The Safety Control Delusion

The Safety Control Delusion

One of the profound realizations of parenting is that you cannot control your own children. One of the stark realizations of marriage is that you cannot control your partner. Yet, here is Safety pushing all this delusional nonsense about ‘controlling’ others.

There is a massive contradiction in the rhetoric of Safety. The mythology of ‘safety is a choice you make’ is in direct contradiction to the idea that people can be controlled. This yearning and wishing for control, even to the eugenics practiced by certain companies and preached by organisations in their quest for zero is a denial of the fundamental reality of human autonomy.

As much as we might wish humans were behaviourist rats in a cage, such a model of humanity is delusional. Half the time we don’t even know ourselves why we do things that are irrational and impulsively illogical. Sometimes an unconscious urge seems to take hold and we later reflect and wonder, ‘where did that come from?’ Safety needs to sit down sometime and have a good hard look at itself and wonder where all this is going.

I see with interest this growing interest in Safety with neurophysiology and suroepsychology. Maybe this is the grand hope to control those dysfunctional computers on top of those mis-behaving bodies. Of course, Safety doesn’t stop and interrogate the anthropological assumptions of this ‘science’ or what it proposes for human identity. Critical thinking is in direct opposition to compliance thinking.

And now we see an attraction to the delusion of the prediction of human behaviour: https://sianationalconference.com.au/session/conceptual-model-for-predicting-worker-safety-behaviour-in-construction-projects-a-neural-network-approach/

Are we about to see the insurance and gambling industries go out of business? Not likely. Both those industries know much more than Safety about fallibility, mortality, vulnerability and risk.

Why is someone not standing up and questioning the ontology of this silly language of ‘prediction’ and showing its trajectory? I will tell you why. Safety would rather believe the delusion of control than the reality of autonomy. Like the delusions of zero in denial of fallibility, Safety marches deeper into dream world than real world. Next step in the trajectory of safety is transhumanism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism). I wrote about this in my book on fallibility (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/fallibility-risk-living-uncertainty/).

One of the real life realizations about parenting and marriage is that if someone goes with you, it’s not because of your control but because of a dozen other factors beyond your control.

The attribution of control of others redefines the nature of policing. Who on earth wants to police their partner or children? If you seek to, what does that say about you?

Why would we need policing if people can be controlled? Why is it that our gaols are full of the same people who exit and re-enter if they can be controlled? The whole nonsense language of ‘prediction’ and ‘control’ is based on a behaviourist paradigm that doesn’t match reality. I’m sure the government would love to know how to ‘re-program’ terrorists who aren’t predictable and cannot be controlled. Maybe that’s why government avoids connecting with the safety industry, you simply can’t be a profession and believe any of this prediction and control nonsense.