Health and Safety laws, the right arm of the state, are permeating and influencing every level of today's society. Risk is no longer encouraged ... in fact it's actively discouraged.
School chemistry labs used to be places of wonder, often illustrating via the display of controlled pyrotechnics what happens when chemicals are combined. Pillar drills and lathes were used in metalwork lessons. Educational devices like raw chemical experiments, and machine tools are now viewed as too dangerous, and have been excluded. Fear of H&S laws inhibits their use.
And it's not just the classroom. Even in industry, I've witnessed supplies to engineering tools being routinely disconnected due to safety concerns. But free individuals do find a way round it. Instead of using the decommissioned grindstone, they'll jam their work into a vice and attack it with a whizzer. It's less safe, but gets the job done, and less blame can be put on the manager in the event of an accident.
Meanwhile, the NHS, the stealthy left arm of the state, works further to decrease our willingness to take risks, by increasing our dependence on external authority. It warns us of the dangers of not accepting the principle of drug dependence in the form of inoculations and other toxic modes of approach to disease prevention.
The matriarchal state mollycoddles. Under its skirts it inhibits all intentions to travel into the unknown, where danger may lurk. But every known was once an unknown, that's now been discovered through the spirit of adventure. Faith is that which puts it's foot on the first step into the dark unknown.
When our children were small, an artist in the Chester area made a delightful papier mache model of the Green Man, which some lucky individual was allowed to carry around Chester during many processions. The Green Man is a representation of the uncivilised individual. This type of the free individual is not welcome. Cain kills Abel, Romulus kills Remus, Set kills Osiris. The Wicker Man may be derived from the same origin. All are symbols of society's non-tolerance of the free spirit in man.
Unpredictability in an individual is not welcome. Societies work to stifle it whenever it arises. Freedom is covered over in order that we forget it.
But as Leonard Cohen sings in his
Anthem:
"There's a crack, a crack in
everything.
That's how the light gets in, that's
how the light gets in."
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