The body is in some sense perennially at risk. The possibility of bodily injury is ever-present, even in the most familiar of surroundings.
Anthony GiddensThe thesis that risk assessment itself is inherently risky is nowhere better borne out than in the area of high-consequence risks.
Anthony GiddensAbstract 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.
Anthony GiddensA lifestyle involves a cluster of habits and orientations, and hence has a certain unity - important to a continuing sense of ontological security - that connects options in a more or less ordered pattern. (...) [T]he selection or creation of lifestyles is influenced by group pressures and the visibility of role models, as well as by socioeconomic circumstances.
Anthony GiddensMartin Luther King did not stir his audience in 1963 by declaiming 'I have a nightmare'
Anthony GiddensRegimes are modes of self-discipline, but are not solely constituted by the orderings of convention in day-to-day life; they are personal habits, organised in some part according to social conventions, but also formed by personal inclinations and dispositions. Regimes are of central importance to self-identity precisely because they connect habits with aspects of the visible appearance of the body.
Anthony Giddens