian governments have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s ironic that the same NSW Government that has listened to the experts in public health and the medical community in responding to the pandemic has chosen to ignore many of those same experts on the issue of lockout laws.
The phenomenon of which we speak is normally called “safetyism”. One definition explains it:
Safetyism refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.
https://movementum.co.uk/journal/safetyism
Billy and Frances of Movementum argue:
On the surface, safety appears benign and comforting; dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that personal freedom must be sacrificed in order to accommodate its increasing grip; the new laws or safety rules put in place eventually become constricting. Once safety culture is in place, it becomes entrenched as institutions grow around it and looks for more ways to justify its existence; after all who’s going to dismantle the safety-industrial complex and lose jobs and lucrative contracts?
How and why did it emerge?
With the steady decline in organised religion among the British, other beliefs have stepped in to fill the vacuum, guiding us and providing a framework with which to live our lives. The decline of organised religion hasn’t ushered in a world that is rational, logical and rooted in empirical scepticism; our modern materialistic secular world is full of new superstitions, rituals and faith. One of the most visible of these new doctrines, after gaining traction for many decades, blossomed in 2020 - that of safetyism.
They quote Carl Jung:
Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychotherapists of all-time, wrote about how modern mass society has ‘produced an individual who was unstable, insecure and suggestible’ and claimed that a third of his patients were suffering from ‘no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.’
The new cult is a curse for the notional free society in which we have, for so long, strived to attain. And it is embedded in the institutions of the State and their cheer-squadders, like the folks quoted in relation to the ending of the lock-out laws.
Gabrielle Bauer is a Canadian medical journalist. She has written a book, published in 2021 by The Brownstone Institute.
Some people have argued that “safety comes first.” But at what cost? As frightened people missed cancer diagnoses, as people deprived of social contact sank into despair, as people lost businesses they had worked for decades to build up, the costs of the Covid mitigation policies kept piling up. Not just that, but the policies threw the young (who had their lives ahead of them) and the working poor (who couldn’t shelter at home) under a bus.
During Covid, the public’s preoccupation with “safety at all costs” reflected an ongoing value shift toward what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of the 2018 bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, call “safetyism.” The book defines safetyism as “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”
Society was already leaning hard into safetyism before the pandemic. Covid just built on this momentum. No rule was too costly or absurd if it promised an extra increment of safety, and the experts promised us that the rules would do just that.
https://www.mercatornet.com/covid_2020_book
Bauer’s book is called Blindsight is 2020: Reflections on Covid Policies From Dissident Scientists, Philosophers, Artists and More.
She refers to the Lukianoff and Haidt book. This is an indispensable guide to safetyism, but its focus is more on the imperative of mental “safety”. It is the coddling of the mind, after all, that concerns them. They are going after wokedom, “safe spaces” and the drive to eliminate all offence-causing words and deeds. This is, indeed, a societal curse and is high up the list of must-do’s if we are to recapture our freedoms.
One of the myths that Lukianoff and Haidt attack is “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”, an inversion of the famous Nietzschean dictum repeated by many, including G Gordon Liddy.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-stronger/
What policies designed to address both physical (including medical) safety and mental safety have in common is that they are used, malevolently, to extend State power and the expense of citizens and their rights. The only real citizen right the ruling class perceives is the right to feel “safe”. There is a difference, though, between the two, and not recognising the difference has caused no end of friction among conservative and populist tribes. Woke policies are irritating and can cause (say) unemployment for objectors to the culture. Covid policies killed people. Many, many people. And impoverished a generation of students. Led people to suicide. Increased depression. Killed economies. Advanced the fact-checker class and turned it into an industry. Destroyed small business, perhaps forever. Created the conditions for a globalist takeover.
No, the two are different. The apotheosis of Covid safetyism, of course, was the manipulative, jingoistic, bald-faced lie told by global leaders from 2020:
No one is safe until we are all safe.
The linked video provides a truly chilling reminder of those lunatic times and those who bought the fiction of that line. The most cursory look at this video will confirm that the nutters were, indeed, in charge of the asylum in 2020. They still are. Every last member of the Covid Class gulped down the Kool-Aid. Some, clearly, were given it intravenously, in mammoth doses. It is little wonder that nobody, but nobody, wants to discuss it now.
