Toward a More Dangerous Society
Safety, like comfort, leads us to sin
“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion."
"Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"...
"Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”
―C.S. Lewis,The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
“Stay safe!”
—Everybody you’ve met from February 2020 to the present
Shanti De Corte was put to death because drugs and therapy could not make her feel safe.
Twitter suspends or deplatforms people who violate their nebulous “community safety” rules.
The City of St. Louis, Missouri, places bicycle helmets at intersections and encourages pedestrians to wear them when crossing the street—for safety.
Billions of people wore paper masks for two years believing they promoted safety.
Air travel has become a humiliating burden because of what Seth Godin calls “the illusion of safety.”
Despite the 24/7 drumbeat of “safety,” all-cause mortality, particular among people in the prime of life, continues to push excess deaths higher and higher.
While recklessness is a sin, our twisted society has managed to make safety an even greater sin—and made us all much less safe.
As the sad story of Shanti De Corte highlights what happens when people make safety a necessity. “Give me safety or give me death.” When you think about it, it doesn’t even make sense.
Pride of Life
The evangelist John’s first letter warns of the immortal dangers churned up by making an idol of safety.
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:15-17)
Pride is the beginning of all sin, and the pathological need for an illusion of safety betrays a disordered pride in the mere fact of being alive.
Most scholars agree that John’s use of “pride of life” refers mostly to the pride of showing off one’s worldly possessions: fine clothes, jewelry, makeup, nice cars, etc. But certainly safety is among these worldly possessions, for nothing strips a man of his glamorous amenities like death or serious bodily harm. You can’t take it with you, as the saying goes, as the rich man learned after shunning Lazarus. (Luke 16:19-31)
Did the rich man avoid handing Lazarus a coin out of greed or out of a disordered need for safety? Financial paranoia makes misers of men, but Lazarus, we are told, was covered with sores. Would a rich man with fine things risk catching leprosy to pay some alms?
We can easily imagine the rich man of this parable to choose a pleasant death administered by a physician over a long, painful, humiliating death as the bacterium eats his living flesh.
Safety first, and all that.
Safety Leads to Vulnerability
One of George Carlin’s most enduring routines was about germs and safety. [WARNING: Strong language].
This clip is from a Carlin special from 1987. Ronald Reagan was president, and every Volvo had a yellow “Baby Onboard” sign in the back window.
How much more have we fetishized safety in the 35 years since Carlin delivered this profanity-laced homily? Yet, everything he said was right, particularly about the immune system.
Just as our muscles grow weak and vulnerable to injury if we do nothing but sit, our immune systems weaken when we live in a germ-free environment. Perhaps some of the excess deaths the world is experiencing result, not from the dangerous mRNA vaccines, but from spending two years avoiding the near occasion of other people.
Did you know that more American military service members die in training than in combat? Via CNN:
In 2017, nearly four times as many service members died in training accidents as were killed in combat, according to a House Armed Services Committee report related to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2019 – a key point highlighted by many lawmakers and military officials who argued for additional defense spending to help offset readiness issues
The CNN piece talks about efforts to make training safer. Military training should avoid recklessness and unnecessary risk, but did the authors ever stop to consider that perhaps our relatively low combat death rate was a result of rigorous (and dangerous) training? If we were to make combat training as safe as, say, software engineering, the first contact with the enemy would likely result in a replay of the Battle of Kassarine Pass in World War II.
If we want to live vitally and become resilient to the dangers of the world, we have to train for danger, not safety. But we won’t train if we believe it’s possible to live a risk-free life, as training itself poses a certain degree of risk.
Liberty Was Never Safe
Freedom and safety are incompatible. No man is freer than when he’s stranded alone on an island in the South Pacific. That is the one and only situation in which a person has avail of all of his rights, because there’s no one around to infringe on them.1
A disordered lust for safety leads people to surrender liberty. The logic goes something like this:
There’s a threat that I am unequipped to address.
Experts with particular skills promise to address the threat.
If don’t do whatever the experts tell me, their magic won’t work.
Therefore, I will do what they tell me for my own safety.
It’s a perfectly logical line of thought—unless any one of its legs is false. And, I would posit that, not one but two legs are termite-ridden:
You are best equipped to address threats you face.
Experts are least equipped to address those threats.
And I’ll throw in a therefore . . .
Experts who promise to address the threat in exchange for your freedom are frauds.
I probably don’t need to tell you that Dr. Fauci was a fraud from the beginning. He told you masks do nothing, then he told you (less than a month later) that masks were the only way to prevent the spread of Covid.
