Spoiler warning. Nothing in life is risk free. Not that money back guarantee, not that get rich quick ponzi scheme your brother keeps trying to get you involved in…certainly not that “risk-free” investment your broker promised.
Everything in life comes with a degree of risk. Want to play it safe and never leave your house? Surprise, sucka! You didn’t get any exercise and now you’re dying of a heart attack. Don’t want to die of a heart attack so go out running every morning? Watch out for passing vehicles. And bears. And rutting deer. Seriously; horny deer cause more injuries and death than bears do, by a large margin, though admittedly, that’s because they’re frequently to be found out on the roads, cruising does.
Going out ATVing, you are taking your life into your own hands, yes, but not much more than if you are going skiing or hiking or any outdoor activity. I recall listening to former Tumbler Ridge News publisher Loraine Funk (RIP) regale staff with stories of her close brushes with death while out hiking around the many remote villages that she lived in during her too-short life. Stories of taking a short-cut up a ridge and winding up clinging to a edge of a cliff, finally managing to get to the top through sheer determination.
But then she died from complications from diabetes.
Do something or do nothing, there are risks involved. In fact, by definition, doing nothing is doing something.
In health care, there is something called the competing risk model.
If, for instance, a patient has breast cancer, they might die from that if left untreated. Or they might die from a stroke, totally unrelated. Heck, they might get in an accident on the way to the hospital. If they decided to treat the cancer, they might not even survive the operation. Or they could get an infection during surgery and die from that.
There’s even a calculation to take into account all these variables:
Yeah, no, I don’t understand it, either. But the idea is if you take into account all the various forms of harms that come from doing something vs doing nothing, you can decide—on average—what the best course of treatment is. For certain types of breast cancer, the best course of action may be to operate. For others, it might be radiation or chemo-therapy. There’s even the option of hormone therapy for some patients.
Or, the doctor might decide to wait and see what happens. “Watchful waiting” is sometimes an option for patients who have a slow growing form of cancer or in patients where the risk of treatment is greater than the risk of the disease.
Because, as we’ve been talking about, no course of action is without risk. There is the potential of harm that comes with any and all chosen courses of action. You might never have experienced harm, but the potential is there.
These potential harms are not just found on the personal level.
When we get together in groups of people, there becomes two states we occupy. That we must be aware of. One is our personal space, but the other is our role in society. Public vs private.
While we might think we are individuals only, the fact remains that our actions do affect others around us. If, for instance, you decided to drive to the store, but drove on the left hand side of the road, you might cause an accident. At the very least, you’d cause the other drivers on the road to have to take action to avoid you.
In order to avoid such conflicts, we have developed societal norms to help us interact in ways that don’t lead to conflict. These range from Folkways (“Say excuse me when you burp at the table,”) to Mores (“Don’t show up to grandma’s funeral in a hot pink bikini; it’s not respectful,”) to taboos (“don’t point at someone; it’s rude,”) to laws (“driving on the left side of the road is illegal”).
Note that many of these examples are specific to our culture. In Australia, driving on the left side of the road is the law. In Egypt, burping is a way to show appreciation for the food.
While the harm of violating things like folkways and mores is typically running the risk of being shamed or humiliated (getting the stink eye; getting told off), the more serious the harm, the more likely it is that the norm is going to be encoded into law.
This is why driving on the right side of the road is the law and not just a social more—if you’re going down the highway in the wrong lane at 100 kph, someone could die. It could be you.
But, crucially, it could be someone else. We don’t notice a lot of these social norms, because we grew up in this culture. We learn from observing our parents and friends and society at large that drinking and driving can lead to accidents. We have laws that govern what happens in marriage and in divorce. We have laws that govern how we treat people in conflict (from murder and assault laws to slander and libel). Because there’s a chance that our actions may harm others. Our liberties only extend as far as they impact others, then there are rules curtailing our liberties so that we can function as a society. These norms are so common as to be invisible.
Right now, though, we are in a time where a new norm being established, and we are in a time of flux. Where the rights of the individual are coming into conflict with the rights of other individuals, with the rights of society. Where we are trying to figure out the harms caused by one course of action vs another. And at what point in time does the solution become worse than the problem? When is the cure worse than the disease? We’ll talk about that in my next editorial. But the key takeway this time is every course of action holds the potential for harm, and must be undertaken with appropriate precautions.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.