Safetyism

Description

Micha Narberhaus:

"The Covid pandemic not only showed how quickly our Western governments can become authoritarian, it was also a moment when it became clearer than ever that large parts of Western societies now value their safety more than their civil liberties. Of course, this was not the first sign of a new safety culture in the West. Safe spaces on campuses were a warning sign years ago. A whole generation has now been brought up with the idea that speech can be violence, rather than making a clear distinction between actual physical violence and, say, ugly words.

In 2018, in their seminal book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote that a culture of safetyism and safety parenting is creating fragile children. They argue that today's generation of young people (Gen Z) have grown up without the opportunity for unsupervised and unstructured play, and have therefore been prevented from learning key parts of childhood development, including how to deal with moderate levels of risk and fear through games such as hiding, exploring and climbing trees.

In the book, Haidt and Lukianoff argue that denying children the freedom to explore for themselves deprives them of important learning opportunities that help them develop a range of social skills central to living with others in a free society.

A society that weakens children’s ability to learn these skills denies them what they need to smooth social interaction. The coarsening of social interaction that will result will create a world of more conflict and violence, and one in which people’s first instinct will be increasingly to invoke coercion by other parties to solve problems they ought to be able to solve themselves. (Steven Horwitz, cited in The Coddling of the American Mind)

It is no coincidence, then, that during the pandemic it was the Zoomers (Gen Z) who were most likely to call for lockdowns and masks, and who feel most unsafe from too much hate speech on social media.

Conservative author N.S. Lyons argues that even the United States, the society best protected from attacks on freedom of speech by its First Amendment, is ultimately not immune to the fact that a growing segment of Western societies now "values security over freedom and top-down control over self-governance". He argues that this new intrinsic constitution, "the spirit that governs the American people", will ultimately prevail over the written constitution. We're already seeing this shift in the way several Supreme Court justices seemed to interpret the First Amendment in a recent hearing of the landmark censorship case Murthy v. Missouri, about whether the federal government can collude with social media companies to systematically suppress its citizens' communications."

(https://michanarberhaus.substack.com/p/sleepwalking-into-totalitarianism-910?triedRedirect=true)