The most progressive institutions – which pride themselves on values such as ‘openness’ – were the most ferociously glad to close things down during the Covid pandemic. In the United States, numerous elite universities, including Yale, Harvard, Brown, Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins, set up anonymous whistleblowing platforms to report breaches of health regulations. At Yale, when the Delta wave arrived, the university banned ‘close contact greetings’ at club sporting events, ‘including handshakes, hugs, and high-fives’. During the Omicron wave, for over a month, the university prohibited students from visiting nearby shops or restaurants, even to sit outdoors, effectively turning the campus into a ‘quarantine zone’.

These events reflect an ingrained culture of ‘safetyism’ in the West, to use a term coined by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of The American Mind. Jean Twenge remarks in her Generations that the phrase ‘stay safe’ has more than quadrupled in frequency in American books from 1995 to 2019. The word ‘safe’ is omnipresent: ‘safe sex’, ‘safe drinking’, ‘safe eating’, and, of course, ‘safe spaces’.

In The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, Christopher Lasch wrote in 1984 of how our culture had taken a ‘survivalist’ turn because of the ‘disappearance’ of the future. As the possibility of instant nuclear annihilation dawned (now seconded by the green apocalypse, or a kind of civil war), people adapted their behaviours accordingly. Individuals withdraw into day-to-day tasks and their immediate environment. Lasch stated that what he branded a few years earlier as a culture of narcissism ‘might better be characterised […] as a culture of survivalism. Everyday life has begun to pattern itself on the survival strategies forced on those exposed to extreme adversity’, among which he highlights ‘selective apathy, emotional disengagement from others, renunciation of the past and the future’ and ‘a determination to live one day at a time’.

One of the most popular genres of recent decades is the zombie invasion, especially in video games, from Call of Duty: Black Ops to The Last Of Us (whose success was rewarded with both a sequel and a TV adaptation). In the zombie genre, everything is about survival. You have to take one day at a time, and sometimes have to kill the people closest to you to outlive them. The closer you are to anyone, the closer you could be to a deadly virus, not exactly a recipe for flourishing social trust.

The word ‘survival’, Lasch noted, had begun to pop up in peculiar places, such as manuals on how to ‘survive’ the world of work or on how to ‘survive’ a visit to the in-laws. In books published in the US since the end of the Second World War, the verb ‘survive’ has more than tripled in frequency. This impressive statistic pales in comparison to the use of ‘survival’, which has multiplied in use by roughly 14 times since a century ago, precisely in a period in which the chances of sudden death dramatically decreased. The culture of ‘safetyism’ rose sharply in big American cities over the last decades just as they were becoming markedly safer places to live in.

In the ‘safetyist’ worldview, the outside world is perceived as a nightmare, brimming with threats. Whether it be a virus, a ruthless competitor willing to get ahead at all costs, or a murderous wave of Walking Dead, that which lies outside the door is perceived as fundamentally hostile.

Has anyone in the past theorised such a society? Not Rousseau, who made a virtue of community cohesion. Not Aristotle, whose notion of common good sounds quaint to the modern ear. And not John Stuart Mill, because he believed in free speech absolutism.

The answer probably lies in the work of the 17^th-century political theorist Thomas Hobbes. The only natural bond between men, according to Hobbes, is hostility. There is nothing in man’s nature apart from a desire for self-preservation and a will to destroy or subdue the other. According to the author of the Leviathan ‘man is a wolf to man’, and ‘the passions that encline men to Peace’ in a community are mainly reducible to ‘feare of Death’. If he is a strong believer in the equality of men, it isn’t in a rose-tinted semi-Christian way, grounded in a belief of inherent human dignity or worth, but because men are equally capable of slaughtering each other.

The famous solution Hobbes theorised was an all-powerful State designed to hold everyone in check. Since the state of nature is so painful, all subjects would gladly give up their freedoms for this protection. We are far from the classical liberal argument about protecting oneself from the grip of the state. Here, individuals surrender themselves to absolute power precisely to protect themselves from each other. Under the Leviathan, violent aggression by a neighbour is no longer entirely impossible, but it is at least highly improbable. That helps us to avoid being paralysed by permanent fear. Hence, the weakest being, the individual fearing violent death at the hands of his neighbours, gives birth to the strongest being, Leviathan, to protect him.

Yet, our world and Hobbes’ descriptions are very different. We are the most ‘indoors’ civilisation of all time. The sofa is where we eat, work, sleep and relax. Weather has considerably less impact on our daily lives than it did on the life of our ancestors. Everything is made to feel soft, from our burgers to our mattresses. We eagerly strive to feel comfortable at every instant of our life. Most of us wouldn’t last more than five minutes in a truly Hobbesian world.

But in many key respects – social atomisation, an absence of shared morality, and, above all, a constant concern for personal safety – our societies simulate the Hobbesian state of nature, raising a Hobbesian solution of an all-powerful State to the modern conundrum. Polls consistently demonstrate that Gen Z has stronger statist tendencies than older generations.

In a world ruled by a ‘live and let live’ approach – a liberal world – the only possible common language appears to be one geared towards ‘safety’. If I want to persuade someone of my views, there is no more effective approach than to clothe my arguments in the jargon of health and safety. This has the predictable effect of stretching the concept of ‘safety’.

‘Emotional safety’, for example, is a neo-Hobbesian concept par excellence. A neo-Hobbesian culture is one in which we say things like ‘I don’t feel comfortable doing this’, or ‘I think we have an unhealthy relationship’ when expressing moral qualms. It is a world where the adjective ‘hurt’ almost never refers to physical pain. Similarly, instead of talking about social breakdown and the absence of vision for a common future, we reduce these things almost entirely to the neutral notion of ‘mental health’, which manages to both radically individualise what should be a matter of public debate, and frame it in terms palatable to health and safety bureaucrats.

A ‘survivalist civilisation’ is a contradiction in terms. Once the social contract is ‘signed’, survival is no longer meant to be a chief concern. It is precisely to know the good life that men and women gather together. Survival is the constant obsession of individuals cut off from a community, the emotionally crippled, those maimed by social atomisation. Only a lone wolf thinks that man is a wolf to man. An essential paradox dominates the mental life of the West: will we survive our survivalism?