At State Football, Safety Is Our #1 Priority!” So declares a banner appended to a social media post advertising new high-tech helmets for college football players. Likewise, a sticker on the back of a tractor-trailer driving down Interstate 81: “Safety First!” And the sign on the entrance to a construction site: “Hard Hats On—Safety First!”
This is nonsense. Were safety really the top priority, there would be no need for better football helmets—the football team would be abolished altogether. No one would drive a tractor-trailer at all, much less on an interstate highway, and no one would be allowed to step foot on a construction site. The mantra “Safety First!” is always a lie—and a dangerous one, blinding us to our own true priorities, impeding prudential risk analysis, and derailing character formation.
Although a football team may acquire better helmets because they care about their players, the existence of the football team points to priorities placed above safety: the virtues of strength, courage, and teamwork; the joy of playing or spectating; campus and community camaraderie; money. Trucking companies care about the safety of their drivers and others on the road, just like construction companies wish to avoid injuries on their worksites, but we drive trucks and build buildings to earn a living, to increase American economic productivity, and to improve our quality of life—in spite of the associated risks. Which of these priorities deserve to be placed ahead of safety? Which, if any, do not? In each case, the “safety first” mantra impedes a truthful accounting and an honest conversation.
What would American society look like if we truly and universally applied a “safety first” mindset? For decades now, Americans have been running an unofficial nationwide study to answer this question—and the subjects of the study are our children. The closest we come to living up to “safety first” is in parenting, on playgrounds, and in schools. As Jonathan Haidt has shown in 2018’s The Coddling of the American Mind (with co-author Greg Lukianoff) and 2024’s The Anxious Generation, “safetyism” has combined with other forces to make our children and young people more fragile and anxious than ever. When we pursue “safety first” for children and young people, what we ultimately mean—whether we know it or not—is that we would prefer to malform their character than to risk their bodily harm.
In addition to malformed character, young people raised in the “safety first” regime are incapable of prudential risk analysis. If our playgrounds are composed entirely of foam and rubber, children never have the opportunity to learn, in relatively controlled environments, what happens when their bodies encounter wood or steel. If we do not allow adolescents to do meaningful work with power tools and machinery, we prevent them from learning how to exercise the care and attention needed to wield power responsibly. Most frightening of all, if our young people learn to drive in cars that mostly keep themselves on the road despite distracted drivers, with safety features suggesting invincibility for those in the car, the consequences for those outside the car could be devastating. In short, we as a society do not give our young people the opportunity to confront and master developmentally appropriate challenges. (Meanwhile, we ask them to define their own existential identities—a challenge no one is capable of meeting.)
“Safety first” repudiates human greatness. Under safetyism, mountains would go unclimbed, wildernesses unexplored, seas uncharted, flood victims unrescued, fires unfought, tyrants unchallenged. Such greatness is almost always the product of more quotidian formation toward ordinary human excellence. Those who enter burning buildings do so because they have developed the virtue of courage—of pursuing the good in spite of difficulty or danger. The ordinary development of competence and character, through prudential risk-taking under the guidance of wise mentors, creates the conditions for greatness.
Young men, in particular, wilt under the regime of safetyism. In every culture, young men have tended to court danger, risk life and limb, and act in ways that those around them would view as rather reckless. Today we might say this is because the adolescent male prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped. Be that as it may, a truer account would describe this risk-taking as a unique, if dangerous, gift—the gift of recognizing danger and carrying on anyway: to trim the sails in a storm, to push forward in the teeth of battle, to do risky things for the sake of the community, their families, and often for a young lady they are trying to win. Adolescent boys have this unique power. But this is not the story we tend to hear about young men today. And so, in most cases, the soft oppression of the safetyists results in a soft emasculation. In other cases, young men rebel—embracing foolhardy recklessness rather than prudential risk-taking and antisocial aggression instead of strength oriented toward the good of the community. The solution is mentorship in thoughtful risk-taking for the good of others and one’s own character.
Our mantra here in the Joshua Program at St. Dunstan’s Academy—a farm, trades, and character gap-year for young men (high school graduates, ages seventeen to twenty) on a 176-acre farm in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains—is “Safety Third.” (We thought we coined this phrase, but it turns out that Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs got there long before us.) This may sound flippant, but it is not. Third place is still a high priority. There is much that we should and will sacrifice in order to reduce dangers and risks. But there are some things we must never sacrifice. The most dangerous thing our participants will do is drive to church twice weekly, as the likelihood of getting into a car accident is higher than a workplace accident. Additionally, the young men in our program will—after instruction and at the elbow of mentors—operate power tools and chainsaws and tractors. They will learn how to build an A-frame crane in order to raise a two-thousand-pound timber-framed wall into the air. In all this, they will be shaped toward wise and prudential risk-taking—not to court danger for its own sake, but to accept risks when higher goods are on the line.
If our young people, particularly our young men, are to grow in competence and in character—if they are to grow up—they must put safety third.
