Safetyism

In Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation, safetyism is defined as “the West’s cultural bias toward suppression of risk-taking and submission to a quasi-absolute form of safety that attempts to regulate and control every sphere of social interaction and techno-economic relation.” The book’s argument is recursive: by trying to eliminate all risk, safetyism has itself become a “civilizational danger” — an existential risk. The examples it marshals run from regulatory backlash against nuclear energy and fracking, to fears that space exploration is mere escapism, to “AI safetyism” in Silicon Valley so dominant that an obsession with alignment could, by inhibiting accelerated progress, become an existential risk in its own right. The book ties it to a broader culture of “riskphobia” (paired with Paul Boghossian’s “cognophobia”), and quotes Elon Musk’s lament during the 2023 Starship launch that civilizations decline when “they quit taking risks… every year there are more referees and fewer doers.”

Context: “Safetyism” was popularized by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) to describe a culture that treats safety as a sacred value overriding other goods. Boom (by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber) extends the term from campus culture to technological and economic risk-taking.

Where this appears

• Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation — defines safetyism as the West’s risk-suppressing cultural bias and argues it has itself become an existential/civilizational risk, with examples from nuclear, fracking, space, and AI safety.