Regimes 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.

The risk climate of modernity is thus unsettling for everyone: no one escapes.

Achieving control over change, in respect to lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.

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

The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of actions in a feedback fashion. Human history is created by intentional activities but is not an intended project; it persistently eludes efforts to bring it under conscious direction.

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.

High-consequence risks have a distinctive quality. The more calamitous the hazards they involve, the less we have any real experience of what we risk: for if things 'go wrong', it is already too late.