A Happy Belated Thanksgiving
And a few comments on the ideology of safetyism.
Happy belated Thanksgiving Day for my American readers, and happy Black Friday Shopping as well!
This week really got ahead of me and unfortunately I didn’t have time to release the second part of my “functional foods” post due to a ton of cleaning and cooking. This is what happens when you host Thanksgiving every year so you’d think I’d have it figured out by now 🤷♂️.
I will say, however, that not going onto Substack for the past few days has actually been relaxing. Not being inundated by constantly depressing stories can be rather alleviating. I do hope many of you take the time every now and then to stay away from social media, including Substack, if you feel it taking a toll on your mental health.
I do also want to thank you all both paid and free subscribers alike for sticking around this Substack for the past year! It’s been a rather tumultuous year (several years to be honest) for many, and for me I’m still trying to figure out how to figure out Substack and the publisher/reader relationship.
Even with all that, I’m still grateful to have an audience. I do also hope that many of you have were able to have a COVID drama-free time with loved ones.
Now, because of this hectic week I have fallen behind on my reading quite a bit so I’ll need to get back into the groove of things.
However, one thing that I’ve heard from family the past few days was this notion of safetyism, although the people arguing for safetyism wouldn’t know if it as an ideology or term.
Safetyism was a term popularized in Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure and is the ideology of living a life removed of dangers, usually at the cost of obfuscating the concerns over social and cultural trade-offs.
A more concise definition, as provided by Benjamin Simpson and supposedly derived from Lukianoff and Haidt’s book is the following:
Safetyism is the cult of safety–an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to see themselves as victims.
The ideology of safetyism is what drove the lockdowns, and by all accounts it tends to serve as a driving force for many of the cultural issues we are facing that focuses on the notion of safety without examining how enforcement of a sterile society can be severely detrimental to the individual and the ability to generally operate in daily life.
The recent discussions I had have been, of course, around guns and recent mass shooting events such as the recent shootings at a Colorado Springs LGBT night club and a Walmart in Virginia.
The discussions generally revolved around fears over going Black Friday shopping due to these shootings, and I even had a few discussions about these mass shootings being blamed on Trump allowing people to do what they want.
Personally, what I find bewildering is the idea that people’s thoughts and opinions on topics can shift so suddenly based on the whims of mainstream media and politicians.
I’ve noted that my thoughts on guns have changed over the years, and being Asian myself the beginning of the pandemic and leading into the incident with Kyle Rittenhouse essentially ended the gun arguments (at least for Asian Americans) given the fact that so many people were concerned over the safety of their families and wanting a means of protecting their loved ones.
This makes it all the more frustrating seeing those same people arguing for needing a gun to then immediately pivot and talk about how we don’t need them and this is only a thing that occurs in America.
I tend to find this argument rather ridiculous. It’s almost like arguing why shark attacks happen near beaches, as if to say that shark attacks should be commonplace in the American Midwest.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that a country with plenty of guns may have killings using firearms in the same ways that countries with knives may suffer many knife attacks.
Such arguments tend to obfuscate the fact that people with nefarious intentions will carry out their actions in the means they deem fit and they deem available to themselves. To argue that removing guns will solve murders without addressing why many people find the need to kill one another doesn’t get to the root of the problem, but rather serves as a social, safetyist bandage.
It also tends to override the idea previously held ideas of how commonplace some of these shootings are. Those who live near urban epicenters such as Detroit, Michigan, and D.C. are well-aware how many shootings are reported on nightly news stations. It’s something that is expected, rather than something that is seen as a rarity. However, media reports can take things that were once deemed common and make it seem as if these are things that are now only gaining in occurrence due to increased reporting.
It’s like the old saying: those who don’t watch the news are uniformed and those that do are misinformed.
Now, this post isn’t intended to add to the pro-gun/anti-gun debate, but rather that many of the driving forces for policies and decisions made by those in power stem from the enforcement of a safetyist culture.
