The recent headline that a British Everest guide survived an avalanche against all odds is, of course, a fine human interest story. But the calls from Westminster for ‘tighter mountain tourism laws’ that follow it are not just misguided: they are symptomatic of a deeper, more troubling rot. We have become a nation of nannies, clutching our rulebooks as we slide down the moral and physical slopes of our own making.
Let us recall that the Everest of today is not the Everest of Mallory and Irvine. It is a theme park, a stage for Instagram narcissists and corporate team-building exercises. The ‘miracle’ guide was leading a commercial expedition, a package tour for the pampered rich who pay to have their hands held at 8,000 metres. The fact that he survived is less a testament to providence than to the sheer stupidity of the enterprise.
Now, the British government, ever eager to regulate what it cannot understand, proposes to impose new laws on Nepalese mountain tourism. They will mandate better safety protocols, stricter vetting of guides, and perhaps a quota system for oxygen cylinders. This is the same regulatory reflex that gave us health-and-safety audits for school bake sales. It is the death rattle of a civilisation that has lost its sense of risk and reward.
Consider the historical parallels. When Rome fell, its elites were obsessed with sumptuary laws—regulating what people could wear, eat, or do for entertainment. The Victorian era, for all its supposed rigour, was a carnival of hypocrisy: public morality campaigns ran alongside private opium dens and child labour. Our current obsession with ‘safety’ in extreme tourism is no different. It is a cover for our own cowardice. We no longer want to climb mountains; we want the mountain to be administered like a branch of the civil service.
The guide’s survival is indeed remarkable. Let it be that. But the call for laws is a confession of weakness. The mountain does not care about your laws. It will still kill the unprepared. And the unprepared will still come, because they are not seeking adventure: they are seeking a credential, a story to tell at dinner parties. The only way to truly make Everest safer is to stop going. But that would require a spiritual discipline we no longer possess.
Instead, we will get more regulations. More forms. More committees. And when the next tragedy occurs—and it will—the same voices will call for even tighter controls. This is the cycle of decadence: each new law a plaster on a wound that demands amputation. We have forgotten that some risks are inherent to the human condition. That is what made us great once. Now, we are merely safe. And that is the most dangerous thing of all.
