Safety

It's not much fun, but it's very safe.

In a society where outrage drives media engagement and profits, there is an outsized incentive for pundits and politicians to make you feel unsafe. Recognizing and resisting this tendency is a necessary skill for maintaining your psychological freedom.

Maslow's Need for Safety

Safety is a primal emotional concern, just above food and shelter on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you don't feel safe and secure in your environment, it is very difficult to focus on finding love, educational advancement, or artistic pursuits. Creating a society where crime and grift are minimized, and there is the perception of equal justice, is a necessary prerequisite for a culture that allows most people to experience the more sublime layers of Maslow.

The Safety Cage

Negativity bias in the media has caused many people to perceive our society as becoming less safe, even as every meterstick shows it becoming more safe. Crime is at historically low levels, but fear and anxiety are at an all-time high. This has led to a feedback loop where people retreat into the safety of their homes and familiar places, spend less time venturing out into the world, so that even more of their information comes from outrage-fueled media. This causes the world to close in on them, trapping them in a mental cage of their own fear and anxiety.