The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
Henry Louis Mencken
I did listen to an interesting interview on my way to work today — David Rubin interviewing Heather Mac Donald — which drove home one issue I was thinking about it for a while.
If there’s one term that defines society today, especially the approach to Covid19 and our culture as a whole, safetyism might be the term. (Seems also to be a term in “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Lukianoff and Haidt (2018), well, at least to Wikipedia: “The authors define safetyism as a culture or belief system in which safety (which includes “emotional safety”) has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. They argue that embracing the culture of safetyism has interfered with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development.”)
And yeah, Covid19 is a reoccurring theme on this blog, as the way we deal with it, the way it is used to foster other agendas (never let a crisis go to waste) … I think that’s very detrimental to a society that can only survive by innovation, by finding creative — new and useful — solutions.
The interview itself covers lots of other topics, all worth listening to, so, yeah, well-worth watching:
Hopefully, Dave Rubin will stay online for a while — and, well, if YouTube kicks him, he has his own community on locals.com.
