DEFINING RISK

What is risk? What is the best approach to managing it? Or are risks ultimately just illusions? An attempt to bring order into the unknown.

By Sebastian Sele

Statistics clearly show: our lives are never more at risk than during birth. Not until we take our last breath. In between, we play football on residential roads where only a speed limit sign protects us from the next reckless driver. We hand over our income to strangers and get into flying machines. We smoke, drink and enjoy life. Some of us voluntarily jump off mountain ledges with nothing but a parachute on our backs. Is this behaviour a sign of courage? Or merely recklessness?

We love risk – yet we also fear it more than anything else. Or, as philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

But how exactly does one define risk? Risky behaviour is perceived differently from one individual to the next. From one country to the next. From one phase of life to the next. According to ISO Standard 31000, a risk management framework for organisations, “risk is the effect of uncertainty on objectives”. We want something – but something else could get in our way. A hazard. Maybe. Or maybe not. How do you stay on top of things in the face of uncertainty?

Remain rational and evaluate the situation, responds former ski racer and base jumper Marco Büchel. There is no such thing as absolute certainty, only probabilities, adds a security consultant who has worked in almost every war zone in the world since the 1990s. Gerd Gigerenzer, an icon of risk psychology, takes another position and advocates for trusting your gut.

What these three people have in common: they all swear by the value of experience.

We tend to quantify risks. We calculate likelihoods of occurrence, create models and scenarios. We insure ourselves against likely occurrences (often) and against unlikely ones (less often). We seek financial security. But how to quantify the apocalypse?

In evolutionary terms, our objective is simply to survive. We are fairly good at that. Mankind already has 300,000 years under its belt. But even this success is relative. Sharks have existed for an estimated 400 million years, kangaroos for 25 million years and Galapagos tortoises for 3 million years.

We might disappear after 300,075 years. Lord Martin Rees – cosmologist, astrophysicist and founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge – warned at the beginning of this century that the likelihood of our extinction by 2100 is 50 per cent. Not because of asteroids, solar storms or alien attacks, but because we will have destroyed ourselves.

“We are the first species with the power to change the entire planet,” he says and warns of man-made pandemics, dependence on autonomous technologies and populism.

Rees continues what one of the most famous risk researchers initiated: in 1986, the sociologist Ulrich Beck published his book “Risk Society” – just a few months after the Chernobyl incident, the biggest nuclear disaster in human history. According to Beck, globalisation and individualisation will result in new risks for which we have only ourselves to blame, “disasters that we have not yet experienced and that we must not experience under any circumstances”. These risks hang over us like the sword of Damocles and guide our actions. At the time, Beck wrote that such man-made risks require a social rethink and must drive us to take responsibility.

Forty years on, everyone is familiar with Covid-19, ChatGPT is shaking up certainties in the labour market, autonomous weapons systems are becoming operational, global warming has exceeded the 1.5-degree mark and nuclear powers are still at war. The only certainty is uncertainty.

“What depresses me is the growing discrepancy between the world as it is and the world as it could be,” says Lord Rees. In the spirit of Ulrich Beck, he appeals to governments to take existential risks seriously – but also emphasises that life has probably never been as safe as it is in present-day Europe. Most Germans, Brits and Swiss will not have to expose themselves to extreme danger over the course of their lifetimes.

“Strange, indeed, that perhaps no era has ever been ‘more secure’ than ours and yet we all suffer from a growing, immeasurable fear of every potential event,” wrote the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle in her book “In Praise of Risk”. Risk society is becoming an anxiety society. We believe that we are above risk and can and must control it. “This zero-risk approach we have adopted is disastrous,” warned Dufourmantelle. “It relieves the subject of their own responsibility.”

Responsibility – it is part of risk. In earlier societies, every stroke of fate was seen as part of a divine plan. Today, in our individualised society and neoliberal order, everyone is their own god. You, esteemed readers, bear responsibility for your actions. As do I. Or do we simply expect our insurance companies to shoulder the burden?

In what became her final act, the philosopher Dufourmantelle opted for taking responsibility. When she saw two children drowning in the Mediterranean, she plunged into the water, rescued them – only to die herself. Everyone has the potential to become a hero. Not every hero dies at sea; some lead quiet lives.

In this sense, the 2,500 or so inhabitants of Stadel, a small village in the north of Canton Zürich, can be seen as heroes. The deep geological repository for the radioactive waste that the Swiss have collectively produced since the Beznau I nuclear power plant was opened in June 1969 is to be constructed beneath their feet. Nobody wants this waste on their doorstep – but it has to be disposed of somewhere. According to Nagra’s experts, the chances of a catastrophe occurring will be nowhere lower than in Stadel. This is because Nagra aims to develop a concept that is robust enough to withstand all potential hazards in the coming millennia – even so-called black swan disasters that are beyond our imagination today.

Yet we wonder: is “probably safe” safe enough? To answer this question, says Matthias Holenstein, Managing Director of the Risk Dialogue Foundation (Stiftung Risiko-Dialog), society needs to address two points: what exactly is at risk? And where do we as a society draw the red danger line that we do not want to cross?

Almost half a century has passed since Chernobyl and Ulrich Beck’s “Risk Society”. The internet has shifted the rules of coexistence. 9/11, Covid and artificial intelligence have shaken up what we once considered certain. We are under a continuous media downpour of conflicts and crises. Nuclear power, once identified as the evil of our time, has been elevated back to the throne in the face of climate change.

Neither radioactive waste nor a nuclear power plant incident are among the top ten greatest risks for Switzerland listed by the Federal Office for Civil Protection. If risk likelihood is included in this official assessment, a power shortage, an influenza pandemic or the failure of the mobile phone network rank at the top of the list. A winter power shortage would cost more than 180 billion Swiss francs.

The first dimension of risk is technical and, as such, easy to calculate, says Matthias Holenstein from the Risk Dialogue Foundation. The real art lies in rendering the second dimension – the human factor: How does risk affect me? How do I deal with it?

“Risk is an old-fashioned romanticism for adults,” writes philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle in her praise of risk. We have to be able to look danger in the eye and realise that we can recover from pain, disaster and grief. This is important because: “We are not redeemed in advance.”

We love risk – yet we also fear it more than anything else.

Back to Issue 004