Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better

by Matt Hern

From warnings on coffee cups to colour-coded terrorist gauges to ubiquitous security cameras, our culture is obsessed with safety.
Some of this is drive by lawyers and insurance, and some by over-zealous public officials, but much is indicative of a cultural conversation that has lost its bearings. The result is not just a neurotically restrictive society, but one which actively undermines individual and community self-reliance. More importantly, we are creating a world of officious administration, management by statistics, absurd regulations, rampaging lawsuits, and hygenically cleansed public spaces. We are trying to render the human and natural worlds predictable and calculated. In doing so, we are trampling common discourse about politics and ethics.
Hern asserts that safer just isn't always better. Throughout "Watch Yourself," he emphasizes the need to rethink our approach to risk, reconsider our fixation with safety, and reassert individual decision-making.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education

182 pages, Paperback

First published July 8, 2007

Reviews

[Diana Sandberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is interesting to read this book 14 years after its publication, especially a little over a year since the Covid plague hit. Questions of safety are more stark and less debatable, while notions of personal responsibility are increasingly fraught. I find myself disinclined to engage and becoming more and more fatalistic about issues of social control. As a student of history, I often muse upon the fact that, over the millennia, the vast majority of humans have had very little of either agency or privacy. Why should we expect any different from whatever future we have left?