subject: What Is Safety? [print this page] What is safety? Most people would agree with the following logic: if we practice "safety" in every situation and environment we are exposed to and take care in our choices and actions, generally this gives us the feeling of being relatively secure and therefore we believe and have faith that by practising safety in any given situation we will be able to avoid most all potential risks and dangers present, while taking advantage of at least some of the benefits available to us within the environment; our choice to be safe assists us in achieving another day of life in our world. However, if we do not obey the rules and laws governed by man or nature we consider these behaviors and decisions as "unsafe" because statistically we have been taught that we are putting ourselves at higher risks for personal injury, the injury of others, damage to our way of life, socio-economic crisis, legal ramifications and even death. It can easily be argued that survival of the fittest is the evolutionary game of self preservation.
What is safety? I believe that safety begins in the mind as a selfish construct, safety mindedness minimizes dangers and risks while maximizing the benefits and rewards available within a given environment or situation its goal is to maintain security and stability so that another day of life can be achieved Under certain circumstances safety may be transferred to an identity group or in many cases to an organism's progeny, the progeny then teach their progeny how to be safe. These beliefs, rules and laws have been determined over time through trial and error, in addition to our evolutionary tendency toward self preservation we are also taught and teach our children and others to be "safe". Evidence of this educating might for example be a crossing guard at a school to make sure that traffic safety is practised by children who attend the school and by motorists using the roads near a school, or work safety programs implemented by a company to protect their employees while they are on the job. Sayings like: "Safety First" or "Safety First, Last and Always" resonate deeply with us. When someone says that something is "unsafe" it generally deters people from doing or interacting with whatever it might be. Safety is similar to our drive for self preservation and is more than likely the result of this drive it teaches us how to survive so that our species can continue.Safety is in a sense an evolutionary belief system that defines our past, present and future as a species.
