Unsafe at Any Speed · The Subjunctive

Ancient Anesthesia

In a short but beloved vignette in Homer’s Odyssey, we learn of Odysseus’ encounter with the Lotus-eaters. By the caprice of Zeus, he and his men were besieged within a tempest upon the ocean for two days and nights. Desperate for some reprieve, they drove past Cythera onward until some ten days later when they finally set foot on the island of the Lotus-eaters.

Having drawn water and taken meals, Odysseus sent forth two of his men—with a third as herald—to learn about the people who dwelt there. The islanders showed no violence to the visitors and offered them only the fruit of the lotus to taste. Upon doing so, they lost their purpose and wished to return not to their ship with report but “there they were fain to abide among the Lotus-eaters, feeding on the lotus.”

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Once discovered so, Odysseus returned his comrades by force, weeping, and dragged them beneath the benches of the ship and bound them. He demanded his company disembark with haste lest anyone else among them should eat of the lotus and forget their love of purpose and home.

“And whosoever of them ate of the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus, had no longer any wish to bring back word or to return, but there they were fain to abide among the Lotus-eaters, feeding on the lotus, and forgetful of their homeward way.”
— Homer, The Odyssey, A.T. Murray Translation (1919)

The Lotus-eaters is not a simple pharmacological parable. It is an encapsulation of a more persistent desire within all humanity. Everyone has felt that vertigo at the immensity of the unknown. Within its mystery lies latent harm, injury, even death. Adventure reveals uncharted monstrosities of which we fear to speak. The compulsion to anesthetize ourselves against the arcane is ancient, insistent, and—as we will see—dangerous. The lotus does not remove danger. What it removes is the memory that danger is constitutive of the journey.

As with other such contemporary provocations, the problem of safety is most acutely felt by leaders. How can leadership vouchsafe safety? What is safety? Can it be measured? If so, how? What are its minimum requirements? Are the minimum requirements sufficient to inoculate leaders from charges they weren’t safe enough? What outcomes can we expect from our pursuit of safety? What is lost when safety outruns risk? Can leaders even pursue risk at all anymore? If so, when, where, and how? If not, what remains for the concept of leadership?

The Genealogy of Safety

As with the word culture, we can trace the origin of safety to Latin as salvus, meaning safe, or unharmed, and salus, meaning health, or welfare. Etymologists often trace this further back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root, solh₂-, associated with ideas of physical integrity, structural completeness, or unbrokenness. This same root produces words such as salvage, salutary, salubrious, and curiously, salvation.

While a different word, a similar concept appears in Ancient Greek as asphaleia (ἀσφάλεια). Asphaleia meant firmness or stability. It derives from a- (not) and sphallein (to fall). This is a building that doesn’t collapse, or a city protected by walls, or a polity that does not descend into strife. Thucydides used it in the context of war and order. Aristotle used it to describe political concepts. It is closely tied to durability of an order.

These words orbit a shared concept of intactness or preservation. Safety was not comfort, or absence of anxiety, or elimination of risk. Safety originally described integrity after exposure to challenge or injury. The Roman phrase, Salus populi suprema lex esto (“The welfare of the people shall be the highest law.”) already gives us a sense of the elevated nature of salus as a supreme political principle.

As Latin mutates into Vulgar Latin and around the 12th century, into Old French, salvus becomes sauf (safe) and its genitive form salvitas becomes sauveté or saufeté. By the 14th century, saufeté enters Middle English as saufte or safte. The transition toward the modern spelling safety consolidates through the 15th and 16th centuries.

During this 400 year period—and especially in the earliest English uses—the meaning begins to coalesce around guaranteed protection. A lord’s or king’s pledge of safe conduct acted as a legal instrument rather than the absence of risk as an ambient condition. The original concept of safety as “integrity despite turmoil” morphed into a more defensive position now discharged through the dispensation of authority.

As safety achieves more common English usage, it embraces something beyond authority’s armature. Its meaning continues to suggest legal protection, but it begins to stand for freedom from danger, or preservation from harm. This semantic shift moves it further away from “not fallen” and further toward the avoidance of risk.

The French, English, and Scottish Enlightenment is yet another accelerant for this trend. The great contractarians all speak of safety. Thomas Hobbes insists the sovereign exists to secure bodies against violent death. His conception of safety is negative and physical. It is, in short, protection from chaos.

John Locke modifies this frame. He holds that safety is guardianship of natural rights. We know these: life, liberty, estate (pursuit of happiness). This shift is subtle but profound. Locke expands the beneficence of safety from the person to their interests.

Through Jeremy Bentham, safety becomes rationalized. With his utilitarianism, we begin to see justification for law and punishment as instrumental. No longer need we make recourse to metaphysics or theology. We can not only reduce harm, but maximize happiness, and deter violence. This renormalizes safety as calculable. (We might ironically note Bentham also devised the panopticon: the most efficient and effective design for a prison the world had ever seen.)