It’s a push to further provide power to politicians while taken power away from the individuals who are influenced into feeling helpless and angry and wanting something to be done even if it means stripping away at your individual rights and freedoms.
Don’t let fear dictate the way you live your life, and understand that many people serve as fear merchants wanting you to buy into their products of safetyism.
Many people will live and die to the notion that negativity and fear sells.
Just remember to not buy-in when doing your holiday shopping.
These are just a few thoughts and ramblings for the time being. Hopefully within the next few days I will get out some other articles. But in the meantime stay safe, don’t fall for safetyism, and spend time with loved ones while gorging on your leftovers!
If you enjoyed this post and other works please consider supporting me through a paid Substack subscription or through my Ko-fi. Any bit helps, and it encourages independent creators and journalists outside the mainstream.
I like the idea that This Moment, took 13 or 14 billion years of everything happening just the way it did, so that I can open my eyes and see it, feel it, be it. The news is not reality, whether I watch it or not. But this moment seems to be worth rejoicing in gratitude.
Aloha, and I'm off to take a walk outside!
My thoughts ? The ideology of "safetyism" is that it's a guaranteed winner. Why employ any other strategy when history shows that from the beginning of recorded time, fear wins as the ultimate tool for control. We have such short memory spans...let's hope and pray Americans never allow the picture of their Secretary of Defense, a very experienced military officer, in a cotton fabric mask and with a huge plastic "shield" over his head, to ever fade from their memory ! The message was FEAR FEAR FEAR, the intent ? Obviously the intent was to manufacture FEAR. This man, and the administration, had to be confident that the "average Joe" in the U.S. would make no attempt to analyze that "display" of fear. So, the "average Joe", like me, HAD to KNOW that one of our highest ranking military men with access to ANY protection, would chose one of the many pieces of equipment that actually PROTECTS our military members from germs and chemicals. They would not chose a food handler cotton mask and a star wars type of comic "shield" .... so why would that be ? It could have been because those useless symbols send a much more powerful message than words, when seen in public by a fearless warrior ?
But, when one rationalizes the situation, actual thoughts begin to surface, along with facts. This is a HIGH ranking military man. This man has access to the finest chemical warfare gear/masks made. This is a very important man, therefore, the government would not even allow him to travel about with such "pretend protection"... let's face it, the man looked completely ridiculous. The "average Joe" could not tell you the differences between a virus and bacteria, or even if any differences exist. The government COUNTED on this, along with ignorance of other facts that were once taught in the "free public education", but were gradually watered down and ultimately eliminated, due to being wholly unnecessary for the "masses". So, being primarily driven by emotions, not facts or research, or even "science" (No, Dr. Tony Fauci is NOT the same as the NOUN "science"), just emotions, just as more than 50% of the population will vote solely on "emotional feelings" rather than take the time and do the significant amount of work necessary to research candidates REGARDLESS of "party" affiliation. So again, the driving force under all is FEAR. Fear of not voting for "the party", fear of standing out, fear of being ostracized (a major principle in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals book).
So it only stands to reason that the intellectually elite, those who read such books and others on Critical Theory ( the basis of critical race "theory" and that entire post war "school" called critical theory... and yes, long ago that was something one learned about in public high school when studying "progressive" philosophy, socialism, communism, etc. ) would KNOW that fear will trump anything, rather pushing a pandemic to gain control, or convincing a population that gradually eliminating firearm will solve the "problem" of human spiritual weaknesses.
Yes, our curriculum is now filled with subtle, and not so subtle, reinforcement of the doctrine of "safety" above all, our government bombards us with constant fear mongering nearly "threatening" people with what will happen if they don't fork over more to finance foreign wars, if we don't get shots and vaccinations for nearly everything you can name now from herpes to flu, that we will die from oxygen deprivation or infernal temperatures if we don't stop using paint and whipped cream in aerosol cans.... etc. . How could we NOT predict our children would become so risk adversive that one day they will willingly line up for any type of injections without any explanation at all ? I know, THAT will never happen, when I first read Orwell (required) I laughed my head off.... just too far out !