A system that cannot produce bad outcomes for someone is unlikely to produce good outcomes for anyone. Completely safe systems do not involve mechanisms and actions that interact with the world in any way significant enough to generate meaningful outcomes. And humans aren’t made for them. Or any living thing, really.
Absolute safety and the predictability of positive outcomes, without accompanying risk and its resulting negative outcomes, simply doesn’t exist in the kind of world we inhabit. That which produces no negative outcomes produces nothing. That which risks nothing gains nothing. That which demands no struggle produces no strength.
The wish to “have it all” with no cost and no tradeoffs is very understandable. But it is hopelessly immature. It is a childish fantasy, the fantasy of a dependent and undeveloped and ignorant creature that has yet to become an actual agent within the world. And even if the child cannot see where that price is being paid, it is being paid somewhere. It is only their ignorance and dependence that protects them from it. The burden of realization is a painful one, that we must leave the garden and head out into the dusty land to make our way by sweat and pain, ending in death.
It is the duty of all parents, their own terrible burden, not merely to protect our children within the garden, but to prepare them for the world beyond. The madonna is the picture of joy for a parent, but the pieta is our destiny. And we escape it and comfort ourselves only at the cost of our own children’s knowledge and strength and integrity and agency.
A system that can produce no pain will produce nothing. A child that can suffer no pain will never mature into an adult. A world with no struggle is not a world we can live in, nor would it be worth living in or satisfying to us. Nothing that can be obtained without cost has any enduring value. Risk is the lifeblood of reward. And failure is the price we pay for any true success.
Making Nobody Happy 