Harm Avoidance

Investment advisors will often advise people to consider their risk tolerance before making financial decisions. Age, years to retirement, current financial position, familial status (e.g. how many dependents you have or will have), job security, and other factual factors are relevant, but they don't tell the full story. A "gut check," as in "how much risk can I tolerate and still be able to sleep at night," is a personal matter, not one that's parseable by looking at a sheet of numbers. Some can sleep like lambs while leveraged to the hilt, while others won't even carry a mortgage because debt makes them sweat. While there is the matter of prudence vs recklessness, there isn't really a clear right vs wrong in risk tolerance. Personal preference matters.

The same can be said for less directly financial matters, such as the sort of job you prefer, your dietary and exercise choices, your leisure activities, and the friends you choose.

For individuals, risk tolerance only extends to a small circle of family and dependents. Strangers aren't much affected, nor will they care much, if you like to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, or eat gas station sushi, or do Jackass style stupid human tricks. Or gamble beyond your means, or blow every dollar you make on cocaine, or barge into biker bars talking trash. Likewise, few will care if you stuff all your earnings into a mattress, or wear seven masks, goggles, and SPF one million before stepping out of your house.

Where the rest of us start caring about your predilections is when those predilections are imposed on us.

I recently heard an interesting point regarding the infiltration of woke-sensitivity into universities. It was phrased as a preference for harm avoidance, which may not be identical to risk tolerance, but certainly shares the same boat.

The notion of policed speech, aggressive enforcement of such language demands as neopronouns, deplatforming of dissenting opinions, the replacement of open inquiry and debate by rote inculcation, and the rest of the woke playbook can all be understood as a prioritization of harm avoidance. The harm being avoided is potential affront of people who belong to protected identity groups.

The point that made my ears perk up? Causative connection between prioritizing harm avoidance and the increase in women in universities, especially at the top of the org charts. The hypothesis goes: since women are naturally more risk-averse than men, they are more apt to minimize risk in the organizations and institutions they head up. Obviously, this is a generalization, and as obviously we can find women who engage in extreme sports and men who use e-readers because they worry about paper cuts from real books, but generalizations, if valid, will manifest as societal drivers.

I won't belabor that point any further - you're smart enough to chew on it for a bit, and factor in the many other variables that produced this outcome.

It is the question of prioritizing harm avoidance, even if we don't seek its origin in identity matters, that is fundamental to liberty itself.

Should harm avoidance be elevated above the pursuit of knowledge and discerning the truth?

Should harm avoidance trump self-determination?

Should harm avoidance override equal treatment, under the law or in society?

You or I can choose how much harm avoidance we embrace, and indeed we do so every day. Do you wait for the crosswalk light to turn green before crossing? Does the amount of traffic on the road affect your decision? Do you look at the date on the milk carton before pouring some on your Cheerios?

I've heard defenders of "woke" define it as "being nice to others." If you're a regular reader, you know my definition starts with the word "coercion," because it's not enough that someone decides he or she or zhit will be nice to others. The "nice" must be required of everyone, with "nice" being defined very rigidly, narrowly, and demandingly.

All in the name of harm avoidance. If you use the wrong words, or express the wrong viewpoints, or vote for the wrong people, you risk hurting someone's feelings. Or, in that language, of offending them. Offendedness being highly subjective and internal, the right to claim offense is an open invitation, rife with moral hazard, to be offended at ever-slighter slights, in order to coerce desired behaviors and outcomes.

But, in this I am mostly preaching to the choir. The problem is when this attitude of swaddling everyone in cotton and packing peanuts extends to the rest of life. I re-ask the previous questions, with an extra word.

Should coerced harm avoidance be elevated above the pursuit of knowledge and discerning the truth?

Should coerced harm avoidance trump self-determination?

Should coerced harm avoidance override equal treatment, under the law or in society?

If you answer yes, fully or qualified, the onus is on you to prove to me why you have a right to restrict my life and my choices. Otherwise, you’re simply declaring that my rights are yours to infringe.

Our rights have been described as being "unalienable." That means they can neither be given away nor taken away. Yet that's exactly what the harm avoidance crowd seeks to do, every day. Not for themselves - that wouldn't bother me in the slightest - but for third parties that quite often never asked for their involvement.

The worst part of all this is the selectivity. Claudine Gay oversaw a culture at Harvard that quashed open inquiry, disagreement, dissent, and debate. That culture protected members of certain "oppressed" groups to totalitarian degrees, but when actual, open "hate speech" was aimed at individuals not deemed worth protecting, harm avoidance became "depending on the context."

If you believe in liberty, don't presume to decide for me what my risk tolerance is, or whether I need to have some "harm avoidance" engineered into my life. If you believe it's proper that you do, then you don't believe in liberty. If that's the case, just say so, and we'll both know where we stand.