In 2002, a thrill-seeking Oxford University student climbed into a trebuchet and was flung 100 feet through the air to his (unfortunately not immediate) death. Amazingly, Kostydin Yankov, 19, had willingly handed over £40 for this hellish experience. In fact, he’d purposely visited Middlemoor Water Park in Somerset, along with other members of the university’s extreme sports club, to give it a go. One of the other students who had been due to try the ‘ride’ directly after Mr Yankov, later told an inquest that he was concerned about the safety of the contraption, after seeing hat others appeared to land toward the front of the net.
If you want an idea of how this thing worked, here’s a video of it in action. Warning: someone does fall off the net at the end, though it appears that they were ‘merely’ injured, not killed.
I thought of Mr Yankov’s unfortunate death this week as I read an essay by Sam Klemens over at The Unhedged Capitalist, on the safetyism that has taken hold of our society.
Sam discusses a recent poll which asked: “Should the government favor innovation or safety?” 56% of all respondents voted for safety.
He writes:
I believe that the lockdowns were one of the worst policy decisions of the last century. They were senseless government meddling that did virtually nothing to lessen the impact of the Chinese virus, but did manage to ruin tens of thousands of small businesses and force millions of people into isolation further exacerbating an already acute mental health crisis in America.
I’m guessing most of y’all feel the same way about lockdowns, and one of the questions we’ve pondered is why was the government able to get away with it? How could these draconian tactics be adopted on such a widespread scale? Well, this poll provides us with an answer. The people are demanding it!
If we’re to believe the accuracy of this questionnaire, then 56% of the population wants the government to do something, anything, to keep them safe. And that, my friends, is how you end up with lockdowns. The worst policy ever wasn’t just the technocrats abusing their power, it was politicians responding to the whims of the voters.
Before we go on, I want to make it extremely clear here that I agree with Sam that a culture of safetyism has taken hold of our society, and that it’s a bad thing. The lockdowns were the starkest and most horrific example of government over-reach within my lifetime, and I hope they represent the apogee (though I doubt they will).
The libertarian conservative in me will very happily argue all day long and with great force that the welfare states which came into being in the early 20th Century throughout Western society, which persist to this day, have created societies in which people are woefully reliant upon the state. People now expect governments to fulfill their every need, and they’ve certainly lost a sense of personal responsibility through being nannied by the state.
The public embrace of safetyism was also almost certainly given a massive boost by the Covid pandemic, helped along by the campaign of fear that governments waged against their people. A 2020 YouGov poll found that support for socialism jumped by nearly 10 percent among young people during the pandemic.
According to reporting on the poll:
Within the Gen Z group (ages 16-23), support for socialism increased nearly ten percentage points over the course of a single year: from 40 percent in 2019 to 49 percent when this poll was taken in September 2020.
Looking at the entire population, support for capitalism declined from 58 percent in 2019 to 55 percent in 2020, while support for socialism among all Americans increased from 36 percent in 2019 to 40 percent in 2020.
The Pew Group found a similar trend in a September 2022 poll: among the under 30s, socialism is now more popular than capitalism:
On the other hand, the same survey found that support for both socialism and capitalism had declined since 2019 (and as you can see from the graphic below, capitalism is still the more popular of the two in America). We’ll come back to this in a bit.
So it’s clear that, demographically speaking, the idea of ‘government as a benefactor’ is gaining ground. That absolutely is a problem as all those small business owners found out in 2020/21. Government is not supposed to be Big Brother, and no one wins when ministers get it into their heads that they should be telling people what to do. Nanny-statism is an insidious trend and we should all push back against it hard.
HOWEVER.
Business closures, school closures, mandatory mask wearing, and social distancing were not the only evils wrought by the pandemic. Nor, I would argue, were they the worst.
