Jonathan Sumption has given an interview to Yascha Mounk at Persuasion about why democracy is in peril. The basic problem, he thinks, is that citizens of liberal democracies have become more and more risk averse and as a result want the state to do more and more to protect them from the kind of minor, everyday risks that are part and parcel of living as free citizens. Here is an extract:
Mounk: It strikes me that when I was in grad school and starting to learn about the subject, there was tremendous certainty about the future of democracy. Now the consensus seems to have flipped. Why do you think that, in all the time the American and British democracies have existed, it is at this point that we’re seeing special stress on the institutions?
Sumption: I think there are a number of reasons, but the most important of them is risk aversion. This is, in one sense, a perfectly natural development of human societies once a larger number of people becomes involved in public affairs. But over the last century, people in the West have become progressively more risk averse. They have become progressively anxious that the state should protect them against risks which are not just sudden, external, once-in-a-century catastrophes, but are very much part of the ordinary risks associated with any kind of life in which there is a reasonable degree of individual freedom. Financial risks, health risks, safety risks of one sort or another. We expect a high degree of protection from the state against these risks.
The problem is that when you get up a fear of risks which are associated with ordinary life, and you look to the state to deal with that, the state will react in the only way it knows, which is by introducing coercion, in order to prevent you doing the things that give rise to the risk and prevent everyone else doing them as well. So you get a situation where the state suppresses part of life in order to suppress the taking of risks, which is actually inseparable from any kind of free activity in a democracy.
Worth reading in full.
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I asked a few people I know what they thought was the percentage of the population who have died from Covid-19.
These are not stupid people, but they gave ridiculous answers, such as 3%, 5%, 10%.
Well now that we know only 17,500 people in the UK died from Covid over a period of almost 2 years, and not the fraudulent figure of 148,000 which the government still clings to, we can say that 99.9875% survived per year.
Or, 0.0125% died.
(One person in eight thousand.)
And average age 82.5 years!
Some deadly pandemic!
Pathetic, limp-wristed, wet-lettuce, woe is me wokes emboldened by media egging them on is what is ruining democracy. That and the the absurd get out of jail free card of deleting any opposing opinion.
Time to round up on these people and smash some sense into them the old fashioned way.
‘Risk-averse’ reminds me about tiny aspect of my child-hood. Costly soft-surfaces in playgrounds were being introduced that only wealthy councils could afford; friends and I felt sorry for children there.
We viewed those surfaces as ‘spoil-sports’; couldn’t run ‘fast’ on them, couldn’t use them as ‘table’ for less active games, couldn’t bounce back to up and running, if tripped over own feet, so quickly as from tarmac.
Whole aim in life was play. Soft-surfaces wasted play-time.
When landed on hands and knees, (babies’ position) thing that hurt was ‘dignity’. Straight back on feet cured that hurt immediately.
Only problem was if an adult spotted ‘damage’ after play-time. Couldn’t always remember when it’d happened, didn’t hurt at all, already healing, but anti-sceptic lotion did hurt. Learning to control our feet better resolved that problem.
Maybe the tarmac enabled self-control and coping with life’s ‘ups and downs.’
When I see children now trip over their feet, adults dash screaming to them and cuddle them, holding them down. The children then start screaming.
Play-ground owners’ fault when children trip over their own feet?
Just seen my own typo. My apologies: antiseptic is actually what I meant
Sumption is very worth listening to but I was not impressed by his remarks about Brexit. he stated that many who supported Brexit felt that any methods were justified to get that result. The most important issues surely were, and remain:
1 we still have not got what we voted for 6 years ago
2 we got none of what we voted for for 4 years
3 the Remainers used methods, with support from imaginative judges, to seek to deny Brexit at all
4 The example he gave (Boris trying to save a back bencher) was an ill-advised attempt to get around Parliamentary procedure which was of limited significance and a one-off issue whereas the Remainers abuse of Parliament would have resulted in permanent denial of the referendum result.