The Enlightenment—the modern—transmuted safety, now ulterior to mere protection from physical harm, into securing our interests under a rational administration of risk. Safety thus became secular, procedural, and governmental. We are now far from safety as redoubt. It has become not just an instrument, but a system.

Yet the vector was not exhausted. During the industrial revolution, it continued to push safety forward along this trajectory. Beyond political abstraction, safety began to take on more material urgency: factories maimed, mines collapsed, urban density bred contagions. Following exposés such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and disasters like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, safety begins to take on a moral character. Safety as system becomes a moralized regulatory regime such that by the mid-20th century, federal agencies had almost completely institutionalized safety compliance.

Safety thereby subsumed the actuarial. It was abstracted into the measurement of risk, the reduction of the probability of it occurring, and the minimization of liability. This period treats humans as workers embedded in systems. Safety responded within the mechanical, statistical, and managerial. It was to do more.

In the middle of the 20th century, safety moved further along this course. The New Deal and European welfare states introduced Social Security, unemployment insurance, healthcare systems, and pension guarantees. Through this aegis, safety metastasized beyond the body and into livelihood, placing its focus on macroeconomic stabilization. Its goal migrated to insulation from volatility.

This slow but inexorable evolution had now made safety a bulwark against social uncertainty. To be safe came to entail tacit guarantees of economic success, reliable income, and comfort in retirement. Security was structuralized, and risk socialized.

In the late 20th century, reasonable concerns surfaced that our increasingly bloated conception of safety may be incapable of acquitting itself. In 1986, Ulrich Beck published Risk Society, in which he reveals that modernity has produced risks it cannot fully predict or contain, such as nuclear annihilation, environmental collapse, and systemic financial contagion. This marks a reflexive reorientation in which we became obsessed with mitigating risk, precautionary postures, transparency, and regulatory oversight. Risk management and the “precautionary principle” rise to dominate thought about the environment, public health, and all other existential concerns. Discontented as we were with mere defense, we conscripted safety into accepting responsibility for the anticipatory.

In the first decade of this century, the path traversed into the ontological. Through the cumulative residue of the work of figures such as Carl Rogers, by the 2010s, safety underwent an involution with the aid of leadership and management theory. As a growing orthodoxy, safety gravitated into a psychosocial singularity. It began to signal freedom from any threat to the integrity of each person’s sentiment and identity.

What is actual—what is real—is thus hyperlocal. What each person experiences or feels was increasingly centered by the consensus purpose of safety. With gathering force, interpersonal risk is now seen as caprice from which we should be liberated. Any engagement leaving anyone with self-doubt is transfigured into an unmitigated threat to psychological security. Thus, the moral imperative of safety now expands beyond the instrumental and into the virtuous.

Accordingly, physical harm is increasingly decentered within safety. We now speak of safety as the domain of not just emotions and identity, but even narrative and information. We designate physical spaces as safe. Social media platforms enforce “community safety.” Organizations of all kinds progressively see harm as semantic and symbolic. Safety is now semiotic. Discourse that gives offense or destabilizes or provides occasion for discomfort is a target for total moral rejection. Safety has completed the shift from ontological stability to psychological entitlement.

What was once pursuit of the robust has become litany for protection. We have bowdlerized these ideas into their inverse. To be robust is now a performative demand that no challenge should ever be allowed to land. To protect is liberatory. We have replaced adventure with preservation and safety is at the vanguard of this project.

The Secular Theology of Safety

The destination at which safety has arrived is metaphysical. In its genesis, safety described a condition of remaining intact. It was testable by contact with danger. The ship was safe because it did not come apart on the sea. The city was safe because it did not fall while under siege. The polity was safe because it endured conflict without becoming dissolute. Safety was rendered intelligible by exposure to stress. It was proved by withstanding that which might undo it.

Contemporary safety is often unintelligible and no longer proved. It is professed. It has become sacred.

The sacralization of safety required no appeal to the divine; it is a secular sacredness. Safety has quietly assumed part of the work once performed by God. Salvation is the amelioration of the anxiety of contingency. It promises deliverance from the terrors of finitude: injury, ruin, deprivation, humiliation, death. It offers meaning while contending with what cannot be mastered. Modern safety inherits this burden while still pretending to be administrative.

The sacred has predictable properties. It is non-fungible; it can’t be traded off. It possesses a moral asymmetry it is profane to question. Its jurisdiction grows. Rituals and purity codes are generated around it that must be propitiated to demonstrate allegiance. It gives rise to priestly intercessors that interpret and enforce it. And it provides mechanisms for expiating and absolving transgressions.