Fauci told you that he would stop the virus if you gave up all social contact for 15 days. Then 45 days. Then for one year.
Fauci told you that the vaccines would prevent acquisition and transmission of Covid.
Then he told you vaccines prevent series illness and death.
He told the vaccines were perfectly safe for everyone from unborn babies to old ladies in nursing homes.
But for Fauci magic to work, we must all give up all of our freedoms and do exactly what he tells us—even the contradictory instructions that one person cannot possibly perform. Fidelity to one must be a rejection of the other.
Fauci is a fine example of a handy heuristics: experts who demand your liberty in exchange for their protection are frauds. (Worse, they slave traders.) But there’s another leg of the syllogism that needs some support: You are best equipped to protect yourself.
Let’s use a very dark example that I hope applies to no one, especially you or a loved one. If it does, I am sorry, but I think you will appreciate this.
Someone who receives a cancer diagnosis knows he can’t cure himself. He will need a medical team to survive. That team might include surgeons, oncologists, pharmacists, nurses, technicians, and more.
But the patient who simply surrenders to the care team faces stiffer odds than the person who owns his own treatment.
For example, few cancer specialists are even aware that prolonged fasting slows the spread of many forms of cancer and reduces or eliminates side effects of chemotherapy. Moreover, patients who combine fasting with chemo see faster remission and often require fewer rounds of chemo. Among the doctors who know this science, most don’t bother mentioning it because, they say, “no one’s going to stop eating even if it would save their lives.”
The person who owns his own life wisely seeks professional medical assistance for a serious situation, but that is not the same as surrendering your liberty to a bunch of doctors. No matter how compassionate a doctor might be, he doesn’t care more about your life than you do. He is unlikely to have the time or inclination to learn about alternative and supportive treatments like fasting because the medical schools don’t teach it, the CDC doesn’t recommend it, the pharmaceutical companies are against it, and the medical industry is more afraid of effective naturopathic medicine than you are of cancer.
Retaining your agency does not mean going alone, it means directing your caregivers instead of taking orders.
You will never be safer than when a team of experts is doing your informed bidding. (As I write this, Tucker Carlson is doing piece on naturopathic medicine and diet, including eating the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the government and medical industry tell you to eat. The EXACT OPPOSITE. Just thought you’d like to know.)
You Are the Only Expert about Your Life
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was brilliant and enlightening. I felt I’d known Jobs my whole life by the time I finished it.
And, yet, Isaacson did not know Jobs better than Jobs. Isaacson doesn’t know one one-millionth of what Jobs knew about Jobs. The world’s foremost expert on the man knows relatively little about the subject of his expertness.
Steve Jobs would never surrender his decisions to a biographer. Hell, he never even put license plates on his cars—even when he was young and broke, he never bothered spoiling to looks of his cars, even beaters, with a state-issued license plate. And, as far as Isaacson could determine, Jobs never got a ticket for driving without license plates.
You are the Steve Jobs of your own life. You own it. You know better than anyone when you need the help of an expert, but, absent a present crisis, you are capable of rendering most “experts” unnecessary. You have remarkable control over your health and safety—as long as you do not, in the absence of crisis, trust the “experts” who demand your money and liberty to dispense their “magic.”
As the saying goes, freedom isn’t free. It takes time. Owning your own life means being okay with ignorance of unimportant things. You have to be okay with not knowing the most popular apps among 20-year-olds or which starlet divorced which star to start a polyamorous relationship with three illegal aliens. With that time, you can lift weights, eat fat and protein, grow some of your own vegetables, and learn how to tell the date by the latitudinal angle of the sun.
And it’s all in the Bible. In fact, it’s all in the passage at the top of this post, which is why I included some extra verses to provide needed context:
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:15-17)
Freedom is detachment from this world, and that means you maintain control of your life. Because your only job in this life is to give it back to the Triune God—and no one can do that but you.
To give it back well used, bruised, and suffering for love of God, not carefully and painlessly euthanized like Shanti De Cortes. It’s not about feeling safe and comfortable—it’s about the love that hurts.
Go see Aslan, who is dangerous because he represents Christ. Aslan is not safe, but he’s good.
Be dangerous.
This is why there can be no “right” to education or healthcare or anything like it. If we say a man has a right to be educated, we imply that another man lacks the right to refuse to teach him. The two are mutually exclusive. Man does incur obligations in exchange for rights, but those obligations are owed only to God, the grantor of rights, and they are summarized by two commandments: to love God with your whole heart and your whole mind and your whole soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself.