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diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index 2ee5db2..f2e22b9 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -1442,21 +1442,144 @@ It’s probably cheaper and easier to buy most things, but when I can I’d rath ## Safety Third -If you land on luxagraf.net on an odd day of the month, you might notice the little tag line under the site title is "safety third". This comes from a sticker we saw on a pole outside the [Henry Miller Library](https://henrymiller.org) in [Big Sur, California](https://images.luxagraf.net/2017/2017-11-28_161158_monterey_picwide.jpg). Miller no doubt would have agreed. He might have ranked safety even lower in his decision calculus. I often do. +If you land on luxagraf.net on an odd day of the month, you might notice the little tag line under the site title is "safety third". This comes from a sticker we saw on a pole outside the [Henry Miller Library](https://henrymiller.org) in Big Sur, California. Miller no doubt would have agreed. He might have ranked safety even lower in his decision calculus. I often do. -The sticker and its motto became something of a family joke. Whenever we did something other people might have frowned on, someone would shout, "Safety third!" and we'd go do whatever it was. +<img src="images/2023/2017-11-28_161158_monterey.jpg" id="image-3319" class="picfull" /> -Over time I began to feel less jokey about it. I've come to see our culture's obsession with safety as one of the key axes on which our world is turning, and I don't like where it's leading us. It's not a place I want to go, it's not a place I want my kids to go. I think safety first is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. +Every time we go to any sort of government park -- state, national, county, city, you name it -- we get handed a set of rules. I can tell which level of government land we are on by the number of rules, the more rules the higher level government. These rules are invariably couched in terms of safety. -It's also a big part of the reason we came to [depend on "experts."](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) +They range from the ridiculous to the obvious, but almost never tell anyone anything they didn't already know. As we all know, these rules aren't in fact for anything other than heading off lawsuits. Go abroad to less litigious cultures (like Mexico) and you'll discover there are far fewer rules. -Before I get too deep though, let me just say that, if safety is at one end of the spectrum and careless idiocy is at the other, in rejecting an obsession with safety I am not suggesting the antidote is careless idiocy. +The Safety Third sticker became our antidote to the endless rules of public spaces. It was a good family joke. Whenever we do something other people might frown on, one of us will invariably shout, "safety third!" before plunging ahead. -Removing safety from your decision calculus completely would not be a wise choice. Likewise making it the top of your decision calculus is not a wise choice. As with most things, there is a third option: thinking for yourself. You can find a balance point between paranoid and being reckless, and also recognize that other people will find different balance points and that's okay. +Then the pandemic happened. -This is what I mean when I say safety third. Not that you should be reckless, but that you should demote that desire for safety. +Regardless of your opinion on the response to the disease, one overarching truth struck me: a very vocal and powerful segment of our culture believes that safety trumps everything. More to the point, they took it for granted that the rest of us would agree that nothing is worth risking life for, absolutely nothing. + +To my mind this wasn't actually very surprising. It's the natural outcome of an obsession with safety. Our lives were already littered with the tools of safety -- rules, warning labels, helmets, straps, leashes, railings, walls, soaps, disinfectants, goggles, and so on. Who will object to throw a few more on top? + +Turns out, quite a few of us. But I am not so much concerned with any new levels of safety mania, I'd prefer to cut it off at the root. + +I know I don't want to live that way. I don't want my kids to live that way. I suspect most of you don't either. + +<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_160211_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3316" class="picfull caption" /> + +Safety is an endless positive feedback loop. The safer you think your are, the less risk you are willing to take. Once you get on that treadmill, it's nearly impossible to get off without knocking the whole thing over. People get trapped. Witness Howard Hughes, an extreme example, but an illuminating one. Cultures too seem to get trapped, with ours currently steaming up that lofty mountain of self-imposed isolation and madness that Howard Hughes pioneered. + +Before I get too deep it's probably necessary to point out that if safety is at one end of a spectrum and reckless idiocy is at the other, in rejecting an obsession with safety I am not suggesting the antidote is reckless idiocy. The opposite of one idea is invariably another bad idea. Sanity is in the middle. + +There is a third option between the timidity born of fear safety obsession and cliff diving in Acapulco. It's called thinking for yourself. You can find a balance point between paranoia and recklessness, recognizing that other people will find different balance points than you and that's okay. + +This is what I mean when I say safety third. Not that you should be reckless, but that thinking of safety first isn't going to lead to a meaningful life. When you come to the end of your life, whenever that may be, I am confident that you are not going to be thinking "I wish I had been safer". Bonnie Ware's famous book, *The Top Five Regrets of the Dying* has [not one mention of safety](https://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/). + +Life is not safe. The sooner you accept this and move on, the happier you will be. Just getting out of bed is fraught with risk. Ask Hughes. He eventually stopped doing it. So if it's safety you really want, that's probably the way to go. + +Still, I'd like to propose though that things aren't actually nearly as risky as our ingrained safety-first mentality might make it seem. You may have noticed you weren't born wearing a helmet. In fact your skull was literally smashed as you where born and yet here you are. You then grew to have a reasonably strong skull, similar models managed to help the rest of your species survive lo these last 400,000 or so years. And, while you weren't born with knee and elbow pads, you were born with some pretty remarkable joints and an almost Wolverine-like ability to heal thanks to a very sophisticated immune system. All of which is to say that nature, god, whatever you like to attribute this state of affairs to, has provided you with a pretty good starting point. You're got a good system for avoiding and dealing with injury should you miscalculate risk in some way. + +Proponents of the safety-industrial complex will here likely note that you weren't born with a mountain bike or internal combustion engine at your disposal, nor did we evolve with those sorts of risks, and therefore all the defenses of nature are useless. This