CONCEPT
Safetyism
The cultural approach — developed by Haidt, Lukianoff, and Skenazy — that prioritizes feelings of safety over intellectual rigor, developmental challenge, and the capacity-building friction of genuine encounter. In the AI age, the doctrine by which schools ban the tools and call it protection.
Safetyism is the sacralization of safety as an end in itself, untethered from the developmental cost of achieving it. Defined by Haidt and Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind as "an approach to policy that prioritizes feelings of safety at the cost of intellectual rigor, open debate, and the free expression of ideas," the concept generalizes to any institutional response that treats the absence of challenge as equivalent to the presence of well-being. Skenazy's free-range framework is safetyism's most persistent operational critique, and the doctrine has migrated — through explicit citations in policy journals and school district memos — directly into AI regulation debates. Every school that banned AI tools in 2025–2026 was executing safetyism's logic on a new surface.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Safetyism operates through a characteristic three-move structure. First, identify a genuine risk — depth atrophy, fluent fabrication, the erosion of critical thinking.