We note in extremist approaches to Safety, mostly fostered by Zero, that ultra-safety is harmful.
Zero harm is therefore a movement to harm.
Recent research demonstrates that a heightened focus on safety creates mental health (psychosocial) disorders in children.
How fascinating that as Safety embarks on its venture into Psychosocial ‘Hazards’ (https://safetyrisk.net/category/psychological-safety/; https://safetyrisk.net/what-is-psychosocial-safety/ ), that its global mantra creates mental health harm. Indeed, this very venture into psychosocial ‘hazards will also create more harm. And much of this will remain hidden, much will be driven underground. That’s what Safety does best, then parades its numerics and metrics to claim improvement and fixing.
We now know that ‘Helicopter Parenting’ and ultra-safety don’t work. Indeed, the comprehensive research by Amalberti (Navigating Safety, Necessary Compromises and Trade-Offs – Theory and Practice) demonstrates that ultra-safety is both dangerous and impossible (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S092575350000045X).
Yet, none of this seems to stop the safety cult from its addiction to zero.
The research tells us that Young People are now more anxious, depressed, suicidal and lonely than ever before yet, their world is constructed as a cocoon. There is now more regulation around everything for young people from playgrounds to food, from activity monitoring to technological protections. Yet, Young People are now less resilient and less enable to live a full life than ever. We now know that our young people live in The Shallows (Nicholas Carr) where the Death of Expertise and Truth (Tom Nichols and Michiko Kakutani) is only matched by the number of social media friends formulated by hits on Tik Tok.
Yet, our Young People are less resilient than ever. It is just as Taleb predicted 10 years ago in Antifragile (http://kgt.bme.hu/files/BMEGT30M400/Taleb_Antifragile__2012.pdf). Ultra-safety makes people less resilient, less able to learn and more fragile to risk.
Of course, if you live in the S2 Hollnagel dream, resilience can be ‘engineered’.
Back in the real world, be now know that ultra-safety is harmful. And yet we see Safety happy to parade that safety should be an obsession (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-as-a-mental-health-disorder-obsession/). Indeed, it seems like safety extremism (https://safetyrisk.net/how-to-be-a-safety-extremist/) is the norm, in an industry that loves to regurgitate its mono-disciplinary drivel to its masses.
- Safety shouldn’t be about hiding from the world but embracing it.
- Safety shouldn’t be about the fear of risk but embracing risk.
- Without an ability to embrace risk, there is no learning.
- If there is no learning, there is no resilience.
So, in SPoR, we guard against ultra-safety by methods that enhance the tackling of risk rather than trusting myths and rituals that don’t work.
In SPoR, we recognise that risk, ethics, politics, trade-offs and by-products, personhood and risk management are a wicked problem. This is why we study semiotics, the unconscious, mythology (https://spor.com.au/september-canberra-workshop/), embodiment and learning. All of these help develop a new approach to risk that works (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/it-works-a-new-approach-to-risk-and-safety/ ).
In SPoR, we know that The Love of Zero (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/for-the-love-of-zero-free-download/ ) leads to brutalism. We know that behaviourism (BBS) is the mechanism used to harm others in the name of zero. We know that fallibility (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/fallibility-risk-living-uncertainty/ ) is NOT the enemy of safety. We know that Envisioning Risk (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/envisioning-risk-seeing-vision-and-meaning-in-risk/) can be undertaken without any of the concocted mythology Safety attributes as effective, when it is not.