The language that ‘Safety Saves Lives’ doesn’t help any process in tackling risk or the outcome of safety. Indeed, if anything this kind of language further promotes safety arrogance, elitism and unethical conduct, delusion and disconnectedness from the everyday practice of helping people tackle risk.

Interestingly, in real professions you don’t hear this kind of nonsense language. In medicine professionals create the circumstances, environment and interventions that help your body heal itself. The surgeon facilitates the circumstances for healing and then your body takes over. The doctor doesn’t heal you or save you! The hospital and nurses don’t heal or save you. Such language is simplistic, attributes elite language to one factor and mitigates against the humility of any ‘helping’ profession.

Of course, Safety never speaks of being a ‘helping’ profession even though it delights in the language of the label ‘professional’.

One good aspect of this language “Safety Saves Lives’ is that it shows that Safety personifies itself. I’d like a dollar for every time I get attacked for making a similar personification or for articulating Safety as an Archetype. Ah, that’s right, attribution in safety only goes one way.

Our language (discourse) and the power in our language (Discourse) is so important in a self-understanding of culture. Our Semiotics, Poetics, Religion, Rituals, Mythology and Linguistics are foundational to any understanding of culture. Except in safety, these are dismissed and of course most important, ‘don’t talk about safety culture’. Only in safety are the basics of culture ignored and the expertise of Anthropology and Religion ignored in an understanding of culture. Want to know about culture? In safety you ask an engineer. Want to know about Linguistics, ask an engineer. As for Semiotics and Poetics, what are they?

The language of ‘saving lives’ is religious salvation language, called Soteriology. Sorry to tell you, safety people don’t save lives (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-people-dont-save-lives/).

The last thing this industry needs is any language of ‘saving lives’, ‘cardinal rules’, ‘superheroes’ and ‘saviours’. All this language does is inhibit connection with everyday people tackling the challenges of risk. Such language also fosters a cultic Discourse that feeds elitism and arrogance. Some of the key qualities of professionalism is humility, helping and care, things you don’t hear Safety say. The last person anyone wants to confide in about their weakness or vulnerability is someone claiming to ‘save lives’ or be a ‘superhero’.

Sure, celebrate your occupation as much as you like, but don’t carry on with such delusional language.

In SPoR, the Semiotics of ‘safety saves’ is simply abhorrent. Have a look at some examples:

The list of this silly language and semiotics is endless. Here are a few more examples:

Of course, there is never anything in this Discourse of:

If you do a search for ‘safety saves’ it comes up with over a trillion results, much of it about how people are NOT saved!

All of this language is a sign of immature and unprofessional Discourse.

Fortunately, people become desensitized to all of this goop and in the end, it just becomes noise or wallpaper. If you want to see what not to do in Semiotics, just study what Safety does.

In SPoR, we don’t ‘save lives’, we ‘help people tackle risk’. Language matters.

This is much more helpful and mature language. What we do in SPoR that is practical, positive and constructive, is actually study Semiotics (https://cllr.com.au/product/semiotics-and-the-social-psychology-of-risk-unit-3-overseas-online-elearning/) to make sure that messaging in risk connects and that the medium of the message works. In the end we focus in SPoR, on helping people save themselves in the way they tackle risk.