CONFORMITY, COMFORT AND THE ILLUSION OF SAFETY
Risk backwards is what happens when the deep human desire to belong in a group meets our sheep-like tendency to follow the flock, in a click-to-buy-now culture increasingly wired for ease. It’s what happens when conformity and comfort exert their gravitational pull.
Here I offer five antidotes to getting risk backwards, corresponding to the first five decades of life.
BEYOND THE BLANDING
Towards the end of his career, screenwriter and producer Lionel Chetwynd reflected on what he called a blanding of American prime-time television. Programmers had become too scared of offending any person or group; the job had come to involve avoiding controversy at all costs.
In the formative years of US television, there had been a dominant notion known as balanced programming – if a particular view was presented in one programme, it should be balanced by a different view in another programme on the schedule. By the late 1990s, balanced programming had been replaced by the concept of balance within programming. A controversial issue raised on a Monday could no longer be balanced by a different show on a Tuesday; it now had to be answered within the same script.
The difference, Chetwynd argued, was subtle but profound. Scared of anything that might upset advertisers, regulators or any vocal group, programmers blanded the treatment of serious issues on broadcast television. “We, as an audience, may be impoverished by this, but at least we are spared controversy.”1
Blanding can look like a good response to risk. It is often the default option for large businesses. In the age of Reddit and Robinhood, why risk upsetting a customer who can whip up a crowd? Play it safe. Avoid controversy wherever you can.
And yet blanding is also risk backwards. Though prudent, it weakens and brings its own perils. Without discomfort, we end up in rooms where everyone smiles and pretends to agree – and that’s where the dangerous decisions get made.
CHRIS BACON
Chief Executive
FIRST DECADE
PLAY WITH DANGER
Picture this. You’re on a summer holiday, somewhere sun-kissed, in a beach-side hotel. The first morning, you come down for breakfast, to be struck by a scene – dozens of children eating with their families, while staring at screens. Tablets for toddlers. Nintendos for nine-year-olds. Their parents talk past them or scroll on their own phones.
You want to shout – but the kids won’t hear through their headphones. And so, overcome with emotion, you perform a wild gesture of public service. You walk through the restaurant, gather up all the children’s devices, then stroll out across the beach and drown the tech in the sea.
It rots the sense in the head! It kills imagination dead! It clogs and clutters up the mind! It makes a child so dull and blind He can no longer understand A fantasy, a fairyland! His brain becomes as soft as cheese! His powers of thinking rust and freeze! He cannot think — he only sees!2
Blanded children’s gaming and programming don’t lead to much thinking. They kill imagination, cluttering and clogging and soft-cheeseing the brain.
Whereas fantasy and fairytales – these help mould the first decade of life. With their shadows and shapeshifters, danger and darkness, the enduring stories from the forests and castles of medieval Europe prepare children for our unfair, volatile and ambiguous world. They get children ready for the world as it is and spark imaginations for worlds that might be.
It’s in fairy tales we discover that tame wolves aren’t to be trusted. That the handsome prince isn’t all he appears. That it takes courage, and guile, to escape the witch’s oven.
It’s here we learn to climb that beanstalk, not knowing where it leads.
For generations, these stories have been an antidote to anxiety, a time-tested way of processing natural childhood fears.
Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales And treasure isles, and distant shores Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars, And pirates wearing purple pants, And sailing ships and elephants, And cannibals crouching ’round the pot, Stirring away at something hot.
ESTIMATING OGRES
Kidnapping, though common in fairytales, is rare these days in Europe and North America. One stat suggests a child in the US would have to be unsupervised outdoors for an average of 750,000 years before being abducted by a stranger.3
And yet parents, like investors, are often bad at sizing risk. We misestimate the likelihood of extreme outcomes. This can feed excessive caution – a caution that gets risk backwards. A recent survey of eight to 12 year olds in America found 60% had never walked or cycled anywhere without an adult.4 One in four eight and nine year olds aren’t allowed to play unsupervised, even in their own front yards. Do ogres and trolls linger outside?
