Safetyism

In American Greatness, Curtis Willis writes in part,

…The police chief in New Albany, Ohio says children below the age of 16 should not be allowed outside without supervision. Florida authorities charged two parents with felony child neglect when their 11-year-old played basketball unsupervised (in their own yard) for 90 minutes and a neighbor called the police.

Unstructured, unsupervised play allows kids the risk-taking through which they test their limits and gain the confidence to push their limits. Freedom to take risks breeds bravery.

…In his paper, “The Importance of Unsupervised Childhood Play for Democracy and Liberalism,” Ball State University economist Steven Horwitz writes, “Denying children the freedom to explore on their own takes away important learning opportunities that help them to develop not just independence and responsibility, but a whole set of social skills that are essential to living in a free society.”

“Laws that make it harder for kids to play on their own pose a serious threat to liberal societies by flipping our default setting from ‘figure out how to solve this conflict on your own’ to ‘invoke force and/or third parties whenever conflict arises,” Horwitz warns. “People’s first instinct will be increasingly to invoke coercion by other parties to solve problems they ought to be able to solve themselves.”

The False Promise of “Absolute Safety”
That’s what we’re seeing on campus and off with calls to regulate behavior and speech even in private settings.

Add a government bureaucracy predisposed to arrogate power to itself and you have a prescription for disaster.

…What if someone you trusted said you were sick? What if someone you trusted made you sick so you relied on them for support?

That’s known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. It’s considered a form of abuse.

Now, what if someone did all of the above to an entire nation?

…Alexander Solzhenitsyn told the Harvard graduating class in 1978, “Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism.”

The administrative state tells us a conflicting if not opposite message: Trust us—we can guarantee your absolute safety and well-being.

To justify its existence, it will tell us we are in danger and will find ever more risks from which to protect us.

This is Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

And it’s why “safetyism” advancing under the banner of the Left is hazardous to your health.

Read more here.