I do strongly agree that we need to return to a better respect of Parliamentary conventions but we also need Parliament to start respecting the people and our views and values. The poor quality of Parliamentarians flows from their selectio. Their attitudes are reinforced by the MSM and recently the Supreme Court all of which want a different people than there is and live in isolation from us.
Excessive risk aversion restricts the individual who is afflicted by it. It means someone is left standing on the kerb while others, who can see that there is no traffic, walk across the road.
The problem is when excessive risk aversion is coupled with a perverted perception of risk and a zeal for “protecting” others. This is where punitive speed limits, bumps etc slow traffic almost to a standstill, there are long gaps in traffic, but you must not cross until the green light lets you.
It’s also where healthy people are compelled to avoid other healthy people or they will be punished.
It was wonderful to read this brilliant interview (I would strongly recommend listening to or reading the full interview): such clarity of thought based on huge knowledge, good, well-informed questions from Yascha Mounk, altogether very stimulating.
Back when I read Esquire magazine about thirty years ago they did a satirical piece on the child safety craze. It ended with the infant in something like a flak jacket, lying in a bombproof crib, and Dad (the author) saying ‘Please don’t die on my shift, baby.’
It would probably read like straight reporting from the Daily Mail today.
The irony is that the state has been a negative factor in health and safety during the Covid panic: lockdowns, increasing senescence, closing off hospitals to people with serious disease, stopping hospitals and doctors from using effective treatments, pushing treatments that are dangerous and don’t work.
Extreme risk aversion is nothing to do with the threat to our democracy. If it was, we wouldn’t have shut down our economy and be in the process of shutting down our energy infrastructure.
What is happening is that woke policies are being implemented. They have no valid justification, so they are justified on scare tactics. These are not valid scares, but the public do not know this, and behave like sheep.
Interesting discussion. Risk aversion is certainly a thing here. But what causes it? This is a more important question I think.
Paris, Macron gases his own citizens, women and children in restaurants of all places, the WEF “young leaders” Trudeau, Macron, Adern, or as I prefer to call them, “Junge Führungskräfte”, seem to have learned a lot from their master, ex Hitler-Jugend, Klaus Schwaub, obvious where this creature got his mentality from, and it appears to have rubbed off on them
These days I have to contain myself, if I hear the phrase ‘keep safe’ I feel inclined to commit GBH, it is the most cringeworthy, lily livered, nauseating, feeble, submissive phrase to come out of this covid nonsense. I do not want to ‘keep safe’ I want to live my life on the edge, taking risks, chancing my luck, (If you can make one heap of all your winnings, And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss) and dicing with death. I have nearly come to a sticky end several times in my life but my luck held and I am still here, I would not have it any other way.
This keep safe drivel has been the key as to why so many weak, spineless politicians have been able to take up the role of authoritarian tyrant whilst still pretending to be some sort of Mother Teresa figure. It has been an open goal for those keen on pushing us in to a nightmare world of global totalitarian communitarianism. But it is all for the common good…… really? and who decides what is the common good? and as the good book tells us; For what shall it profit a… Read more »
Oh how I despise the stupid saying ‘keep safe’ it is an inanity and meaningless.
Extreme risk aversion is better expressed as abject cowardice…
There is risk aversion, but there is also denial of responsibility, that the government will cover my back so I don’t need to.
There’s a widespread false assumption that restrictions are safe when they’re as safe as punches from Frank Bruno.
Is it risk aversion?
I don’t see the population being very risk averse when it comes to taking experimental mRNA therapies.
I think he is confusing risk aversion with slavish obedience.
Restrictions are wrongly seen as safe, nannying is wrongly seen as safe.
The ‘risk’ was confected in propaganda. It was a fiction. The plebs just followed Fuhrer orders .
He’s very good at articulating what everyone else is thinking.
We’ve had 30 – 40 years of governments terrifying their subjects – the war on terror and Covid being the 2 best examples. Of course, in situations like these, people’s ability to see through the BS leads them to rely on the state more and more.