This parental caution forms part of what Jonathan Haidt, of New York University, has diagnosed as the twin contradictory mistakes of modern parenting: overprotecting kids in the real world; and under-protecting them online.5
Real-world overprotection stifles children’s ability to explore, deal with stress and assess and manage risk. Virtual world under-protection exposes them to addictive content, unhelpful peer comparisons and worse. Leaders in Silicon Valley seem to know this. Sundar Pichai of Google, Evan Spiegel of SnapChat, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple – all are known to have limited or delayed the use of technology by their own children. These digital chefs don’t eat their own cooking.
THE CASE FOR MODERATE MISCHIEF
For many kids growing up in rich countries, the first decade of life has become controlled and sanitised. Here is risk backwards: by removing danger and unpredictability, we don’t help our children; we make them more fragile.
My own seven children seem happiest in unsupervised and unstructured activities – especially play with elements of danger. Jumping off rocks into rivers. Selling something home-baked, unaided, to strangers. Games with tree-climbing-stick-fighting combinations. If nothing else, activities like these make them better able to handle setbacks – and three of them have the bodily scars to prove it.
SECOND DECADE STRESS-TEST CONVENTION
After a generation out of power, Britain’s Labour Party won a landslide victory in the 1997 general election. Propelled by D:Ream’s unshakeably catchy anthem Things Can Only Get Better, the tone of the election campaign was upbeat. And the promise of the new government was clear. Its top three priorities would be: education, education, education. A major expansion of university places followed, as Labour targeted getting 50% of young people into higher education. Universities across the country grew: new student numbers rose from 280,000 a year to 430,000 during Labour’s time in office.6
To pay for the expansion, maintenance grants were replaced with student loans. In addition, a university education, previously free, now came with a price tag – annual tuition fees, introduced in 1998, started at £1,000 for me, rose to £3,000 for my younger brother and are currently £9,535 for my oldest daughter. A friend of ours has recently graduated from the Royal College of Music with £70,000 in debt. He’s working part-time for a charity, reflecting on the financial burden and how it might be repaid.
Nearly 30 years on from Labour’s education promises, it’s time to get beyond the chorus of that election-winning anthem. While the D:Ream has come true for some graduates, it’s proved fleeting for many.
I sometimes lose myself in me I lose track of time And I can’t see the woods for the trees… You show me prejudice and greed And you show me how I must learn to deal with this disease I look at things now In a different light than I did before.
“Risk backwards is what happens when paradoxes get flattened, and we get stuck in straight lines.”
CASE OPENED
In probing the merits of a university degree via costs and debt, supply and demand, I’m in danger of coming across like the old economist who knows the price of everything, the value of nothing and only wants to marry Taylor Swift for her money.
Without doubt, a good university degree is an end in itself, not simply a boost for getting a job. The learning, the experience, the joys and the friendships – all can be priceless.
But let’s assume, for teenage readers in Ruffer Review households, the conventional path runs something like this: study hard at school; do well in exams; get yourself into the best university you can. Risk backwards is not stress-testing that convention. Risk backwards is following this path because your mum did, your mates are, and your teachers want you to.
THE MARKET FOR GRADUATES
What might await you on the other side of a degree, some time towards 2030? I’d summarise the jobs market for graduates in the UK as follows: plentiful supply, of mixed ability; demand set to be upended.
On the supply side, the number of UK-based 18 year olds accepted into university or college has hit a record high. The education, education, education boom remains in full swing. But it’s a curious boom, when the fees across universities are uniform, while the quality of the degrees they offer is not.
As for demand, most industries are only in the foothills of the adoption of generative AI. Many entry-level graduate jobs are among the ripest for disruption.7 In finance and professional services, for example, many of the core tasks given to new graduates – detailed research, crafting communications, crunching numbers – can now be done as well or better by a machine. Generative AI offers people like me an instant army of interns. These interns work rapidly. They work evenings and weekends. They’re always chirpy, and never hungover.
