Approaching the Safetyism Singularity

Trying to make the world a safer place sounds like a good thing to do. We don’t want to be subject to danger, whether walking on the street, travelling on public transport or investing money in a enterprise. We expect our government to support our safety. We expect our government to exert levels of control to make our environment safer.

But there’s an issue with making the world a safer place. For young people growing up in our safer world, they may lack the challenges in their environment for them to develop our level of resilience.

So a side-effect of increasing safety can be decreasing resilience. What happens when people lacking resilience start to feel unsafe? Correct, they will demand more safety. They will demand more social control.

Now we have a feedback loop. Desire for more safety leading to more social control leading to less resilience leading to more desire for safety. A feedback loop where each generation, with each social issue, demands more and more safety and social control.

In order to fulfil the growing demand for more safety, governments have to employ more people who can action social control, corporations have to be aligned with safety concerns in the very first conception of what they produce. Everything becomes based around safety and control.

Safetyism is the term nowadays used to denote the quasi-religious perspective that physical and emotional safety is a sacred value that should be honoured in our society.

A Safetyism Singularity could be approaching in the West. Westerners may soon live in a culture where no one dares to say or do anything spontaneous, for fear that there could be a diminution in safety, for which they might receive condemnation. Western resilience may collapse completely. With collapsed resilience, our culture may simply become prey to any more predatory culture who seeks to take over.

Whilst everyone wants to feel safe, I feel it’s important to appreciate that pursuing Safetyism unchecked will likely lead to social collapse and, potentially, subjugation by another culture.