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Do you look around and find what you love — and try to protect it?
The world is lovable, and so are people. Traditions hold the community together, trust maintains the community, and friends stabilize us.
Profoundly, preservation (conservatism) is more respectful than progress. Ego and idealism drive change, challenge what works, and thrive on manufactured instability.
Roger Scruton’s quiet challenge: before you break anything, know what you’re willing to defend.
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In a litigious society, the risk is never worth the reward. Safety is about protecting against liability more than ensuring individual well-being. The cost is a loss of shared experiences that initiate new people into trust. (To remain safe, isolation and restriction are paramount.)
Instead, the rules (now made plain and authoritarian) can be subverted to extended mutual risk, fostering complicity and connection. The polite decline of legalese introduces gray zones, navigated quietly under bureaucratic oversight, reintroducing the shared transgression as complicit bonding.
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To be a good person, you must be idealistic (and romantic) despite reality’s indifference and institutional antipathy.
We struggle to shape our world and its institutions according to our values – justice, loyalty, and consistency. Yet, we encounter their twisted opposites: greed, manipulation, and fickleness.
Institutions champion sociopathy, and our failure is to consider them communities and strive to reshape them, or shame them, into responsibility.
Depressingly, "goodness" is a manipulative lever for assholes, and yet to relieve ourselves of idealistic values (to be practical) is to become what we despise.
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If information is power, it’s no surprise we lie. We instinctively hold something back to retain leverage, a survival mechanism to protect our most vital resources.
To be open and trusting is to invite predation. Don’t blame people for lying—this cautious instinct can be protective in hostile environments.
The real conflict lies in balancing belief in others with self-preservation. While communal trust fosters security, it also becomes prey to bad actors, eventually dissolving that trust and leaving only frightened survivalists in its wake.
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We live in a time of state intervention aimed at eliminating harm—no violence, no risk—while socially taboo topics like body shaming, racism, and sexual shaming are culturally policed. Despite this pursuit of safety, anxiety and depression are at record highs, even as crime and violence are at historic lows.
The paradox is to live in the least violent times, when beliefs have only emotional and social repercussions and seldom physical or property consequences, yet the fragility of people and failure to maintain peace is escalating.
Part of this results in de-escalating objective, reality-based threats accomplishing an increase in symbolic, ideological concerns, which feel subjectively overwhelming and due to their shifting signifiers cannot be easily mitigated by individual effort. As we shift from physical to ideological harm, we -oddly- inhabit a space where safety is elusive and control pervasive.
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The tools we use to get us through period in our life can lose their purpose once we have moved on or overcome.
Yet we tend to hang on to our protective practices, to reenact them in more and more inappropriate ways. If they provided safety and security once they might do it forever. In such ways our baggage swells, as we hoard our coping mechanisms.
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Approaching the new: As children, we learn to experiment and experience novelty until the thrill produces anxiety, threatening to overwhelm us. Then we rush back to safety, regain our courage, and set out again.
This cycle remains, but as we grow older, we can detach from reality, allowing our pathologies to simulate the anxiety and thrill of novelty and discovery, often at the cost of relationships.
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There are numerous examples of cities/districts setting up radar detection and redlight cameras for “citizen safety,” which happened to generate over $100 Million in annual revenue.
Playing dirty, the city creates more infractions (and generates more revenue) by reducing the “amber time” -the time length of a yellow light- with the side effect of increased injury and accidents. Presented with this new data, devoid of the manipulated context, we have apparently become worse drivers, requiring more state intervention to save us from ourselves.
In this way, the state uses its system control (under the imperative of public safety) to make us less safe for more profit, then uses the results to encroach further into once autonomous territory.
(from Matthew Crawford)
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The quest for safety drives people. There are those who, in pursuing security under the government’s umbrella, flaunt laws and traditions yet claim to deserve state privileges nonetheless. Others maintain severe traditions that reject the state’s authority and claim sovereign privilege.
This oddly hypocritical juxtaposition in our ideological stance pairs with self-preservation strategies. When a Kafkaesque scenario of distrust in leaders, prevailing narratives, and corporate entities leaves us in a “zero-trust” society, there is seemingly little benefit and much potential harm in extending trust to any institution. As a result, we drop back into fractious local networks of individuals to seek communion, safety, and trust.
Counterintuitively, trust is not necessary when something is reasonable: no trust is extended when we all agree. And so, to invoke trust, we must evoke irrationality: social tests that go to unreasonable extremes bind loyalty, creating in-group and out-group affiliation.
While rationality should lead to trust, it is more of a survival imperative to adopt irrationality, making it more reasonable when system trust is lost.
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We live in the information era, but we are also mediated by architecture and platforms that filter, moderate and act as a go-between.
With automated systems in our cars, regulated health, and safety mandated at every instant we are buffered from experiencing direct reality.
We experience a gluttony of inputs, but a poverty of genuine feedback from reality.