AN ALTERNATIVE ROUTE
At the age of 15, my oldest son, Benjamin, stress-tested convention – and found it wanting. He’d concluded he “didn’t want a job in the Matrix.” For him that meant no office, not spending his days sat behind a computer. And, ideally, not having a boss.
As Benjamin entered his final year of compulsory schooling, the adults in his life encouraged him to apply himself to get the GCSE grades we could see he was capable of. But he chose not to. When I called him on results day to ask how he’d got on, he responded with a one-liner I’ll never forget: “Bro, I’m moving to Africa, it literally doesn’t matter.”
And move to Africa he did. After leaving school at 16, Benjamin was planning to start as an apprentice plumber but pivoted at the last moment when an opportunity emerged in Morocco. He joined a motorcycle tour company, picked up basic Darija, charmed international customers and built a TikTok following — while learning he hated motorbikes and editing motorbike videos.
Within a few months, he’d also run out of money. My wife and I have an approach to parenting that has some parallels with the Austrian School of Economics. That meant no bailout for Benjamin, and a (mostly) free market for consequences.
The next few months were bleak. Back in London, he applied for hundreds of jobs and faced hundreds of rejections. Then came a break – a trial shift at a fishmonger’s. That led to a Sunday job, shucking oysters. And from there he has excelled. The work quickly became full-time; he’s currently working 60 plus hours, across a six-day week.
As I write this, Benjamin is a few days away from his eighteenth birthday. With money he’s saved, he’s heading back to Morocco for a month. And when he returns? “I’ll be a Deputy Manager, earning more than a teacher, with no debt. All my colleagues have degrees. And I feel I’ve got a five-year head-start.”
“You can show people all the charts you want, but that won’t change their perceptions of the risks or their resulting decisions. What will change their minds? Going through an event themselves, or knowing someone who has.”
MARIA KONNIKOVA, THE BIGGEST BLUFF
THIRD DECADE
LEARN FROM BABEL
Our twenties are a decade that lines up nicely with Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit (thrownness).
His big idea is that we are all thrown into existence, without any say in the matter. We don’t choose to be born. But here we are nonetheless – in our particular time and place, family and culture. Heidegger argues that we all have to act, and create meaning, within our unique set of unchosen circumstances.
In healthy adult development, during the third decade of life, we’ve packed a large rucksack, waved adieu to our parents and come to the end of the long airport travelator of adolescence, with its pre-defined path and mechanical forward momentum.
The travelator’s last act is to throw us ahead.
Stepping off, we stumble, as we adjust to the new solid ground.
With a crowd thronging behind, there’s no chance to stand still.
After a few steps, it’s already time to choose. You can get on any plane you like. But which destination? Why? And how to pay for the tickets?
The rucksack starts to weigh, the heavy boots of expectation nudging into the back. All that’s familiar has been left behind. A disorientation sets in. Call it the dizziness of choice.
Perhaps it’s best to find a seat, put the bag down and take a minute. Those walking by seem to have it all figured out. Craving advice, unsure who to ask, you take out your phone. But the search for guidance only yields happy false pictures, curated lifestyle success.
TRIAL AND ERROR
Disorientated by thrownness, seeking a future beyond the end of the travelator, it’s easy to waste a prime decade getting risk backwards. Liking things because you want to be liked. Living under the control of others’ opinion. Or, in my case, seeking security and status in the wrong places.
I got married the summer I graduated from university. Two days before I flew to New York for our wedding, my Plan A for the autumn imploded: I’d been offered a scholarship for postgraduate study, but the promised funding didn’t come through; I now needed to find a job and earn money.
In the early phases, this was trial and error, with an emphasis on the error. Looking back, I wince at the combination of arrogance and immaturity I displayed in my first graduate role. Being dizzy with thrownness may have been a factor but is no excuse.
Eventually, I found work I liked, and was good at. The pay rose, promotions came, and the job titles got longer. Outwardly, things were rosy. Inwardly, consciously and unconsciously, I was conforming – conforming to an image of success dominant in our culture. This distorted my decisions in countless ways, including accepting, for too long, conventional perspectives on risk.
In many respects, I was living out the mistakes of the builders of Babel.
