The Safety Dance

a Nuance Two-Step

Fundamental to mankind is the capacity to pierce the veil of time in search of futures we might make for ourselves. It is in our nature having been cast in the likeness of our creator that we too might bring things into being. It is with reason that we sort through these imagined eventualities and make judgements. We consider costs, and we consider benefits. We consider hazards and assign probabilities. We consult with our conscience on the effect bringing about various potentialities might have on others. This is how we shape our world for the better, and it is how our ancestors forged this great nation. This essential process has become corrupted.

Previously we discussed the Utopian Mindset – the tendency for those indoctrinated to Scientism to hold reality up against the utopian vision of perfection, and thereby find reality itself wanting. Similarly, this process of man molding useful, and good futures by first projecting his mind forward has too succumbed to the substitution of Eden for reality in our consideration of paths. This phenomena of safetyism is characterized by elevating the chosen item (hypothetical risk, etc.) above, and to the exclusion of all other countervailing considerations. In doing so safetyism virtually guarantees that the mitigation of a single harm (real or imagined) will be pursued to the considerably greater detriment of all other harms. This is accomplished to significant degree by the old communist staple of “ruthless criticism.” However, in modern times this effort also extends to the exercise of fascistic control of the official narrative through censorship such that the unapproved narrative (representing reality) might not become known before the real thing is catastrophically inescapable. This suicidal project is pursued now with reckless intransigence.

Considerable thanks due our old friends of the Institute for Social Research (the Marxist Frankfurt School) once again for helping to fully weaponize this safetyism such that they now appear to possess a safety(ism) selector switch with which to toggle between nuance on, or nuance off. Covid variant potentially more contagious (though with no signs of increased lethality)? Clicks nuance off: “we must lock everyone in their homes for weeks and shutter all businesses and schools!” Parents finally had enough, and posing an existential threat to political careers? Clicks nuance on: “children are actually at far greater risk from seasonal flu, and don’t appear to be significant vectors for the virus.” Teacher unions pushing back on politicians? Clicks nuance off again: “teachers are our front-line soldiers in this war just like on D-Day, and we must spare no effort in protecting them, so schools mustn’t reopen until all students are vaccinated!”

The specific psychological mechanisms through which this selective application of nuance appears to take effect are on one hand the elevation of a harm to the level of mortal sin with all the attendant religious (and tribal) implications, and on the other the extreme overstatement of the harm such that it induces existential fear in those perhaps not fully religiously oriented towards the Absolute, but are nonetheless susceptible to the pseudoreality (perhaps through a sort of peer pressure, or presumed benevolence of “the experts”).

Pay close attention to what you are being told, and what is being signaled, and you will begin to notice that this safetyism is foundational to the left’s mode of operation, and especially to the taking of ground for the pseudoreality. If they are trying to scare you right now tomorrow they will assault the ground under your feet. The left moves through Hegel’s dialectic, which is in turn how the dialectic moves through time as a ratchet for leftist policy. Safetyism can act as both the handle, and the teeth of that ratchet — both taking ground, and holding it. Society presents as normative (hypothesis), the left introduces counter-normative culture (antithesis), and the synthesis is the destruction (“aufheben”) of the norm itself. This is the beating heart of political warfare. Though, it would be equally correct to call it religious warfare. Scientism doesn’t know the difference.