is true to a point, and I think it's an important objection -- we *have* made the world less safe for ourselves. Yet here we are. Enough of us somehow hanging on, just walking around breathing and driving and doing stuff and not dying. + +Ironically the one time it might be worth considering so safety, for example, a helmet, is driving 65 MPH down a highway. Yet no one does, and, more to the point, even the most ardent of safety-first supporters will look at you like an idiot if you strap on a helmet before climbing in their Prius. + +It'd be easy here to point out some of the many other ironies a safety-first mentality leads to, for example how padded playgrounds actually lead to children taking greater risks because the padding literally cushions them from life's little learing bruises, which then spectacularly backfires when they encounter the rest of life, which lacks padding. The whole reason you need to get hurt playing on the playground is so you come to understand what hurts, what you can do, what you can't do, and how to use the information to calculate which new activities you undertake might be risky and what you can do to mitigate that risk. You don't understand risk until you take some, and earlier you do that the less painful your failures will be. + +But then our safety mania was never rooted in logic, it's not even rooted in a concern for safety at all. As Covid showed so starkly our safety obsession is rooted in a fear of death. + +It seems axiomatic that fear of death is a natural outcome of materialist beliefs. If life is all there is, that is the material world is all there is, then death is the end. And no one likes endings. For our institutions and their leaders, death is the worst possible thing because it is the end. It is, from their point of view, the ultimate failure of man. + +But why? + +As history's many brave atheists attest it does not require belief in the supernatural to make even the ultimate sacrifice of one's life, which would imply that even if death is the end there are many circumstances where it is still preferable to life, for example the preservation of others lives. + +Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a **disconnection from purpose and passion**. If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose." (emphasis mine) + +In other words death phobia is a result of not knowing how to live. + +When you are disconnected from purpose and passion this begins to pile up because the death phobia drives the obsession with safety, which in turn makes us incredibly risk adverse, which in turn keeps us from exploring, potentially from finding our purpose and passion. On and on in a viscous cycle. + +How do you get out? If you're reading this, chances are you aren't in that cycle, but I have an idea of how we get out at a cultural level: By playing without our helmets. + +If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play. If you can't play, you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. A helmet means supervision. We who play are unsuperviseable. + +To play amidst a world full of rules is perhaps the most subversive act. + + +outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means. + + + + +This I believe is how we remake the world: by playing. + +I know, that's not a Very Serious Solution that [Very Serious People]() can go out and implement, but that's the point isn't it? To remake the world any other way would end up right back here eventually. + + + + + + +safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. + + + + +Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.[8] + +Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9] + +Play is free, is in fact freedom. +Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life. +Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration. + + + + +Every culture passes through a materialist phase and every culture has its own form of fear or death while in that phase. You and I did not invent this, but we find ourselves living during this cultural phase, and I think it helps tremedously to remain conscious of that fact when trying to decide how risky any one thing is *to you*. + + +This is why blanket rules are ridiculous and ignored. The sign that says danger, no lifeguard on duty means little if you know how to read the water to avoid rip currents and are a strong swimmer. If you aren't a strong swimmer and don't even know what a rip current is, then the message of the sign might be important, but in the world littered with such signs that one is just so much more noise. You ignore it. + + + + +I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship. + +I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. + + + + + + + + +While I am not a fan of dualisms, I have only ever managed to come up with two solutions to the fear of death: deny death (very popular) or accept death (formerly very popular). + + + +don't forget evolution doesn't have a goal, it's simply a process of fitting the current environment. + + +https://twitter.com/ItsGoneAwry/status/1623675932899700736?s=20&t=oo4ys3gRccV2b9mhU-2Dfw + +If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play and if you can't play you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. Play I could go on at some length about how play is actually the most threatening thing you can do these days, maybe I will eventually, but + + + +safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. + + + + +Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.[8] + +Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9] + +Play is free, is in fact freedom. +Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life. +Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration. +Play creates order, is order. Play demands order absolute and supreme. +Play is connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it.[10] -Safety third. For me this simple slogan stands in opposition to one of the dominant narratives of our time: safety first. Safety is one of the primary obsessions of our age. Our lives are littered with the tools of safety -- rules, warning labels, helmets, straps, leashes, railings, walls, disinfectants, goggles, and so on. @@ -1474,7 +1597,23 @@ I should probably make it part of [my code](/code). -Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a disconnection from purpose and passion. **If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose.**" (emphasis mine) + + + +I think the safety first obession is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. + +It's also a big part of the reason we gave up our independence to ["experts."](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming). Much of the reason we are told we must rely on "experts" is for our safety. + + +From that initial reaction it's been further revealed that the rules we get handed when entering public spaces like parks are insufficient. + + +Clearly, since people like us have been ignoring them. + +social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love. +https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/ +The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death. + Whatever one’s opinion of the response to the disease, what is undeniable is that so many people of influence took for granted that safety must always trump social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love. |