Modern safety comprises all these properties. It doesn’t present as theology overtly. It calls itself policy, or best practice, or standards, or trauma-informed, or harm reduction, or simply values. Yet this is all liturgical language. Each of these terms are ritual instruments intended not merely to reduce harm, but to purify the social phase space by ridding it of anything that might be disturbing. Safety is naming a social horizon in which everyone knows that which must not be done as well as how we are expected to feel to determine that an institution can be considered legitimate.

Consider the sacred properties. Can we ask, for what we might trade some safety? Can we question safety? Can we ask whether some domain should not be mediated by safety? Can we abstain from participating in safety rituals? Can we oppose the edicts of the safety legates? Can we refuse to perform oblation and penance when we have transgressed against safety?

The sanctioned answer to these questions is no. Some few contrarians might say it is possible to answer in the affirmative, but even they must acknowledge the significant reputational risk in doing so. This social dynamic may appear devoid of any appeal to the divine, but it is no less dogmatic or confessional.

We have proscribed commutation of safety in favor of anything else. Truth, nor excellence, nor urgency, nor responsibility, nor discovery, nor adventure, nor reality itself may be exchanged for a suspension of safety. We cannot bargain with safety, nor can we weigh it. We avoid asking what it costs, or what it displaces. We are expected only to affirm it. Questioning is evidence of impurity. Doubt is recoded as threat. Safety was once one value among others. It is now the value against which all others are judged.

This is the secular theology of safety.

Object Impermanence and the Sacred

As with culture and theory, safety is apprehended through the lifecycle of the paradigm in which it operates. We know intuitively everything is impermanent, yet much of what we receive from our collective imagination beguiles our desire for the permanently and universally persistent. Paradigms, like developing minds, assume their most vital objects are permanent. This dynamic is visible in sacred safety.

Sacred objects exhibit recurring structural traits. One of these is timelessness. Sacred objects appear to be beyond time. The sacred also imparts a self-evident morality. We simply know what is good or bad without the need to interrogate (generally because the paradigm will provide immediate feedback). It is also non-fungible. That the sacred cannot be exchanged for anything else is its principal signal. In due course we also notice the sacred generates reputational reinforcement. When we conciliate the sacred, we evince our psychosocial reliability.

The challenge to which these consecrations are attending is fear of collapse. The sacred guards the genesis of our understandings. What this means is that when we directly encounter something new—something newly created and vital—we are left with a deep impression of its growth and generativity. This is remembered and only falters when we are no longer physically capable of supporting its cognitive load. This impermanence accrues not merely to each of us, but to all the orders in which we organize ourselves.

The tragedy of the lifecycle is that no social object is permanent. Our social object orders—families, friend groups, institutional and corporate, professional networks, communities of believers, clubs, art, values, virtues, sacred objects, narratives—all operate within a paradigm upon which we can have reliable interoperability. It has a lifecycle. Our social orders have their own. The sacred is one of those orders, and safety is presently its preeminent object.

Social objects are not only impermanent but also phase dependent. A social object at the birth or initial growth of a paradigm is multidimensionally different than in later lifecycle phases. When a paradigm is new, the sacred is immanent not because it is deeply formalized and solemnized, but because initial growth is incandescently vital. Growth metabolizes the sacred without remainder in a furnace fueled by its exuberance.

When a paradigm is no longer producing more than it consumes the sacred must be metabolized by a different fuel. To metabolize the sacred in late phases of a paradigm, the cost is paid by repatriating the energy its participants inherited when it was young and growing. In practice, this means reduced tolerance for deviation, diminished resources, and heightened reputational penalties.

The sacred order that had once felt vital and generative now presents as myopically consumptive. It must. It is an effort to keep the paradigm stable.

This late-stage discipline vision urgently elucidates the modern liturgy of safety. In essence, safety hasn’t changed. It is still what it is, but it can no longer be consumed through ineluctable excitement for the future. The fuel is now discipline. O, Safety, hear me! We must preserve! We must sustain! We must regenerate!

Beatified safety pervades the domain of human organization. The regnant paradigm in which it is revealed is hundreds of years old. Perched in a reliquary in a reinforced subterranean chamber is a vial containing a tiny drop of pure safety. We are enjoined to protect it.

Nonetheless, we cannot do this indefinitely. As the lifecycles of the nested social objects complete their orbits, new iterations arrive. Late-phase systems organized primarily around preservation are inured to this process. Systems that avoid disturbance are less capable of metabolizing disturbance.

Our overextended and sacred safety will ultimately undermine the original function of safety. Safety itself has not changed; the institutional order through which we attempt to resolve it has aged into preservation. The costs no longer disappear inside accelerating growth. When paradigms enter their late phase, the costs of the sacred are paid through obeisance to the sacred.

Once again, the greatest tribute is paid through leadership.

