The truth about safety is that we will never be safe—not by any objective standard. It’s interesting to see how people can lose sight of something so obvious when they are being bombarded with propaganda. I suppose that’s a sign of an effective propaganda campaign: Some people actually come to believe that maybe 2+2 doesn’t equal 4 after all.
But we all know, on some level, that there’s no such thing as a risk-free environment. Life is inherently risky. That’s the nature of the world we live in. Given this reality, we make tradeoffs based on perceived risks and rewards. We do this sort of risk calculation more or less unconsciously all the time.
For instance, when we drive a car or walk across the street or light up a smoke or go skiing or free solo climb the southwest face of Yosemite’s El Capitan, 3,000 feet high, or when we get out of bed in the morning (or stay in bed)—there is a certain amount of risk associated with each of these activities. We sense the risk involved and we accept it, voluntarily, on the basis of our own preferences, values, and level of risk-aversion.
So, when will we be safe?
It should be clear that safety hardly ranks as the number one priority for any of us, even if it were possible to achieve. It’s always safety second or third or fourth. It’s never first—and for good reason! Otherwise, how would we conduct ourselves? If safety were the ultimate guiding principle in life, what would we do? Would we barricade ourselves in and hide under the bed?
But this fear-driven approach eventually leads to death, as we all must brave the world in order to keep ourselves alive and well. The danger lurking outside eventually crashes the party.
So, there’s no safety in holing up at your local, well-fortified, well-stocked pub—the message we get in the true-to-life zombie flick Shaun of the Dead. If I learned one thing from watching this movie, it’s that we did not arrive here on Earth to play it safe. We were born to take risks and live dangerously—and we’re surrounded by zombies.
The idea that government officials have decided to make safety the highest priority of society is preposterous on its face. It is a pretext for imposing one set of values and preferences on the rest of society, while tolerating no dissent. And it sets the stage for a permanent “new normal” Orwellian police state, because in failing to achieve the impossible goal of “safety first,” the government will never run out of excuses to intervene and expand its power over society.
Meanwhile, the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2 has been wildly exaggerated. See here https://areamanonfire.com/?p=1 and here:
But that’s the whole point of having an unattainable goal: Given some unattainable goal, the government’s work is never done. And if enough zombies play along to get along, the government will keep expanding its power in response to the never-ending emergency, all the while putting more and more restrictions on individual liberty until, finally, we’ll all have been herded into a totalitarian system—perhaps the real goal here.
This is Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
This is Orwell’s 1984.
Where else do you see this going?