The Value of Safety Third vs. The Smothering Mother
A personal reflection on why “Safety Third” creates stronger individuals and better societies
A personal reflection on why “Safety Third” creates stronger individuals and better societies
“We’ve heard your frustration with COVID, with the measures that are there to keep people safe.” — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the anti-mandate protesters in February 2022
“If the underlying value of risk minimization is not examined then the COVID regime will be permanent even if COVID is not eliminated completely.” – Author Charles Eisenstein, August 2021
The Smothering Mother archetype, also called the Devouring Mother, first became alive for me on a long bike ride on a balmy evening in mid-October 2019.
I was listening to one of rock music’s greatest works of art, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” as I was sorting out some very heavy feelings.
A few years shy of 50, I’d been feeling stuck in my job and lousy about my marriage for a few years, if not longer. Since that summer, I’d been getting strong intuitive messages that I needed to take the leap and quit my job in the spring of 2020 when my contract ran out. This was both because of the timing of my life and because I felt something big was coming collectively.
In addition, my mental health had been unsteady, with bouts of hypomania and minor depression that had moved into a pattern of rapid cycling in 2019. It was all a lot to hold on my plate and I was doubting whether I had the courage to make that leap.
As I biked, the song “Mother” came on and, as I listened to the lyrics, I was taken back 30 years to another time when I was facing a big change in my future. After living all my life in a stable family in a suburb of Tacoma, Washington, I’d been offered two scholarships to attend the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
There was only one problem. My mother hated Los Angeles. The air there was unbreathable, the traffic went too fast and the drivers were reckless, and most of all, that dirty, decadent city was not safe.
Wait…
She never said that. She might have thought it, but she never said it. Yes, she had trouble breathing, she was afraid of driving in Los Angeles and basically didn’t like the city’s culture, but she never said, “Don’t go, it’s not safe.”
In fact, she said the opposite. “It’s your dream, please go. What can I do to help?”
Despite her misgivings, my mom permitted me to spread my wings. She was precisely the opposite of the smothering mother in Pink Floyd’s powerful “Mother.”
Look at these lyrics from the two choruses (or better yet, pause for a bit and watch the video below with the lyrics and really feel them):
Hush now baby, baby don’t you cry
Mother’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true
Mamma’s gonna put all of her fears into you
Mamma’s gonna keep you right here under her wing
She won’t let you fly but she might let you sing
Mamma’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm
Ooh babe, ooh baby, ooh babe
Of course mother’s gonna help build the wall
(And then the final chorus):
Hush now baby, baby don’t you cry
Mamma’s going to check out all your girlfriends for you
And mamma won’t let anyone dirty get through
Mamma’s gonna wait up until you come in
And mamma will always find out where you’ve been
Mamma’s gonna keep baby healthy and clean
Ooh babe, ooh baby, ooh babe
You’ll always be baby to me
Mother, did it need to be so high?
On that bike ride, I stopped right after hearing “Mother” and sent my mother a voice message, thanking her from the bottom of my heart for not being that mother, for letting me go and wishing me well.
Now, here’s an odd twist to the story. Perhaps my mother should have convinced me not to go. After all, while I did graduate with honors from USC and had a few good years working for the sports department of the Los Angeles Daily News, I did get sucked into the decadent lifestyle of that city. Hard. There are many reasons for this which I’ll save for another essay but the short of it is I ended up addicted to hard drugs and nearly lost my life at 25.
I was spending all of my money on dope and hardly eating, so my weight had dropped from my normal 175 pounds to 125 pounds. When I was released from the custody of the police and into my mom’s arms, she said I was like hugging a skeleton. She also said it was one of the saddest but happiest days of her life. Half a life later, that still breaks me up to think of what I put her (and my father) through. What I put myself through, too.
Yet … yet … while I would never advise people to follow the path of drug addiction, I’m grateful for it. Hard as it was, it taught me so much: compassion for the downtrodden, humility (for I know where arrogance can get me), and a strong belief in a Higher Power. It was also a deep lesson in the quote,
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Maybe I would have learned these things on a different path, maybe not. The point is, my mother trusted me enough to take a path that she didn’t want me to take. She didn’t smother me in the name of safety.
