Why an Obsession with Safety creates Sick Minds and a Sick Society
https://odysee.com/@academyofideas:3/why-an-obsession-with-safety-creates:1?r=kUgLqNPZJDSnBnmB2vKLhQHqs7by6uKK

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“Condition for being a hero. If a man wants to become a hero, the snake must first become a dragon: otherwise he is lacking his proper enemy.”

Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
Our age has been called many things, but an age of cowards may best describe it given the immense fear, anxiety and helplessness that most people display in the face of even trivial threats. We are not a generation that moves forward into the uncertain future in a bold and heroic manner, instead most people fear the future and prefer safety, comfort, and ease of life, to risk-taking, experimentation and freedom. Or as the 21st century sociologist Frank Furedi writes:

“Young people are socialized to feel fragile and overawed by uncertainty [and as a result]. . .the defining feature of the current Western 21st century version of personhood is its vulnerability. Although society still upholds the ideal of self-determination and autonomy, the values associated with them are increasingly overridden by a message that stresses the quality of human weakness. And if vulnerability is, indeed, the defining feature of the human condition, it follows that being fearful is the normal state. . .”

Frank Furedi, How Fear Works
Overawed by uncertainty, fearing the future, conceptualizing oneself as vulnerable, weak, and fragile is not a recipe for individual or social flourishing. Rather this way of life promotes mental illness and paves the way for authoritarian rule and so, as we will explore in this video, the world would benefit if more people were willing to live just a little more dangerously. For danger, when a by-product of pursuing worthwhile goals or in defence of values like freedom, justice or peace, is life-promoting and as the Roman historian Tacitus put it “the desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise”.

Not all societies, however, have ranked safety as high on the scale of values as does the modern West. Many flourishing societies of the past considered safety to be a secondary value and showed a remarkable capacity to take risks in the face of an uncertain future and to display courage and bravery in the presence of danger.

“Historically some of the most prosperous societies – Ancient Athens, Renaissance Italy, nineteenth-century Britain – were among those that were most oriented towards experimentation and the taking of risks.” (How Fear Works)

Frank Furedi, How Fear Works
In taking the opposite approach and in showing a strong preference for safety over risk-taking the unfolding of the human potential is not actualized, but stunted. For to develop on an individual level, and to advance as a species, exploration of the unknown and experimentation with novel ways of interacting with the world is a necessity and this entails taking risks and confronting danger. But such is a price that must be paid as the alternative is to stagnate in the confines of an ever-shrinking comfort zone, to regress in body and mind, and to fall victim to anxiety disorders, depression or other diseases of despair.

A further flaw with an approach to the future that strongly favours the safe road is that it creates fertile ground for tyrannical, or even totalitarian rule, for as Alexander Hamilton famously stated: “to be more safe they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free”. When a society elevates safety to the position of a first-order value, freedom is by necessity demoted to the position of a second-order value which can be trampled on by those in power who, throughout history, have disguised tyrannical intentions with claims of wanting to make a society safer. What makes matters worse is if a society socializes people to be fearful of the future and overawed by uncertainty, the masses will welcome, or openly call for authority figures to protect them, or as Furedi notes:

“Relieving people of the burden of freedom in order to make them feel safe is a recurring theme in the history of authoritarianism.”

Frank Furedi, How Fear Works