It was, quite simply, the political escape route to the vaccines, the political silver bullet that would end the pain (for governments) of the lockdowns. It provided cover for ignorant and cowardly politicians. It was nothing more. The ultimate nudge. Propaganda 101. It turned the world against the unvaccinated. It labelled dissidents “granny killers”. It turbo-charged safetyism. Weaponised it.
And it was also patently absurd, on its face. If you are vaccinated (and it works), then why do you care, or even need to know, that I am vaccinated? And if it doesn’t work, why on earth would I want to take it?
Note the fact that newsrooms the world over, all in unison, spouted the lie. When lie factories like Thomson Reuters and AAP determine what every single lounge room in the world will see and hear on TV, it is so easy to embed untruths. And it was fear that was the weapon, and “safety” the stated goal.
We will kill you, if necessary, to make you safe. Hence the unforgettable headline:
COVID-19 vaccine now mandatory to get euthanized in Germany.
https://nationalpost.com/news/covid-19-vaccine-now-mandatory-to-get-euthanized-in-germany
Now THAT is safetyism. There is something truly awful about governments accruing more power, doing so by lying and (at the same time) telling us it is for OUR good.
The apostle of anti-fragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and referenced by Lukianoff and Haidt, must be shaking his head at what is occurring all around us. Here is one definition of anti-fragile:
Anti-fragility is a concept that has gained popularity in recent years, especially in business. It refers to the ability of a system or an individual to not only withstand stress and adversity but thrive under such conditions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term in his book "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder." In the book, Taleb explains that being anti-fragile is more than being resilient or robust. It means actively seeking out stressors and challenges to grow stronger and better.
The authors of Coddling say:
No one has done a better job of explaining the harm of avoiding stressors, risks, and small doses of pain than Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Lebanese-born statistician, stock trader, and polymath who is now a professor of risk engineering at New York University. In his 2007 best seller, The Black Swan, Taleb argued that most of us think about risk in the wrong way. In complex systems, it is virtually inevitable that unforeseen problems will arise, yet we persist in trying to calculate risk based on past experiences. Life has a way of creating completely unexpected events—events Taleb likens to the appearance of a black swan when, based on your past experience, you assumed that all swans were white. (Taleb was one of the few who predicted the global financial crisis of 2008, based on the financial system’s vulnerability to “black swan” events.)
In his later book Antifragile, Taleb explains how systems and people can survive the inevitable black swans of life and, like the immune system, grow stronger in response. Taleb asks us to distinguish three kinds of things. Some, like china teacups, are fragile: they break easily and cannot heal themselves, so you must handle them gently and keep them away from toddlers. Other things are resilient: they can withstand shocks. Parents usually give their toddlers plastic cups precisely because plastic can survive repeated falls to the floor, although the cups do not benefit from such falls. But Taleb asks us to look beyond the overused word “resilience” and recognize that some things are antifragile. Many of the important systems in our economic and political life are like our immune systems: they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow. Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously.
https://www.thecoddling.com/chapter-1-antifragility
Resilience and robustness went out the window in March 2020, to be replaced by global safetyism. Safetyism in the service of totalitarianism. We know that the political class and their benefactors and hangers-on actually don’t give a rat’s about our safety. They will risk nuclear war to win a regional argument and to appear strong. They will stop us from acquiring “safe” and effective Covid treatments and so kill us. They will use remdesivir and ventilators on the aged and infirm. They will ship the Covid-infected to aged care homes. No, safetyism is all about them and their indecent lust for power.
Every appeal to looking after our “safety” is a feint, a “look over there” strategy by our enemy the State, as A J Nock called all governments, whatever their apparent commitment to democracy. Appeals to safety inevitably lead to greater regulation of our lives, and greater interference. “Elf ‘n safety” is pilloried by the awake for a reason. Like Covid vaccines, not needed, ineffective and dangerous. Those idiotic fences around minor work sites – like those all over flood-recovering Lismore at present – are metaphors for an era of pretend-risk. Covid was a pretend-risk. Moral panics over child predators are a pretend-risk. The risks to children come almost totally from family members and “friends”, not stranger danger. Attending to supposed risk is a make-work scheme for HR departments and meddlers. A problem created so as to be able to roll out an already-prepared solution. That leads to more control. By them.