Again: Thank you, mom.
I was in a Zoom call this week with a group I’ve come to treasure since I first started going to it last fall. We meet every two weeks to celebrate natural health and connection. I’ve gotten to know several of the members but there are often new people as well. No matter who comes, though, it’s a place where people speak from the heart and where we feel safe to be dissidents about the public health measures that have taken over our lives since COVID-19 spread around the world in 2020.
You see, because of my life experiences, over the past two years I’ve found myself frequently appalled at how often safety is being used by governments, public health officials, and members of the media to justify their policies. And worse, there’s often little room for public discussion over what we are giving up when we focus so much on safety. When some of us speak about things like freedom and personal responsibility, we are often mocked, as though these long-cherished Western values have been rendered meaningless.
Interestingly, one of my experiences living in Japan since 2004 has been a feeling that, in many ways, the culture here has held onto more freedom than American culture has precisely because it hasn’t been so safety-obsessed.
In 2005, we had our first child, a boy, and in 2010, we had a daughter. When they were younger, on our trips to the U.S., we often took them to playgrounds. I couldn’t help but notice how safe American playgrounds were compared to Japanese ones. Sure, they were nice, but I remember strapping my son into a swing when he was five and how quickly he became bored with it. Meanwhile, in the playgrounds in Japan, he’d swing freely, often getting very high, and then would launch himself out of the swing, impressing me with his landing. If only I had a card that read: 10!
I related this to some friends on that Zoom call and one of them suggested I look up playgrounds from 100 years ago. Have a look at this picture below:
What do you feel when you look at it? What do you feel when you ponder possibly climbing up and then going down that crazy slide? If you’re like me, you feel a sense of exhilaration and, yes, reluctance. Would I dare risk it?
How many children died on such equipment back in the day? How many were seriously injured? I think it’s — ahem — safe to say more did than on the equipment of today. But let me ask this: What is the trade-off? Because there is a trade-off.
Humans enjoy doing things that feel dangerous because when we do them successfully, not only does it feel exciting and make us feel alive, it encourages us and makes us feel stronger.
Now ask yourself this: Do the people who run governments and other powerful institutions want everyday people to feel stronger? Do they? Really? Or would stronger citizens — in every way — be a threat to their power?
In my opinion, a healthy society is one in which both individuals and its collective institutions are strong — a both/and world. Unfortunately, what we seem to be living in now is a world where both parties are, in general, becoming weaker. As a result, governments are embodying the archetype of Smothering Mother, not trusting that individuals can be stronger if given some encouragement, convincing themselves that it’s up to them to keep us safe. It’s a lose-lose situation unless you want to live in a dystopia.
There’s one more thing I’d like you to ponder. Is our modern culture’s focus on safety related to an increasing fear of death? We certainly aren’t a culture that is comfortable with death. After all, this is why many places have long requested hearses not drive in daylight and it might be one of the reasons why we put our elderly into old folks’ homes.
It’s understandable to fear death, of course, but our culture’s attitude toward death is not a natural one. Is this fear related to a secular culture that treasures youth and doesn’t spend time pondering the big questions?
Anyone who has done something truly death-defying is going to feel very alive. This is one of the reasons some soldiers and even war reporters speak of being bored when they return home from war. Now, I’m not making a case for war; I’m merely speaking about how a culture that is predicated on safety is one that, at its core, has come to fear death and this is making us, paradoxically, less alive.
“You’re not going to survive life, you’re going to die anyway. So then it becomes a matter of ‘how do you live well?’” — Charles Eisenstein
Charles Eisenstein is one of my favorite philosophers and he has been writing about the psychological impact COVID-19 health policies have been having on society from as early as 2020. And in recent essays and on media appearances, he’s brought up a concept that he says he heard at Burning Man: “Safety Third.”
This really hits home for me. It says that, yes, safety is important but it’s not the most important thing. Heck, I might even move it down the list. It kind of depends on what you are doing, I suppose. Playing a game of baseball? I can’t think it’d be higher than fifth. Playing a game of football? Maybe you move it up some.
