[Trigger Warning: The following may cause Blunt Word Trauma injury.]
From the obligatory safety announcement on the ferry to written warnings on literally everything, we are obsessed with safety. “Stay off the rocks.” Highways of safety cones. “Loose gravel.” Trucks with pulsating lights. Every institution claims safety as one of its core values. Perversely, this obsession with safety makes people feel more insecure, not less. How much safer are you really? And how much safer do you feel?
Frank Furedi wrote in The Paradox of Our Safety Addiction, that “paradoxically the achievement of unprecedented levels of physical safety has coincided with a heightened sense of insecurity.” What started out as liability issues are now insecurity complexes. The constant pursuit of a Utopian vision of a harm-free world does little to help people feel secure.
This safety fetish makes us less aware, less alert, less sharp and lazy in body and mind. It convinces us that safety must always be the top priority – the almighty first principle. We are continually warned about the physical dangers that lurk everywhere. And that risks and unknowns are always bad things – stifling exploration, creativity, discovery, and the beauty of getting lost. Being this safety obsessed is not healthy. Furedi eloquently wrote that “it is not the actual fear of death but rather the fear of life that preoccupies the 21st-century Western imagination.”
And if that’s not all, we have emotional injury, that can leave a person “damaged for life.” Yes, sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can really hurt us. Emotional harm is limited only by the imagination, and as everyone knows, the imagination can come up with pretty much anything to make a point.
But what kind of danger and harm are we talking about? When a warning is real like “this plastic bag is not a toy” for instance, we can all agree on the danger. The real problem, is when the dangers are imagined, or exaggerated, or fabricated, or manipulated.
In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff discuss the unintended consequences of “safetyism” – the idea that people need to be protected, rather than exposed to challenges. What began as a focus on physical safety has evolved into hyper protection from everything, including emotional safety which doesn’t tolerate anything that could trigger psychological trauma.
Atlantic staff writer, Jill Filipovic, wrote on her blog that a piece of conservative legislation was “so awful it made me want to throw up.” A commenter asked for an eating-disorder trigger warning. Filipovic posted a link to a funny photo compilation, another commenter said it needed a trigger warning because the “pictures of cats attacking dogs looked like domestic violence.”
We should all be driving with “Big Baby on Board” stickers and wearing ear muffs. Actually, stay off the road, it’s dangerous out there. As Furedi wrote, “our society has become infantilized, with fewer people having much experience or concept of real physical dangers and many now convinced that safety extends to their thoughts and feelings, which must not be infringed.”
In 2015, a feminist college student group in the UK, banned clapping at their conferences. The group claimed that the act of clapping could “trigger some people’s anxiety.” The alternative? Jazz hands – wave your hands silently in the air – to show approval and create “a more inclusive atmosphere.” Today, you never know what might trigger anxiety. Knitting? Coughing? It’s all about YOU not IT.
We are constantly walking on free-range eggshells, afraid of saying the wrong thing, out of fear we will be called out by the unruly local mob on social media. Anything and everything can be misconstrued regardless of intent. Haidt and Lukianoff warn that “in today’s culture of safetyism, intent no longer matters, only perceived impact does, and thanks to concept creep, just about anything can be perceived as having a harmful – even violent – impact.”
I am not saying emotional safety is bad, keeping others safe from harm is virtuous, but, as Haidt and Lukianoff wrote, “virtues can become vices when carried to extremes.” Have we evolved in a good way because of this? Adults now need safe spaces and trigger warnings in case words and ideas put them in danger, stifling any hope of real dialogue. Conceptions of trauma and safety are used to justify the incessant helicoptering and coddling of children; brainwashed to be afraid of everything (except those f*cking gadgets).
Kids need to fall on their heads and bump into things. It’s part of childhood. And then they become less fearful and coddled adults. We can not gentrify our existence. We can not homogenize ourselves. How do we learn anything if our crucial life experiences are being withheld or hidden from us in the name of safety?
Ben Simpson wrote that there “is a difference between throwing someone a life preserver when they are in danger of drowning and barring them from getting into the pool at all.’’ What if we shifted the conversation from the risk of doing things, to asking what the risk is of not doing those things?
