Funny that we're talking Orwell, because that word "safety" is straight out of Newspeak.
They are never talking about actual physical protection from harm. What they mean is "safe from being made to feel bad for my own poor choices."
"Safety", right.
I was just reading chapter 3 of Peter Gay's
The Enlightenment (Vol. I). He says that the
philosophes claimed "their thought was a form of action," because they wanted to see themselves as practical thinkers, rather than abstract, bookish scholastics. In a footnote, Gay says:
In their self-protective utterances, the philosophes, of course, claimed precisely the opposite: that their thought was harmless because it did not lead to action. But as...Montesquieu's Esprit des lois makes plain, this separation of thought and action was...also a cogent argument in behalf of civil liberties, especially of free speech.