The BBC, The Guardian and Sky News have all admitted that excess deaths are at the highest rate for decades, if you exclude the 2020 pandemic year. Sky reports that 35,000 more people than expected died in the second half of 2022, most of which are not down to Covid, and that excess deaths are running at over 20%, equating to more than a thousand people a week. The mainstream media doesn’t want to admit it, but the most likely culprit are the mRNA vaccines which were released on the public with great fanfare by the government and their corporate partners.
Meanwhile, according to the WHO, nearly 6.9 million people worldwide are recorded as having died from Covid itself within the last three years. Yet, almost all of these deaths could have been avoided. Emergency doctors figured out quite early on in the pandemic that Ivermectin and other cheap and easily accessible drugs could be used to successfully treat Covid. Such drugs eliminated the need for invasive procedures like ventilation — which there is good evidence was the real culprit behind most hospital Covid deaths.
Instead, as has been amply documented elsewhere, a propaganda campaign was waged by both public and private sector players against non-invasive techniques and off-the shelf drugs so that novel — one might say ‘innovative’ — drugs and mRNA vaccines could instead be pushed on the population for profit, even as whistleblowers were warning that that those technologies were unproven and potentially fatally dangerous. So much for a culture of safetyism.
Covid and vaccine deaths are an outcome of the very opposite of nanny-state safetyism. They are the product of state regulators being captured by the market. I often hear right wingers talk about the private sector as though it can do no wrong, yet the gravitational pull of wealth-on-offer is so great that it actively distorts regulatory landscapes, pulling the regulators into a black hole of corruption. Let’s not forget that the same species that inhabits Washington and Westminster corridors also paces the high-rise buildings of Lower Manhattan and The City. Humans are humans whether they’re in the public or private sector; all are susceptible to corruption if the incentive is great enough.
So, let’s take another look at that polling question discussed by Sam over at the Unhedged Capitalist: “Should the government
favor innovation or safety?” To answer that we first have to ask ourselves a very basic, yet intractable question:
What are governments for?
Humans are pack animals. By nature we have a complex and hierarchical social structure. Great tomes could and have been written about the detailed social interactions that shape life within packs or tribes, but at the heart of the relationship between rulers and the rest of the tribe is a simple equation: to remain in charge, leaders must provide protection for everyone else.
There are two main functions within this arrangement: firstly, the leader must protect against external threats, and secondly, they must keep law and order within the tribe. Often these responsibilities won’t fall on the shoulders of just one individual, but rather a sub-group of dominant individuals who have power and weighting within the tribe. A lot of keeping of law and order within the tribe is done through the enforcement of social norms, which is why peer pressure is so powerful, even among humans living in the 21st Century.
At the most basic level, this equation hasn’t changed. One of the reasons that rulers, whether they’re conquerors, good kings, military dictators or democratically elected politicians, tend to start telling other people what to do while promising safety if they do it, is because that’s what they’re supposed to do. There’s actually no other real purpose for leaders or governments other than indulging in their nannying tendencies.
The American Founding Fathers discovered this shortly after declaring independence from Britain. If you recall your history, independence was declared in 1776, while the American Constitution was ratified in 1789, superseding the Articles of Confederation. So what happened during the 13 years in between? Mostly, the American War of Independence, which the colonists Americans very nearly lost.
The problem with the Articles of Confederation is that they were too weak. They were drafted in response to an over-bearing monarch, who had overstepped his boundaries in the trade-off between ruler and ruled, and they were written by people who above all, valued freedom (“We hold these truths self evident…”). Consequently, the authors wanted as little governance as possible, but they soon discovered that having no leader also has its drawbacks.
This, from Wikipedia, neatly encapsulates how weak government left the States vulnerable to both outside attack, and internal breakdown of law and order:
Under the Articles, the United States had little ability to defend its sovereignty. Most of the troops in the nation's 625-man army were deployed facing non-threatening British forts on American soil. Soldiers were not being paid, some were deserting, and others were threatening mutiny. Spain closed New Orleans to American commerce, despite the protests of U.S. officials. When Barbary pirates began seizing American ships of commerce, the Treasury had no funds to pay toward ransom. If a military crisis required action, the Congress had no credit or taxing power to finance a response.
