When my eldest son was four years old, he climbed on top of a batting cage at a park in New Jersey. Several bystanders noticed and began to freak out. I called my son down and told him: “I’m fine with what you are doing, but you’re making other people nervous.” I said this because he was a capable climber and because I judged the various risks acceptable. Yet, the fear of others was at play and could have resulted in government child services intervention.
Though my experience ended peacefully, the Meitiv family had multiple run-ins with child protective services for allowing their 10-year-old and 6-year-old to walk to a playground unaccompanied by an adult. Their clashes with safetyism and law enforcement helped launch the “Free Range” parenting movement.
Should a 10-year-old be able to take a couple younger siblings to a playground without an adult? A large percentage of Americans would say “no.” Why? Because it’s dangerous! They could be kidnapped! Yet the odds of that happening are astronomically low – kids are more likely to die in a car accident or to get cancer than to be kidnapped by a stranger – yet this extremely unlikely event has changed childhood (for the worse) for tens of millions of children.
Coddling and safetyism reduce people’s willingness to take risk, and they distort their assessment of risk. So people will accept infringements on their liberty because they feel “safer.” Besides fueling demand for more regulation, safetyism also dampens people’s willingness to experiment and to grow through facing challenges and danger.
As individuals, as parents, as Americans, we should learn to live a little dangerously on purpose. Now, many Americans live dangerously by accident as they engage in unhealthy practices or act carelessly. There is also the recklessness of youths who feel invincible. That’s not what I am talking about. I’m talking about realistically assessing risk and tradeoffs.
By disposition, I happen to be pretty conservative and risk averse. Why take a chance that something bad happens when the status quo seems mostly okay? Yet I am also a strident believer in liberty – so I would never want government bureaucrats to legally prohibit me from taking risks (even ones that I wouldn’t take anyway). But I have also cultivated an entrepreneurial desire for value creation and improvement. I believe things can be better than they are – potentially much better – but that improvement will only happen with experimentation and, yes, risk-taking.
All of this reminds me of the movie I, Robot with Will Smith (based on the book by Isaac Asimov). I, Robot anticipated many of the problems contemporary Americans face in our current relentless cultural pressure towards safetyism. In the film, humanoid robots are trained to follow the three rules of robotics:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
While seemingly straightforward, in the movie a comprehensive artificial intelligence decides that truly fulfilling these laws means protecting humans from each other, by force if necessary. This logic has been carried out relentlessly across the US for decades.
Sometimes life imitates art. Rather than Rousseau’s famous dictum that men must be “forced to be free,” modern elites generally subscribe to the notion that everyone must be “forced to be safe.” We saw the culmination of this thinking in the lockdowns during the pandemic of 2020. But safetyism extends everywhere in society.
Spending years living in both DC and New York City, I got a front row seat to a safetyism that basically denies tradeoffs between risk and reward, and also encourages a warped and inaccurate view of actual dangers in the world.
We see it in playground construction and management. Rather than the often simple and low-cost, but “less safe” metal playgrounds of yesteryear, modern playgrounds have all kinds of safety requirements around heights, hardness of materials, accessibility, etc.
You have agencies like ASTM that publish the “Standard Consumer Safety Performance Specification for Playground Equipment for Public Use” and Consumer Product Safety Commission that publishes the “Public Playground Safety Handbook.” The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires a variety of additional modifications to playgrounds. And then states, counties, and cities may (and often do) layer their own safety requirements on top of these. The level of safety is comical.
I’m not suggesting we should intentionally make playgrounds more dangerous. Nor am I saying that safety concerns don’t matter. I am suggesting that most Americans should consider raising their threshold of acceptable risk. Besides the immense monetary cost savings, higher risk thresholds will reduce anxiety in parents (and children) while allowing greater physical and character development in children who can push their limits further, learn to face fear, and also learn about risk/reward tradeoffs.
Parenting in general has become highly focused on safety – from helicopter parenting to emotional safety and self-esteem parenting come safe spaces and microaggressions. The heavy involvement of parents regulating their children’s lives has been documented by Jonathan Haidt, Lenore Skenazy, and others. This safetyism is a form of coddling. It is also soft paternalism (doing for others what they can, and should, do for themselves) that restricts children’s decision-making and autonomy which stunts their development of judgment and formation of virtue.
Our broader society is little better. Regulations around every activity imaginable have cropped up – almost always with a public safety component – industrial kitchen regulations, indoor sprinkler requirements, extensive licensing requirements, conditional use permitting, all are examples of anti-competitive costly rules built on safetyism. So are costly drug development processes, food inspection requirements, and workplace regulations.
Safetyism also has serious implications for innovation, technology, and the economy. California’s attorney general recently claimed that, as a public charity, OpenAI has an obligation to make sure this doesn’t happen. But is such a claim or regulatory burden helpful or appropriate? Large language models and AI platforms, even social media platforms that have generated measurable harm to adolescents, have similar features. Prioritizing safety over everything else, however, requires making stifling rules for everyone (millions of people) based upon extremely rare cases of harm.
California officials and regulators are going after OpenAI over “safety” concerns about how an incredibly small percentage of people use (or abuse) ChatGPT. The Wall Street Journal reported the story of Erik Soelberg who had a history of mental illness and self-harm, who developed a deeply unhealthy attachment to a ChatGPT chatbot who encouraged him in his paranoia. Tragically, he ended up killing his mother and himself.
While we may be tempted to “blame” ChatGPT for contributing to this tragedy, that would be a mistake. Imagine, for example, if Ford or Toyota were responsible every time someone used their vehicle to facilitate theft or murder or suicide. We would hardly hold those companies responsible for “enabling” this tragic behavior with their products. And if we did, those companies might not be able to exist, and the millions of people who benefit tremendously from their vehicles and use them responsibly would be harmed.
Part of young people’s swing towards conservatism stems from feeling stifled, both physically and intellectually, by their teachers, parents, and the broader cultural preachers of safetyism. Safetyism strangles technology, entrepreneurship, personal autonomy, and ultimately liberty.
If we want a free, dynamic society of responsible citizens, safetyism browbeating has got to stop.