I often notice attempts to make the world overly safe. This started when I was a kid and the parents would tell us not to get in the pool until a half an hour after eating. I knew it was a sham when I was little. It was caution taken to a ridiculous extreme. There is practically a whole industry built around the misconception that we must make everything safe.
I had a wonderful rant one Thanksgiving when I was 18 or 19 and it was snowing a little bit outside. We had all the relatives around, and thought it would be fun to go out and rent a movie to entertain everyone. My father got angry and asked us if we were crazy to risk driving in the snow just for a movie. I started a half serious, half comedic rant about taking risks. I remember saying that we would never have colonized the country or flown to the moon if we were afraid of risk. I remember using the line, "This country was built on wild risky behavior!"
I've also noticed that risks sometimes make us stronger. You could argue that you only get ahead by taking risks. But more than that, risk is often fun. The sense of danger is what makes the activity more enjoyable. Personal trials also build experience and character. The efforts to overcome obstacles sharpen our minds and bodies.
There are also non-human examples of trial, ordeals, and collisions that are dangerous, damaging, and destructive, but bring about benefits. Fire often shapes the prairie and the forest: burning away the old things brings new life. I was recently looking at an area on the prairie that had been burned down earlier in the year and teh sand hill plums not only survived the fire, but were thriving. I have also heard planetary scientist speculate that meteor impacts bring life to protoplanets. Sometimes this is from the water that they bring, and sometimes one species can only survive after an impact wipes out a competitor, as we rose after the dinosaurs were wiped out. While this brought death to some, it brought life to others.
I recently had dinner with a British guy that worked for a company with an excessive safety policy. I thought he was railing against the absurdity of the policy, talking about how company members were required to report coworkers over incidents of unsafe practices. He talked about how if you saw someone going down a set of stairs and not using the handrail, you were supposed to write up the incident and hand it in. When I agreed with this and told him that it was absurd and that some risks had to be taken from time to time, he disagreed and started defending the policy. I sited the example of a person going skydiving, and his response was that you alleviate all risk by training and using safe equipment. I countered by saying that man would never have explored or colonized the Pacific if they stayed safe and waited until they had thoroughly tested equipment. He was convinced that enormous efforts to pare down the last percentage point of risk was worth the effort.
I think he ignores the fact that a certain degree of risk has a strengthening effect. Recent studies have shown that continual exposure to certain strains of bacteria can bring disease resistance and may even fend off diabetes. Our society has tried its hardest to keep people away from any bacteria for too long. Antibacterial soaps, antiseptic wipes, and hair trigger disposal of food that is past its expiration date has kept us away from exposure to all bacteria (good and bad). The overuse of antibiotics in people and livestock has done little to protect us, it has simply toughened up the bacteria and made us more vulnerable. Now we have MRSA and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis because we trained these strains to resist everything we could throw at them. See what happens to the bugs when they are under assault? They get stronger. The same thing applies to people.
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