Summary definition

Safety is a state in which the individual is able to consider further aspects of their life beyond simple survival. At the highest levels of Safety the individual is assured of their physical, emotional, and psychological freedom across the spectrum of the Maslovian hierarchy.

Agency

When an individual is safe they experience Freedom. This is essentially a “freedom from” experience in which their personal agency as limited only by the Law and their personal motivation.

Purpose

The social purpose of Safety is to allow the individuals sufficient spare bandwidth, over and above survival needs, so that they can contribute their perceptions and unique individual solutions to common threats and problems. Reliable and universal Safety allows the society to become more diverse which results in more accurate perceptions and more adept solutions from a wider array of individuals.

Elements

Safety allows the society to See more accurately and Solve more adeptly because it enables Diversity.

Strengthening

Safety is strengthened by the social provision of means that remove physical deprivations, and Laws that protect people from physical and social harms stemming from the actions of others. Liberal social conditions that allow divergence of thought and opinion are archetypally conceived as “freedoms” and further enhance the diversity of the society.

The reliable and universal assertion of Safety is necessary to facilitate Diversity because every individual is viscerally aware of their own uniqueness, individual frailty, and dependency.

Weakening

Unreliable and partial Safety degrades the ability of the society by restraining the contributions of the individuals.

Physical insecurity results in an exclusive focus by the individuals on their own survival, denying the group those individuals’ contributions to common perceptions and solutions. As Maslow observed, physical insecurity will trump all else even if emotional and psychological freedoms are available.

Even if physical security is ensured emotional and psychological insecurity has a debilitating effect on the function of the group because diversity of expression is limited and that becomes more significant the more modernly developed and dependent on specialised contributions the society becomes.

Evolution

It is axiomatic to say that the first responsibility of society is the safety of its citizens, and indeed it can be argued that Safety is the foundational Quality of any grouping species. Without providing at least some degree of enhanced Safety it is hard to imagine why any individual would voluntarily join a group.

What differentiates the role of Safety in human societies is the consequential enablement of perception and solution Elements, two of the four fundamental building blocks of complex decision taking. Without reliable and universal Safety developed human societies fail to perceive their problems accurately and fail to develop adept solutions to their problems.