Nothing is more precious to me than my children. So why am I am not doing everything I can to protect them?
If I was really serious about keeping my children safe, then I probably shouldn’t let them out of my sight. I certainly wouldn’t let them ride a bike or skateboard; and obviously they would never go near a climbing frame (at least, not without wall-to-wall foam.) In fact, all hard surfaces are out – you can trip-up anywhere. And sharp objects, obvs.
I wouldn’t let them cross a road or mix with strangers. I wouldn’t let them go to school, to Sunday school, to play team sport.
In fact, let’s get serious. Why would I let them leave the house at all? I should lock them down. Perhaps install cameras around my house, so I can monitor them.
All this will take its toll on me. I would need to be constantly vigilant. It’s ok though, because I have a brilliant strategy!
All you have to do is terrorise them into fearing the world.
Lovingly nurture within them a pathological fear of the outside, of the foreign and unknown.
It wouldn’t take long. My children are pretty tough, but I reckon I could break them in 6 weeks. Maybe less if I had some support from the behavioural experts on Sage. Or I could just leave BBC news on in their bedroom.
My conscience would be clear, because I wouldn’t even have to lie to them. The world is dangerous. It’s true – they could die out there. All I need to do is emphasise the danger, the downside, the risk, and let their imagination do the rest.
Here is the coup de grâce. I’ll tell them that if anything ever happens to them, it would kill me.
Guilt, shame, pathological terror. These are all legitimate safeguarding tools in a society that values safety above all else.
No loving parent would do this. But it is precisely what the British State has done and continues to do to our children.
Why is it a horror show, and not a story of compassion and love? After all, it’s a rational and methodologically-sound approach to safeguarding.
I realise you know this already, but just in case a member of Sage is reading, here is the reason that a policy of protecting other people becomes quickly pathological.
Believing you have the right to protect other people is a tyrant’s presumption. That’s because you can only protect others by putting them in a prison of your devising. That prison may be a bubble, a house, a face mask, a culture of fear. It’s a policy that speaks in favour of life, but only so that those lives can be controlled.
Life without risk is not life, it is biological existence. Science cannot tell the difference because it is, by definition, objective. Meanwhile life is, by definition, subjective. It is only life when it is experienced.
There is no reward without risk just as there can be no life without the prospect of death.
All parents know this because all parents feel this tension. Their greatest fear and strongest instinct is to protect their children from risk. But their greatest hope is for them flourish in the world. Their fears and their hopes are completely incompatible, and they must be carefully balanced.
If they are to succeed as a parent, eventually hope must win.
If we are to succeed as a society, the parental ambitions of the State must lose.
Let hope win.
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