George WIll’s Wednesday column is on the same topic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/09/how-government-progressives-forfeit-public-trust/
How about the media forfeit public trust?
(Don’t get me started. My suspicions about the news media began fermenting 35 years ago.)
It depends upon what one means by “media”.
The American news media (meaning, apart from the Web blogs, and apart from opinion columnists like Will, who’s right-of-center) is probably 95% left-of-center. In about 2004/2005, a majority of it went off the cliff like a herd of lemmings. It slobbered all over Barack Obama’s feet, and was utterly blind-sided by ISIS.
Today, America’s self-described “Conservative Journalism” (Web blogs) is mostly a bunch of low-information pamphleteers, to whom conservatism has nothing to do with proper behavior and a sense of decency and personal honor.
As an unsupportable generalization … The Media as a whole (including entertainment and social media) … is hedonistic sanctimony.
Essentially it is decadence in the so-called ‘West’ that is poisoning democracy.
Do you really want democracy, or just the wealth, goods, security, is has been said to offer?
The public sphere is the essence of democracy; it is being colonised, violated and corrupted by consumerism, tendentious politicisation, censorship, propaganda, which the modern person is ill-equipped to navigate: and why should they have to?
Bottom line: ‘homo occidentalis’ wants sex, stuff, pleasure, comfort; not truth, meaning, virtue, justice.
So he will get it – to his own damnation.
If this article has any content, I wasn’t able to find it.
I’ve now been banned from meeting with my parents since March 2020 and spent almost a year in complete social isolation (I still fondly remember a two sentence conversation in passing with an acquaintance in January 2021 as it was the only event of this kind in the time between October 2020 and end of July 2021). This happened for the largely hypothetical benefit of all kinds of other people I don’t know. It’s still uncertain if I’ll ever be able to meet my parents again. And there are still powerful voices clamouring for rolling everything back right into the state of January 2021.
Hence, if it’s Sorry, son, but democracy is for the benefit of other people and not for your’s, democracy can hardly expect a Thank you! from me in return. Give and take is ok, but not some always giving and some others always taking.
To elaborate on this a little in a more abstract way: It’s not extreme safetyism which is destroying democracy, but the idea – originally coined in the 1970s phrase The private is political – that the authority of the state has no legitimate boundaries. Eg, some moron convinces himself (herself, actually, in this case) that humans breathing unobstructedly is a grave danger to society as such. And of course, the state immediatley creates regulations defining what does or doesn’t constitute legal breathing. Likewise, someone else claims to be convinced that people meeting other people is just too dangerous. And of course, the state then decrees that families must be torn apart and that people may only legally meet other people from the same household. Etc. Whatever individuals might conceivably do, the state asserts a right to sacrifice it to this or that great cause at the politician’s discretion: All people are equal. Specifically, all people are equally valueless.
Totalitarian democracy is worse than totalitaran autocracy because it’s multipolar and completely erratic: Whatever someone commanding a PR budget can momentarily popularize, no matter how completely idiotic or how incompatible with what people believed were their perfectly legitimate own lives, becomes possible.… Read more »
Sumption: “We expect a high degree of protection from the state against these risks.”
An argument can be made that this is something which has been cultivated in the electorate. Sometimes deliberately, but at other times, not.
Neville Chamberlain wanted to “take care of all our people” (dialogue from Churchill: the Wilderness Years).
While signing the first of the 1960s Civil Rights acts, Lyndon Johnson commented that the legislation would weld the “colored” community to the Democratic Party for a century. (Guess what? That Act had been passed by a Republican Congress, over Democratic opposition.)
Welcome to the present day.
It’s broadly called culture. The current fracas over COVID exists inside it, and is inescapably molded by it. It shapes the way today’s press behaves, the way politicians behave, and every other “way”. It might, or might not, determine how this or that individual thinks and behaves. Culture is a generality, but defines our larger environment.
