Originally posted on January 27, 2019 @ 5:46 PM
Risk Boldly
It’s great to see that the Australians of the Year are adventurers.
The idea of adventure and learning in risk is central to all they represent. Even when they were in the midst of their rescue of the boys in the caves in Thailand they expected to lose some or all of the boys, they were prepared to risk death for life (https://www.sbs.com.au/news/australian-of-the-year-winners-thai-cave-heroes-message-to-kids ). As they say: ‘we had no choice’. As they stated, ‘If you couldn’t die, I wouldn’t be interested’.
I have written about the importance of adventure and learning in my free ebook: Real Risk, Human Discerning and Risk (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/real-risk/). There is no learning without risk.
The only reason these men had the knowledge to rescue the boys in Thailand is because of all they had learned through risk. Just imagine if these men had lived by the nonsense mantra of ‘zero harm’ or ‘all accidents are preventable’. Can you imaging how dumb they would be. Certainly with no capability to do anything. There is nothing like risk-averse dumb down safety infused with zero harm ideology to make you the dumbest person on the planet. How strange, our two famous Australians describe their friendship as ‘hanging about each other at our own peril’.
Dr Challen, joked that: ‘it was the greatest regret of my childhood that I never had a plaster cast on my arm’. What a comparison to an industry that counts band-aids out of the first aid kit and has a Spanish Inquisition if you twist an ankle. I dare say these blokes count what they learn not by the number of times they nearly died on an adventure but how important it was to embrace risk.
It’s also lovely to see this pair reject the nonsense language of ‘hero’, such a part of the crazy fixation of the safety industry with safety as somehow ‘saving lives’. Even though the media want to project this language, our Australians of the Year sensibly reject it. Their comment: ‘Anyone with a measure of enthusiasm can achieve the sort of things that we’ve done’.
I nearly vomit when I see the TAC Victoria ‘zero heroes’ propaganda (http://www.tac.vic.gov.au/about-the-tac/media-room/news-and-events/2014-media-releases/tac-weighs-in-on-rewarding-zero-heroes), a dumb indictment of an industry fixated on Hazardman discourse (https://safetyrisk.net/hazardman-wont-save-you/) but no idea of the ordinary nature of tackling risk. If you need a zero hero to be safe, you really do have a problem with risk.
From the TAC Vic Website
Of course the only way to get to zero is to take no risk. Don’t live!
However, in the real world of fallible humans and random living, we know that such language is nonsense. What a silly immature discourse that basks in the self-absorbed language of salvation heroics but knows little about Real Risk.
Let me tell you, when we were rescuing Todd and Brant at Beaconsfield in 2006 the last thing we wanted anywhere near the activity was a hero. Heroics are dangerous in all approaches to tackling risk, yet safety endorses and covets this stupid language.
Congratulations to Dr Harris and Dr Craig Challen. What a wonderful model of how Risk Makes Sense (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/risk-makes-sense/ ).
I wonder how many checklists these guys did to rescue the boys in Thailand???