STRIVING AND FAILING
In Genesis 11, we meet the clans of Noah’s sons, experiencing their own Geworfenheit, after the flood. They move eastwards until Babylonia, where they say to each other: “‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’”
They want to build both a city and a tower.
The city is an attempt to secure power and autonomy, independence and self-sufficiency. But its motivating force is fear – of being scattered, separated, rejected.
The better-known tower is about making a mark.
Like many ambitious men in their twenties, these builders crave praise and validation. They want fame, glory and a name for themselves. Their pride – like all pride – is essentially competitive; stood high on the tower, they will be able to look down on everyone else.
But while the builders, confident in their own strengths and abilities, are still erecting the scaffolding of their tower-to-the-heavens, the Lord comes down. First to inspect, then to act.
If, as one people speaking a common language, the sons of Noah can cooperate to build such a high tower, what will their pride spur them to next?
The Lord made them speak different languages, so they would not understand one another. And He scattered them over all the earth – a manifestation of what they most feared.
The building stops. All their labour comes to nothing. That is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.
We have no account of how they responded. But we live with the legacy of their confusion.
“Their pride – like all pride – is essentially competitive; stood high on the tower, they will be able to look down on everyone else.”
FOURTH DECADE
EMULATE MARY POPPINS
Mary Poppins is the patron saint of independent thinkers. She thinks from first principles, resists pressure to conform and operates on her own terms.
Her employer, George Banks, embodies risk backwards. A conventional mind, comfortable in consensus, Edwardian notions of order and – until his transformation at the end of the 1964 film8 – dismissive of individuality, creativity and play.
Let’s place them at either end of their fourth decade in life – Mary just entering her thirties; George a man old before his time.
BREAKING EXPECTATIONS
We meet the Banks family at a point of tension. Mr Banks – a senior employee at the Dawes Tomes Mousley Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank – believes happiness flows from hierarchy and discipline, timetables and rules. His children, Jane and Michael, just want to have fun, with an energy and unruliness that makes their nannies resign.
Enter Mary Poppins, responding to a torn-up advert, written by the children, for a nanny who must be kind, must be witty, very sweet and fairly pretty. Arriving from the clouds, floating down on an umbrella, Mary is practically perfect in every way. She is firm yet charming, warm yet inscrutable, unwilling to match expectations of what a nanny should be. Her methods are her methods: Mary never explains or seeks approval. She’s self-contained, not craving applause or trying to be liked.
Through her magic and adventures – rooftop dancing with chimney sweeps, tea parties on the ceiling, journeys through chalk-painted worlds – the transformation of the Banks family begins.
For Jane and Michael, Mary is a delight; for Mr Banks, she is a disruptive threat. And it’s the clash of worldviews and personalities – Mary’s independence versus George’s conformity – that drives the film forward.
The turning point comes when Mr Banks insists Michael invest his pocket money for the future. Michael protests – he wants to spend it on a bag of seed for the birds outside St Paul’s Cathedral. A confrontation between bankers and boy plays out in front of the bank’s customers. Chaos follows, sparking a run on the bank.
That evening, Mr Banks is summoned by the bank’s partners, humiliated and fired. Stripped of status, the brittleness of his regimented life exposed, George Banks is adrift. And it’s here – in his moment of crisis – that Mary’s influence blossoms. George turns towards his children’s joy and to Mary’s example – and laughs for the first time in years.
Liberated by his firing, George repairs a kite, takes his children to the park and embraces spontaneous fun with his family. Mary’s work as a catalyst for change is now complete. After a firm word with her umbrella, she soars away in the clouds.
MISTAKING ORDER FOR RESILIENCE
Mary Poppins and George Banks can also serve as metaphors for two very different approaches to life.
Mr Banks is volatility suppression in a top hat. He mistakes order for resilience. In calmer times, in familiar circumstances, things proceed as expected. While there’s little growth or dynamism, life is steady and dependable.