Where did it come from?
Look back at the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The steady elevation of “The Idea” as gospel. Call it intellectualism, or whatever. … If we can conceive it, we’re legitimate if we worship it.
Look back at the Mod generation in Britain, and the libertine Sixties kids in the States. Consider the teachings of Dr. Benjamin Spock, by which many post-War kids were raised (and which he later rescinded.) Consider the rise of psychology in popularity, to where it generally became an ‘ism’, permitting anyone to invoke themselves as a victim of something.
Then consider how those shallowed-out segments of the population parented (or didn’t) their children.
Does it then surprise regarding where the worst of the Millennials come from?
Today’s Daily Mail website has an article about a dude who had the time and date of his wedding… Read more »
Not sure I agree with much of this.
Its not ‘risk aversion’ a such, its the feeling by many ( majority) that nanny state will make it OK whatever risk I run. Which does I agree lead to the State taking risk averse stances logically it has to otherwise it goes bust.
The reason people liked lockdowns and vaccines was because they felt ‘better off’. What was not to like about being paid to do nothing for a while? And if you did not bother to read about ‘these’ jabs, well just have them, no biggie, then I get to do what I want with the lolly I’ve saved through the lockdowns. Greed, sloth, nothing more complicated.
The rest of this piece explores Sumption’s own politics, its not mine.
Hear, hear:
But I believe, first of all, that there are some areas of human existence which are, inescapably, our own private domain.
One example is whether we are going to get vaccinated and admit a particular drug into our bodies. The choice that I’ve made is that I want that. But I think that it’s a choice which rationally can be made the other way. I cite that simply as an example of one area which seems to me to be inescapably outside the domain of state action.
No Lord Sumption, western democracy was destroyed many many decades ago, tis but a fiction! We could go back further, but let’s start with Cecil Rhodes and his round table illuminati colleagues, who’s avowed plan was to reunite Great Britain and the USA into one political entity, facilitate a global war (WWI) destroying a unified Germany in the process, and establishing an Anglo Saxon one world government…. Let’s not forget the creation of the FED which gave control of global finance to an evil oligarchy of fabulously wealthy bankers and industrialists. We arrive at the present day, “elected” governments are but caretakers for a global elite that controls it all! A conspiracy theory? If anybody still thinks we have a say in anything due to our magnificent, incorruptible parliamentary democracy, your a waste of oxygen.
Ultimately, safetyism is a radical form of self-regard, and un-American.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/safety-third-covid-19-and-the-american-character/
“Americans must now make a choice. It’s not merely a choice about how we want to live. It’s a choice about who we want to be. Those who fetishize safety posture themselves as virtuous people; they pretend that their concerns are an expression of a deep, abiding care for others. But this is a lie. Ultimately, safetyism—where the avoidance of harm becomes a way of inhabiting the world—is a radical form of self-regard. To elevate safety to the status of an idol reveals a fear of life; it conceals a pathological mindset where worry and uncertainty become a controlling presence. It is solipsistic navel-gazing, a decadent wallowing in anxiety and self-pity.
The dehumanizing aspects of safetyism are disguised by endless platitudes about the well-being of others. But insisting upon others’ compliance so that you can live a safer life (after all, we can never be entirely safe) is ultimately an expression of personal weakness. It is a betrayal of the national character. Taken to the scale of society at large, safetyism threatens the dignity of our people. The time has come for a collective embrace of risk—the inherent risk… Read more »
Thanks for the quote,and the link. Looks an interesting site.
I think a bit more risk aversion among the leaders of the western World wouldn’t go amiss at the moment.
It is patently obvious to anyone paying attention that the approach taken to the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has been misguided by powerful influences off, and that our lead-by-the-nose leaders are now realising that ‘the science’ they were told they were following was a false god and their jobs are on the line.
So, what they are doing is using the well anticipated military exercises in Belarus and Russia adjacent to Ukraine to beat the drums of war as a massive ‘dead cat’ to distract the people from their catastrophic mismanagement of the newly defined ‘pandemic’.