Regardless, as far as an overall philosophy for life or for how to run a society, it should never be first. Yet that’s the philosophy we’ve been living under in the 2020s.
We are living through a time of massive changes when old institutions are no longer serving us. Our political leaders and bodies are drowning in self-serving corruption while telling us we live in a democracy, our media points their finger and shouts “Misinformation!” at everyone but themselves, and most of our storytellers, when they cast their vision to the future, can only see dystopias.
One version of that dystopia where the humans went down the path of comfort and safety comes from the 2008 Pixar movie, “Wall-E.” In that movie, in the year 2805, humanity has been reduced to looking like giant babies floating around on EZ-Chairs being served by robots on spaceships drifting to Nowhere. Meanwhile, the Earth they left behind is a giant trash heap. It was probably too dangerous to go outside and clean it. Safety first!
We can see how this focus on safety has even infected our conversations around media. How many times have you heard a pundit say that somebody’s views were “dangerous”? Sometimes I think to myself: In this 24/7 media landscape with citizens everywhere becoming more ADHD by the day, whatever that guy said has probably been forgotten by the time I finish this sentence!
But that doesn’t stop said pundits from calling for censorship, or “canceling” this person. Or even suggesting they’ve committed treason! Why? To protect the audience, of course! Safety first!
I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for two years now. At the end of that Zoom call, I told everybody how the call had pumped me up, giving me the energy to finally write it. Still, it took me several hours to sit down and flesh it out because I’m questioning what the purpose of writing these kinds of pieces is. Am I trying to convince others or is this mere preaching to the choir? Maybe the point is just to write it, put it out there and let go of the results. Some will hear it, some won’t, so be it.
Still, from a Big Picture perspective, I’m struggling with nihilism, feeling like the SS Civilization may be headed straight toward the killer iceberg. What’s the point in writing anything if we’re going to crash, and crash soon? Should I be learning to garden and focusing on survival skills instead?
However, after I ended the call, I got a sign to write the darn thing. I was getting some breakfast ready and did what I often do: I opened YouTube to see if there was a video I could watch while I ate. And wouldn’t you know it, the video below was right there in the top row of my feed! Do you see the title, “How an Obsession with SAFETY Leads to Mental Illness & Tyranny”?
It’s a great video. So good that I almost used it as an excuse for why I didn’t need to write this blog post. Just share the video, instead! (Writers: See how tricky our rationalizations can be not to write! Scary!).
However, much as I can appreciate the efficiency of sharing media that speaks well for us, there’s also value in adding our take on a viewpoint we share with another … and then sharing our take and their take.
That’s why I made this a personal essay and started by talking about how my life was impacted by not having a smothering mother. I wanted to be clear: my mom took a risk and my path wasn’t easy, so I can understand the smothering mothers. However, when people tell me I have a certain strength of spirit, I’m reasonably sure I gained that because my parents let me go out into the scary world where I took my knocks. I’m also reasonably sure that if my mother had smothered me, I would lack the courage that I’m going to need to face some very big challenges over the next few years.
So again, thank you, mom.
And also, thank you mom (and dad) for being there for me when I did fall. That’s the sort of relationship I’d like to think we could have with our government, too: mostly leave us alone and trust us to be adults, but be enough of a safety net to help us out when we get in over our heads. Discerning what is a healthy safety net and what is a smothering one is key.
Unfortunately, it seems most of the people who are running our governments, working in influential think tanks, and working in our media no longer trust everyday citizens. They call us stupid and feel they have to watch over us. And then they justify their behavior by saying they are “keeping us safe” just as Justin Trudeau did in the quote that leads this post.
If you watch the video I posted a few paragraphs back, you’ll hear why many classic thinkers say this is a terrible idea for both individuals and a civilization. In short, if we’re going to create the kinds of citizens — strong, resilient, creative, courageous — that we are going to need to help us reboot our civilization, we’re going to have to move safety out of its pole position at least back to spot #3.
So, what do you think? Can we trade a little safety for some more freedom? Can we let our people fly again? Or must our Smothering Mother Government help us build our wall so high? And what will the cost be to us as individuals and as a society if we chose that latter option?
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