safetyism
safetyism noun: an obsession with keeping people safe from perceived threats.
Noun
safetyism (uncountable)
- An obsession with keeping people safe from perceived threats.
- “Safetyism” refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. […] The preoccupation with safetyism is clearest in the generation that began to enter college...2018, Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind, Penguin Books, →ISBN, page 30
- While Haidt and Lukianoff focus their analysis on proto-woke novelties like “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions,” the cult of Safetyism is best exemplified in our response to the pandemic.2023 February 16, L0m3z [pseudonym, Jonathan Keeperman], “What is the Longhouse?”, in First Things
Origin of safetyism
From safety + -ism. Popularized in the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, see quotations.
Questions about safetyism
- What does safetyism mean?
- Safetyism means an obsession with keeping people safe from perceived threats.
- What part of speech is safetyism?
- Safetyism is a noun.
Words near safetyism in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: safetyism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-safetyism.wav.
Cite this entry: “safetyism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/safetyism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.