And, of course as usual, any military action we the people are dragged into, won’t be fought anywhere near the nation beating the loudest drum, but they will make a fortune selling us the weapons to use for their geopolitical ambitions.
This aversion to risk or “safetyism” was inevitable once feminism took control of much of the teaching profession the vast majority of teachers are now female with very few male teachers – when I was at school around the late 1970’s early 1980’s it would roughly be around 50/50 male/female … these days the profession is dominated by female teachers – nothing against female teachers who i am sure are very good at their jobs – but it’s no coincidence that the overwhelmingly female dominated teaching profession has coincided with an end to risky competitive sports, protection and helmet-wearing which is now almost compulsory for practically any outdoor activity and hi-vis bibs are mandatory whenever kids are taken out of school by mainly female teachers – also take into account that in health & welfare 82% of social workers are female with very few males – couple this also with the rise of intentional single motherhood it is now quite common for a child to progress from nappies to young adulthood without ever experiencing any positive male influence to their lives and in their thinking as they grow up which is important because males are much more inclined to be… Read more »
Sniff, sniff. I smell hobby-horse shit 🙂
I agree with him. Society is increasingly feminised. More risk averse, more.passive aggressive rather than directly aggressive.
One can argue whether it’s a good thing or not, but it’s pretty real.
I agree with Eric. This does not mean we are wife beaters. It’s simply a matter of common sense.
Eric, does drizzle count as rain? Or is it just a lot of moisture in the air?
Many people are not capable of critical thinking and I am afraid that includes a much higher proportion of women, but with a growing proportion of men. Regardless of sex, whenever you put people who cannot think critically into positions of authority, the planet goes to schitt.
Women are stupid? Mostly stupid? Much more likely to be stupid than men? And you know because?
I’ve read all sorts of comments here over almost two years (yep – since the first days of Lockdown Sceptic). This is the only one I’ve seen that shows a seriously limited capacity for critical thinking.
But perhaps you’re just being pre-menstrual.
Did I touch a nerve? It is an observation that critical thinking is more deficient in one group than another. If you have a different observation then fine, it doesn’t make mine any less valid.
So now critical thinking is “more deficient” in women than in men?
You need to mix with more intelligent women – if they’ll have you. The women I know would subject you to some critical thinking you might not enjoy.
Perhaps you prefer to surround yourself with stupid ones who agree with you. There are indeed stupid women, just as there are stupid men.
I am actually in a technical industry and I know some really, really intelligent women. Mathematicians and scientists as good as or better than their male colleagues. Then I think of the women I know in management. One of them is amazing, the others are all morons, making stupid decisions all the time. I’m not saying that women are stupid. I am saying that many women (by no means all) are rubbish at making difficult decisions. You don’t need to be offended by that.
So am I and that is bullshit. There are hardly any talented women in my area. It has long been forgotten that we have different makeups. Men are far better at logical tasks and rational emotionless thinking and decision making.
I also wouldn’t want a fat dyke trying to rescue me from a burning building. Men and women never were and never will be the same.
I can assure you that there are some good ones. Men outnumber women by around 9:1 in technical roles in my workplace. The women that we do have in technical roles are really good at what they do, especially the ones that were educated in Central/Eastern Europe. Actually, come to think of it, all but one is from Central/Eastern Europe, and that one has the softest skillset of them all. Maybe that says something profound about our crappy education system.
Quite right, and there are an awful lot more poofters around now too
He’s correct.
I trained 25,000 practitioners in advanced project and risk management over a 20 year period. When discussing the business culture, the single most common feedback was risk aversion, or to put it another way, a complete lack of appetite for risk.
No risk, no exploration, no adventure, no breakthroughs.
Compare today with the pioneers of the last 200 years and it tells a sorry tale.
Risk aversion tied in with fear of being held responsible (an impediment for corporate ladder climbers) and being sued by someone for something.