And people long ago ceased worrying about hyper-regulation, it seems. There is, these days, barely a whimper over intrusive regulation. Even when it leads to totalitarian-level impositions and the denial of freedom. We are in an existential fight for freedom, and most people yawn. Many have embraced safetyism. These are the curtain twitchers, the dobbers, the perpetually masked, the eight-times boostered. Most of the rest merely do not understand its dangers. Perhaps, for many, it is safe to ignore. It isn’t.
We actually had an anti-fragile strategy to hand in 2020. It was and is called herd immunity. It was the settled but suddenly inconvenient science of immunology. Humans have a way of responding to viruses, especially relatively mild ones already “in the wild”, as Covid quickly became. Certainly when we were hit with the hyped-but-dud variant, Omicron. The anti-fragile response would, no doubt, have been applauded by John Stone, who, in response to some political non-crisis or other (probably something like climate change), advised governments as follows:
Don’t just do something. Stand there.
This magnificent suggestion, no doubt, fell on deaf ears, since governments, whether addressing non-problems with non-solutions as they typically do, or addressing real problems with bad policies, are programmed to meddle in our lives. They are predisposed to central planning, which the great F A Hayek exposed as a “fatal conceit” long ago.
Dr James Kildare at The Spectator Australia argued in 2022:
Anti-fragile: humans need risk, not ‘safe spaces’.
He continued:
Yet the more we are exposed to something, the more resilient we become. We see this in so many domains, where adversity and challenges do not break humanity, but make us stronger, both as groups and as individuals.
Expression of this thought is something which has recently become very unfashionable. I am sure the medical profession is not the only one which is now bombarded with emails from HR about safe work week, or making the hospital a safe space. I have come to loathe the imprecations to staff and students about the importance of safety – not because we should disregard the principle, but rather because it should not be given such a disproportionate amount of emphasis.
By focusing so much on safety, we forget and fail to appreciate what incremental exposure to risk can do for us. The point is made by Malcolm Gladwell, by Jordan Peterson, and – most of all – by Jonathan Haidt, the latter of whom describes humans specifically as ‘anti-fragile’. We are improved by the right level of stress and risk.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/anti-fragile-humans-need-risk-not-safe-spaces/
Indeed, we are. The powers-that-be surely know this. This means that there something else in play. It is called totalitarianism. And it plays out at every level, be it Covid “management”, right down to protecting chromers from themselves, getting rid of cash from fast food restaurants and insisting that Mass lectors sign safety-for-children forms and undertake “training”.
Some years ago, when I taught business to undergraduates in New Zealand, we used to talk about living and doing business in a “VUCA” world.
VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It describes the situation of constant, unpredictable change that is now the norm in certain industries and areas of the business world.
https://www.mindtools.com/asnydwg/managing-in-a-vuca-world
Turbulent times became a cliché. It was a disrupted world. And it made sense to contrast the old world of relative certainty, of products and markets, with new times and the often catastrophic creative destruction of whole industries, not just businesses. Nothing new, perhaps, but it was the speed of transformations that struck us.
There is a new term to describe the world we now inhabit. The new cliched acronym is BANI – brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible. This is the upside-down, inside-out world, not just of business, but of life. It is a good, neat summary, that hides some of the ugly detail. True but insufficient. Now, we have governments which do not govern us. And corporates and NGOs which do. Supra-national (unelected) bodies dictate the minute details of our lives. Unfamiliar ideologies (like safetyism) that have not just informed, but have become, the political culture.
In a brittle and anxious world full of brittle and anxious, unmoored low-information people, strange and unwelcome ideas move in to fill the void. Things like convenience and safety sound benign, but they are not. Dangerous? You bet. Safetyism isn’t just annoying. It provides those who would do us ill an alibi for irreversible despotism and tyranny.
No mere coddling, then.
Paul Collits
12 January 2023
People talk about post traumatic stress but rarely about post traumatic growth.
Cashless in Australia, soon there will be a surcharge on those paying cash for their transactions. I can hear Anna Bligh now, Oh, but people are asking for it (cashless).