On the surface, everything looks fine. Unremarkable. In good shape. Until what look like regular events – a new nanny arrives, a boisterous son wants to spend, not save – produce a shock. And it’s a shock that gives us our plot twist. Mr Banks – seemingly so methodical and disciplined – hadn’t actually managed risk; he’d merely shifted it out through time. In a crisis, his latent fragility is exposed, with a sting from events he’s failed to foresee. If he were a fund manager, Mr Banks would align his portfolio with the prevailing trends. There would be no idiosyncratic positions, no high-conviction ideas. Instead, he’d hug the index, limit his career risk and do all he could to avoid underperforming his peers. Better, in Keynes’ words, to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
CONVEXITY WHEN IT COUNTS
Mary Poppins, by contrast, embraces volatility. Because she works from first principles, she can thrive in disorder. The greater the disruption, the more opportunities she sees.
She also illustrates the power of convexity – how our actions and their rewards are not linear, because well-chosen actions bring disproportionate rewards.
In life outside the consensus, a spoonful of sugar generates outsize returns.
FIFTH DECADE
EMBRACE THE AFTERNOON
As she approached her fifth decade, writer Elizabeth Oldfield reflected on a desire for “whatever is the equivalent of Pilates for my soul.”9
The advance of secular materialism offers us an ever-expanding menu of products to craft our identity and ease our existence. This menu includes all-you-can-eat entertainment – a multiverse of distraction; everything, everywhere, all at once – for a low monthly fee, set to auto-renew.
Yet the abundance doesn’t seem to satisfy. Unbounded freedom and endless choice prove to be empty calories. The entertainment may numb, but it rarely revives.
In a culture grappling with rising loneliness and isolation, fragmentation and fear, the search for meaning and purpose can feel like an infinite scroll. Oldfield observes friends taking a pick-and-mix approach to understanding life, gathering packets of wisdom and insight wherever they can find them. In Britain, many of us born in the 1970s and 1980s were raised by parents who shunned anything spiritual. “Few of us have had a set of directions passed down.”
As she enters her forties, Oldfield sees the trap of living risk backwards – shunning both a safe and tidy conformity and the crowd’s pull towards “a big glitzy hedonist life.” Instead she wants depth, the rewarding company of morally serious people, and to satisfy her cravings – “for roots, for spiritual core strength.”
THOUGHTS FOR A NEW SEASON
Oldfield is entering what Carl Jung called the afternoon of life. It’s a season we step into thoroughly unprepared.
“Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”10
One way to take these steps, to help us move well from morning to afternoon, is to revisit how we think about risk. Can we get beyond the blanding? Can we enter new rooms, rooms where we don’t all nod along and agree?
The fifth decade is also a time to rediscover the old joys of unstructured play and to stress-test the conventional paths we have followed so far. If we are to satisfy the cravings – for roots and depth and spiritual core strength – we’ll need to find security and status in better places than Babel. And we’ll need the courage to sit alone, in silence, and to ask: in what ways am I trapped like George Banks?
CODA
For my part, it’s taken me until my fifth decade to understand something I’ve read countless times, believe as true and accept on the highest authority.
Namely, that it is possible to spend our lives gaining the whole world – everything we desire, and more. But it will do us no good if we forfeit the essence of who we really are.
To live world-without-soul? That’s risk backwards.
For the first shall be last, and the last, first. ⬤
THE RUFFER REVIEW IN CONVERSATION
In Chris Bacon's episode of Ruffer Radio he shares lessons drawn from different decades of life, explaining why disruption can be an advantage, how to cultivate independent thinking, and how Ruffer’s philosophy embeds these ideas in both culture and investment practice.
15 mins
1 In ed. Suman (1997), Religion and Prime Time Television
2 Dahl (1964), Television
3 Cairns (2008), How to Live Dangerously
5 Haidt (2024), The Anxious Generation
6 UCAS: number of UK-based full-time undergraduates enrolling annually
7 See Brynjolfsson et al (2025), Canaries in the Coal Mine?
8 In PL Travers’ 1934 book, Mary is a sterner and colder figure; George is usually at work
9 Oldfield, E (2024), Fully Alive
10 Jung, C (1931), The Stages of Life
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