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Notes -
Even seatbelts?
I still wear mine. But I'll never forget a woman in my highschool. Her family was on vacation, got into a car accident, and she was the only survivor. She was thrown from the vehicle because she wasn't wearing her seatbelt.
Still ended up paralyzed from the neck down and an orphan.
Tragic, but that really illustrates why being thrown clear is not a good thing.
There's a lot of safetyist excesses but people don't remember that until the 70s you'd be impaled by the steering column in case of a crash. There's been a tremendous amount of actually useful improvements by the safetyists that nobody notices or thinks about anymore because they've become the air we breathe.
The problem is the safetyists have no brakes. Nothing's ever "safe enough".
Clearly we need meta-safetyists to invent safetyist brakes. Of course then we will need meta-meta safetyists..and so ad inifinitum.
This is generally called "the enemy tribe". The fact that, all else being equal, they'll outcompete you if they take more calculated risks is why safety cannot be first.
External enemies are the ultimate check against internal risk aversity, and when they stop existing that begins to spiral out of control. I don't see any external enemies around right now and life is generally better than it's ever been, so people just pay the toll and suffer the loss of dignity/productivity quietly since the bill will never come due... right?
Which suggests that in a climate without external threats safetyism does lead to (or contributes to) life being better than it has ever been? If there is no-one to compete against then your people don't need to be taking calculated risks (which will presumably lead to greater levels of injury/death).
In other words you only need to pull the goalie when you are losing. If you are winning, play safe.
All the things that make life better than it ever has been were created in a culture of calculated risk.
If they're not taking calculated risks, they're not developing/producing, and being undeveloped/unproductive is Bad, Actually. There's a balance between safety and dignity, and cutting dignity out of the picture means you stop advancing. "But we don't need to advance, just masturbate in your own existing greatness until you die" is not how human beings are wired, and doing that kneecaps your ability to handle internal crises properly.
Were they? All of them? Even the safety features created put of safetyism we were originally talking about?
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