The idiots have won

Signs that these are surely the last days are not new.

People have been predicting apocalypse being upon us since, well, St John wrote Revelations.

Not being someone to believe in imaginary friends - I've never traded in that guff - I've never placed much faith (pun intended) in religion.

But whether you believe Christ is god and saviour, or Muhammad is the true prophet, or in the Giant Spaghetti Monster, Australians are hell bent on making life harder for themselves; mainly because we valorize gross stupidity to the point where much public discourse has become a carnival of ignorance.

Even in a country as 'free' as Australia, far too many areas of our existence are now observed and regulated to the point of obeisance against evidence. From abseiling to zines we are told what we can and can't do. We are micromanaged to within an inch of our lives.

I never thought I would find myself evangelizing a libertarian position, but things are getting beyond a joke. We live in a censorious age. And much of this censoriousness is fed by the zeitgeist, that impressions are more potent than fact.

Although bike helmets protect the skull but not the face or limbs, where more biking injuries occur, they are compulsory. Australia being, along with New Zealand, one of the few Western countries that actually impose the ineffective nuisance of helmets on the bike riding public.

Marijuana is banned and, as regular as the passing seasons, someone pops up in the media claiming that marijuana makes crazy people crazier. Well, derr! So the rest of us that are merely exasperated are not allowed to play. Its just grim faced Calvinism pushing a barrow that never works; prohibition.

And so on and so forth until having a fire when your camping, sleeping on the beach, traveling in the back of ute on an empty country road are all verboten in the name of keeping us all safe from ourselves. Paternalism rampant.

Yes, these things cause trouble and can be lethal. Life is, by its very nature, deadly. The solution is to censure idiots and crazy people, but this is not fashionable. Our post-modernist equivocation of values, which is passed of as equality, is in actuality a matter of making life easy for the dumb and the mad. Somehow this has led to being dumb and mad as being all the fashion.

Take smoking. More people smoke than go to church, Going to and working in hotels is an inherently unhealthy act. The best argument proffered by the proponents of blanket bans on smoking in licensed premises is that people who work in hotels should not have to ingest second hand smoke. I agree. Non-smokers should get another line of employment. Who in their right mind wants to work in a bar? Staying sober around drunken people has to be one of the more depressing visages of humanity. Smoke and be damned.

Two discreet problems exist: First, regulation of public life has fallen into the hands of obsessive control freaks; secondly, this overarching need to control human behaviour reinforces and rewards a mixture of stupidity and madness.

I fully accept that there is a role for health and safety in employment. Commonsense would dictate that in other areas prudence and caution should take precedence over individual standards for the general good. The accent here is on general good, not how you'd like others to live - but how others living impacts on you. Then there is the problem of how commonsense evaporates amongst the stupid and the mad.

This is about risk management. It is also about power, but more on that later.

I am not risk averse, but most people are. As a result I am subject to the same risk assessment as all others, including the stupid and the mad. Effectively the state is treating me as if I'm stupid and mad.

What if I want to measure the value of existence by living my life as I see fit? Surely that is my prerogative? After all, it is me that is in the box at the end of the day.

But this is no longer the case.

How did all this start?

Modern government was well summed up in a speech by Kelvin Thompson to Sustainable Population Australia:

"In the modern era, with its twenty-four/seven media cycle, it is possible to get elected without solving problems provided you can use the media to get across three messages - first, that your heart is in the right place, second, that you're working as hard as you can, and third and most importantly, that the other mob would be worse."

Which is why having to fix things takes second place to pretending the problems aren't there and creating this parallel universe where reality is created by ministerial announcement, press release and stage managed media event by governments, corporates and the usual roll-call of NGOs.

Unfortunately, once the cameras roll on messy reality takes hold once more.

A lot of this spin is underpinned by useless scholasticism designed to impress funding bodies with polysyllabic tinkering at the edges. This rolls out sound bites peddled as authoritative voices and 'take-home' messages for a public that has been plunged into a cloud of ignorance. The prescription then becomes a simplistic sloganeering that is even at times at odds or at least antipathetic to evidence gleaned from serious research.

This is the nut of the problem; the one-size-fits-all approach to regulation that looks good on a tabloid front page, but doesn't work or is prescriptively onerous in reality.

Which brings us to the question of power. In this entire regulatory milieu, who benefits?

The usual suspects; the state, which finds a cheap and easy solution that makes it look good; insurance companies, who are by nature risk averse; the rich, who can afford to ignore regulation and buy their way out of it; and dickheads, people that have an anally retentive view of life and don't like the 'messy bits' that are innate to human existence.

Unfortunately the dickhead's obsessiveness drives an eagerness and zealotry to impose their worldview on the largely apathetic rest of us.

Regulation happens by default. Makes good copy. Takes fun out of life. Bring on the apocalypse.