A pointless and redundant email from his insurance company warning against the obvious dangers of extremely hot weather prompts Theodore Dalrymple to reflect over at Taki’s Magazine on the abandonment of the concept of personal responsibility. Common sense is not only not very common these days, but it would appear that daily disasters in our lives are imminent without a benevolent bureaucracy shepherding the masses who lack any sense whatsoever, common or not.

Such redundant advice implies that the world is full of fools, that most adults are really children; and indeed there is no better way to infantilize people than to treat them as infants.

….

The growing nonacceptance of risk and the consequent rejection of personal responsibility in Western society are astonishing.