Safety Theatre And The Suppression of Agency

In recent decades, the concept of safety has expanded beyond the management of material risk to encompass behavioral, linguistic, and cognitive regulation. This paper examines the emergence of safety theatre as a structural phenomenon increasingly oriented not toward harm reduction, but toward constraining discretionary judgment outside sanctioned procedures. Contemporary safety frameworks often prioritize procedural compliance, moral signaling, and liability insulation over situational reasoning and competence development. While framed as protective, these systems can reallocate responsibility upward and erode decision-making capacity downward, producing environments in which actors learn to defer rather than to model and reason. The paper identifies mechanisms through which safety theatre reduces opportunities for agentic decision-making, describes characteristic fragilities of compliance-dependent institutions, and argues that disciplined agency is a precondition of resilient safety.