Living in a risk-free world

As we have been reminded many times over the past couple of months, we’re living through unprecedented times. And because the pandemic is so unprecedented, and because we have the tendency to better remember unprecedented events, it’s more likely that we’ll be able to recall some of the things that have happened so far in 2020 than we would had there been no coronavirus.

Aside from seeing a homeless guy throw a loaf of bread at a lorry, I think there are two pandemic-related events that I’m unlikely to forget for the rest of my life. 

The first was sitting in Lior’s bar in Tel Aviv (the best bar in Tel Aviv), with REM’s ‘It's The End Of The World As We Know It’ blasting out of the stereo. As the music blared, someone tried to explain how the whole virus was a test to see if people would blindly obey government orders. Those that didn’t obey would have their names marked down as potential troublemakers. That was the theory anyway.

The other thing was less an event than an experience. On my trip back to the UK, the airport was almost entirely empty and, aside from two other people, I was the only non-Hasidic person on my flight. That probably wasn’t a fluke occurrence. Hasidic communities in New York, London and Israel have made headlines for completely ignoring lockdown rules.

This has been a growing source of amusement for me as the pandemic has progressed. You would expect young people to be more likely to defy government orders. In reality, most young people in the UK seem to have been amongst the most ardent supporters of the lockdown. 

Conversely, you would expect Hasidim, who must be one of the most conservative groups living in this country, to be law-abiding and stick to the rules. Instead, they’ve often been quite brazen in carrying on as though there was no lockdown in place at all.

How did this paradoxical situation come about? I think it may be down to most young people in the UK growing up in an almost totally risk-free world and, consequentially, becoming extremely risk-averse. 

To have grown up in the UK over the past 50 years or so means that you have never faced a major war. Unless you’re a bougie urban dweller, you don’t have to worry about paying or organising schooling for your children, it’s provided for you. You don’t have to worry about healthcare, it’s free. You don’t have to worry about pollution because almost all major industries have been moved overseas. You don’t have to worry about conditions in those factories because they’re so far away. You don’t have to worry about your rubbish because it gets shipped abroad. If you don’t have a house, the state will help you get one. If you don’t have a job then there’s a good chance you’ll get money from the state. Even if you do have a job then there’s a good chance you’ll get money from the state. The list goes on.

This is not to say that everything in the UK is amazing. Stagnant wages, the hollowing out of the middle-class, massive (and increasing) income inequality and the insane centralisation of power and capital in London are all huge problems. But you can only gauge how good something is by comparing it to another thing. And by global standards, the UK is a very good place to live.

The ‘problem’ with all of the benefits I’ve listed above is that it can lead to a situation in which people lead such a comfortable life, they come to believe that life should have no discomforts. That feeling is only compounded by the fact that the state is the body which assumes responsibility for many of the risks in your life. In turn, this reduces the amount of risk that people take on, making them less comfortable with risk and eager to hand over more of it to the state.

Unfortunately for us, risk does and always will exist and choosing to avoid it has consequences. On a societal level, it leads to less innovation, less productivity and eventual decline. We progress by trying new things, moving forward with what works and discarding the things that don’t. To paraphrase Nicolas Taleb, in the absence of risk-taking, the mechanisms of societal progress fail. 

There is a fairly convincing case to be made that this is already happening. Peter Thiel and several others have argued that the world has been in a period of technological stagnation for about 50 years. As one anecdotal piece of evidence for this, it now takes longer to fly between London and New York than it did when Richard Nixon was president. 

Stagnation aside, the other problem with handing over risk to the state, is that it can lead to tyranny or, in the case of the UK, just make life much duller. Fun and/or satisfying things, like riding a bike really fast or asking someone out on a date, involve risk. Boring and infantilising things, like standing in a 30-minute queue to buy bread, involve you being told what do. Handing over risk to the state means you increasingly lose the ability to make the decisions or do the things that make life interesting.

The problem is that we have become very accustomed to this transfer of risk. I think this partly explains why young people in the UK have supported not just the lockdown but are totally blase about the printing of huge sums of money and World War II levels of government borrowing that have taken place over the past two months.

Why then have the Hasidim been so happy to break the rules? Part of it probably comes from a long tradition of being insular and living outside of wider societal norms but a more important reason might be religion itself.

A huge component of most religions is understanding that the world is chaotic and dangerous. Everybody has a plan until a massive flood engulfs the entire world. Having that at the back of your mind could make you more capable of dealing with chaotic, risky situations.

Of course, another topic that religion deals with quite a lot is death. Having some belief about what happens when you die may make you more comfortable with the idea that you’re going to get killed in a pandemic. 

For young people in the UK, who are not just risk-averse but overwhelmingly non-religious, there are no such comforts. Dying is the end of the road. Getting there is the biggest risk of them all.