The Leader As Supplicant

The leader has become distributor for the fuel used to metabolize safety. Leadership used to be animated by a risk-bearing posture in which judgement is exercised with acceptance of the uncertainty it faces. Leaders were once assumed to be those that take risks and accept the consequences. Transposition of safety and risk was essential to the purpose of the leader. With safety as a class of sacred social objects, leadership has become risk-avoidance under the pressure of reputational enforcement.

As with the effects of culture and theory, our sacralization of safety has aided in deracinating the intention of leadership. This is not the fault of those called to lead. Responsibility lies in the preservation logic of the paradigm that now expresses itself through the leader. In turn, this has produced optimizations that favor weaker leaders, but those whose calling is leadership have found their purpose and vision constricted by it. Even the most stalwart and wise leaders have some sense of the yoke that has been placed on them such that true leadership appears to lie somewhere else.

Every tractable modality of safety has conspired to serve this hollowing out of leadership. To serve these modal exposures, leaders ardently seek salvific dispensation. The petition is broad: protection from physical injury and legal liability; job security and defense against income volatility; reputational insulation from scandal and semiotic misreading; psychological safety from the demands of others and the instability of our own identities. Sacred safety transforms leaders from agents of possibility into petitioners for permission to act. They become not petitioners to any institution, but to the sacred abstraction itself.

When safety is sanctified, no transposition can be named. When leaders cannot transpose, judgement cannot be discharged. This deflates leadership to posture, enforced by threats to reputation. The result is supplication: to be legitimate, the leader must bend the knee. Responsibility for decision becomes request for permission, and failure is nursed by the pursuit of absolution.

Examples of this are legion. Universities have institutionalized “psychological safety” and “harm reduction” as moral frameworks. When pressed publicly on speech boundaries, leaders of these institutions could neither fully defend speech nor fully embrace restriction without violating at least one constituency for which safety is demanded. The outcome has been resignations. The pattern that underwrites this confusion is competing safety claims—in this case, speech safety vs identity safety—which yield a no-man’s land for leadership. The sacred adjudicates itself poorly.

When leaders sin against safety, they are compelled to perform ablution. Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal (and other controversies involving alleged misinformation), Facebook was accused of creating an unsafe information environment. The ritual lustration demanded was for its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to appear repeatedly before the U.S. Congress and deliver a confession. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility,” he said, and, “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” and, “We need to do better.” These hearings didn’t give the appearance of an investigation. What they evinced was public moral theater. The congressional Sanhedrin demanded acknowledgement that Facebook had harmed democracy, vulnerable populations, children. Rather than defend policy, Zuckerberg was pressed to seek purification for violating the safety of the social order itself.

This ceremonial levy was a signal example for similar expiations sought by many other leaders in recent memory. Its structure recapitulates medieval penance wherein sin is revealed, a confession is made, remorse is expressed along with a promise of reform, and ongoing supervision is prescribed. The sacred must survive. Leaders, rather than lead, are obligated to supplicate before sacred safety.

Memory of the Future

The Lotus-eaters is more than mythic curiosity or gnomic denunciation of the narcotic. The lotus is civilizational anesthesia. It is something much softer than violence or catastrophe. It discloses our collective desire for relief from danger, from responsibility, from living. The sailors are not injured by the lotus. It does something more subtle and sinister: it dissolves their purpose. In the same way, sacred safety quietly replaces the purpose of leaders with preservation.

Thus, the scandal of the story is not the lotus. Nor is it the weakness of the sailors. Nor is it the manipulation of the islanders. The scandal is Odysseus. In modern terms, he has done something profoundly unsafe. He overrides the sailors’ consent. He uses force. He ignores the emotional state of his men and binds them against their will. Odysseus paid a price for this. His authority was exercised, not requested. Perhaps it would have been safer for them to stay. From the perspective of sacred safety, Odysseus is the villain. From the perspective of purpose—of their voyage—he is the only leader present.

The lotus eaters were hospitable, not evil. They offered what they believed was only sweetness. They performed no violence. They did not coerce. The danger they posed was the comfort that ends the voyage. Sacred safety operates the same way. It offers relief from danger, from uncertainty, from judgement, from exposure. The cost of this is artfully delicate. The cost is the ship never leaves.

Contemporary leaders face a terrible choice. They may indulge the lotus of safety or bind their sailors in transcendent purpose. They may preserve comfort or pursue the journey. The latter option will always appear unsafe. Most now choose the former. This is the tragic structure of leadership.

Safety originally meant not failing. But the voyage means climbing the mast, leaving safe harbor, and crossing unknown waters. When safety becomes sovereign within the sacred, the voyage cannot commence.

The lotus was sweet, peaceful, and harmed no one. It also ended the voyage. Odysseus knew this.