Abstract systems depend on trust, yet they provide none of the moral rewards which can be obtained from personalised trust, or were often available in traditional settings from the moral frameworks within which everyday life was undertaken. Moreover, the wholesale penetration of abstract systems into daily life creates risks which the individual is not well placed to confront; high-consequence risks fall into this category. Greater interdependence, up to and including globally independent systems, means greater vulnerability when untoward events occur that affect those systems as a whole.

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.

High-consequence risks form one particular segment of the generalised 'climate of risk' characteristic of late modernity - one characterised by regular shifts in knowledge-claims as mediated by expert systems.

The body is an object in which we are all privileged, or doomed, to dwell, the source of feelings of well-being and pleasure, but also the site of illnesses and strains. (...) [I]t is an action-system, a mode of praxis, and its practical immersion in the interactions of day-to-day life is an essential part of the sustaining of a coherent sense of self-identity.

Martin Luther King did not stir his audience in 1963 by declaiming 'I have a nightmare'

Risk concerns future happenings - as related to present practices - and the colonising of the future therefore opens up new settings of risk, some of which are institutionally organised.

To a greater or lesser degree, the project of the self becomes translated into one of the possession of desired goods and the pursuit of artificially framed styles of life. (...) Not just lifestyles, but self-actualisation is packaged and distributed according to market criteria.