Domestically, the Articles of Confederation was failing to bring unity to the diverse sentiments and interests of the various states. Although the Treaty of Paris in 1783 was signed between Britain and the U.S., and named each of the American states, various states proceeded to violate it. New York and South Carolina repeatedly prosecuted Loyalists for wartime activity and redistributed their lands. Individual state legislatures independently laid embargoes, negotiated directly with foreign authorities, raised armies, and made war, all violating the letter and the spirit of the Articles.
By the late 1780s, the politicians of the day recognised that some government was necessary if America was to survive and thrive as a nation. Their solution was to create a strong federal government with sufficient powers to carry out its natural purpose, but to build a series of checks and balances into the system to ensure (as far as such things are possible) that the government didn’t overstep its boundaries.
Innovation or Safety? We Need Both!
As mentioned above, I lean heavily toward right-wing libertarianism myself, yet I baulk every time some hillbilly with a Gadsden Flag insists that society should, or even could, be regulated by free markets signals alone. Let’s ask Mr Yandon’s family whether anyone with an idea and some cash should be free to market their “innovation” to anyone stupid enough to try it.
Innovation is often a good thing. It brought us dry, warm homes and antibiotics and cars and guitars. It can also be a bad thing — especially in the 21st Century, as technology has now reached the point where an innovation has the potential to wipe out not just every human being, but also the vast majority of plant and animal life on the planet.
Moreover, the hyper-novelty that brought us world-decimating innovations has also added sufficient noise to the system to obscure many of the signals the free market still sends.
At the time the Founding Fathers were drawing up the Constitution, market signals were strong enough that government regulation at a local level was not particularly needed. People lived in relatively small communities, and their interactions were limited for the most part to the people immediately around them (which meant there was a social penalty for cheating). Even today, if you move to a new town you can quickly figure out which local Indian takeaway is likely to give you food poisoning, and which does the good chapatis. Try moving to a new town and asking which is the good local airline or crypto-currency.
The modern answer to this problem comes in the form of review sites, but the anonymity behind such online platforms means they can be easily gamed — if you want a good laugh, I invite you to read about the Vice writer who got his garden shed to the top of London’s restaurant rankings on Tripadvisor, for example.
For the most part, failures of regulation are pretty harmless, even now. Try out a new marketing service or mini-skirt, and the worst that can happen is loss of money or dignity. Try the dodgy Indian (or a Vice-writer’s garden shed) and you might lose the contents of your stomach. But do you really want to be a guinea pig in a human-flinging trebuchet? Do you want to be the first to try out an experimental vaccine? Some products can do serious damage to the consumer. That’s why we’re supposed to have regulators who run tests and hold products to safety standards. After all, there’s always going to be some thrill-seeking 19-yr-old silly enough to hand over 40 quid to be viciously flung to their death.
Well I've got to say, I really enjoyed reading this. I was especially surprised by your knowledge of early American history! And I appreciate that you're skeptical of the utopian vision of an idealistic private sector. Although I obviously support capitalism, there is always the recognition that the drive for profits will incentive some really shit behavior that's bad for everyone involved.
Great article. I'll be rethinking my views on safety vs innovation.
Interesting article. I agree with most of what you say, except "firstly, the leader must protect against external threats, and secondly, they must keep law and order within the tribe".
As it happens, in one of my own recent posts, Essential Functions of Government, I strongly disagreed with this idea that protection is the primary function. To my mind, it "overlooks the fact that there are functions of government which are intrinsic to the very existence of a coherent society, functions without which there can be no sense of community. These functions are more fundamental than 'protection' because, if they’re done badly, or if they're compromised by higher level functions, then the community starts to disintegrate". (https://malcolmr.substack.com/i/126372706/core-functions-of-government)