There’s a playground in the Netherlands made of discarded shipping pallets and construction debris. Rusty nails stick out everywhere. Little kids climb on it with hammers, connecting random pieces together. One false step and you’re slicing an artery or losing an eye. There’s barely any adult supervision. Parents don’t hover. Nobody signs waivers.

American visitors literally cannot believe what they’re seeing. And they don’t let their kids play there.

This isn’t a story about Dutch people being braver or American parents being overprotective. It’s about something more fundamental: who can afford to let things go wrong.

The Position of Fuck You

In The Gambler (2014), loan shark Frank explains success to degenerate gambler Jim Bennett:

You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that’s your base, get me? That’s your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Boss pisses you off, fuck you! Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don’t drink. That’s all I have to say to anybody on any social level.

Frank asks Bennett: Did your grandfather take risks?

Bennett says yes.

Frank responds: “I guarantee he did it from a position of fuck you.”

The fuck-you level is simple. It means having enough backing that you can absorb failure. House paid off, money in the bank, basic needs covered. From that position, you can take risks because the downside won’t destroy you.

Without it, you take whatever terms are offered. Can’t quit the bad job. Can’t start the business. Can’t tell anyone to fuck off because you need them more than they need you. Can’t let your kid climb on rusty pallets because one injury might bankrupt you.

Frank claimed “The United States of America is based on fuck you”—that the colonists told the king with the greatest navy in history to fuck off, we’ll handle it ourselves.

But here’s the inversion that explains modern America: the country supposedly built on telling authority to fuck off now systematically prevents most people from ever reaching the position where they can say it. And Europe—supposedly overregulated, nanny-state Europe—actually makes it easier for ordinary people to reach fuck-you level than America does.

Let me show you exactly how this works.

Why Your Gym Is Full of Machines

Walk into any corporate fitness center and you’ll see rows of machines. Leg press machines, chest press machines, shoulder press machines, cable machines. If there are free weights at all, they’re light dumbbells tucked in a corner.

This seems normal until you understand what actually works for fitness.

The single most effective way to improve strength, bone density, metabolic health, and functional capacity is lifting heavy weights through a full range of motion. Specifically: compound movements like squats and deadlifts that use multiple muscle groups through complete natural movement patterns. This isn’t controversial. Every serious strength coach knows it.

So why doesn’t your gym teach you to do these exercises?

Because the gym owner is optimizing for something other than your training results. They’re optimizing for liability protection.

Machines limit range of motion. They guide movement along fixed paths. They prevent you from dropping weights. They make it nearly impossible to hurt yourself badly. And that’s exactly the point—they’re not designed to make you stronger. They’re designed to be defensible in court.

This isn’t speculation about gym psychology. Commercial liability insurance policies for gyms explicitly exclude coverage for certain activities. Unsupervised free weight training above certain loads. Specific exercises like Olympic lifts without certified coaching present. Anything where someone could drop a weight on themselves or lose balance under load.

General liability insurance for a mid-size gym runs $500 to $2,000 annually. Add “high-risk” activities like powerlifting coaching or CrossFit-style training and premiums spike 20-50% due to claims history in those categories. Many insurance companies won’t cover those activities at any price.

The gym owner faces a choice: provide effective training that insurance won’t cover, or provide safe training that won’t actually make people strong.

For the gym owner, this isn’t really a choice. One serious injury—someone drops a barbell on their foot, tears a rotator cuff, herniates a disc—and the lawsuits start. Medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering. Courts often void liability waivers, ruling you can’t sign away protection from negligence. The gym owner is completely exposed.

The gym owner has no fuck-you level. One bad injury could end the business, wipe out savings, destroy them financially. So the gym that can exist is the gym optimized for legal defensibility rather than training effectiveness.

If healthcare absorbed medical costs, different gyms could exist. Someone gets hurt, the system handles it, everyone continues training. But American gym owners bear full exposure. Without fuck-you level, they can’t structure operations around what actually works. They have to structure everything around what they can defend in court.

This pattern—activities distorted by who bears costs rather than shaped by actual function—appears everywhere once you see it.

The Mechanism

The mechanism is straightforward once you understand it.

Consider two families with kids who want to learn physical competence by taking real risks:

The Dutch family: Their kid climbs on the pallet playground. Falls, breaks an arm. Healthcare handles it automatically. Total out-of-pocket cost: zero. No bankruptcy risk, no financial catastrophe, no lawsuit against the playground. The family has fuck-you level through the collective system. The kid can take risks that develop genuine physical competence. The playground can exist because the operators aren’t exposed to catastrophic liability.

The American family: Their kid wants to climb on something challenging. The parents know that if something goes wrong, they face potential financial catastrophe. Emergency room visit, X-rays, orthopedic consultation, cast, follow-up visits, physical therapy. Easily $15,000 to $25,000 depending on the break. If complications occur—surgery needed, nerve damage, growth plate involvement—costs could hit $50,000 or more. Plus lost wages if someone has to take time off work for appointments and care. The family has no fuck-you level. The parents can’t rationally let the kid take that risk.

U.S. healthcare spending hit roughly $16,470 per capita in 2025. That’s largely private and fragmented, with real bankruptcy risk from injuries. European universal systems average around $6,000 per capita with minimal out-of-pocket costs.

This isn’t about different attitudes toward danger or different cultural values about childhood development. It’s about who bears the cost when things go wrong.

When you have fuck-you level:

• You can experiment
• You can fail and try again
• Failure provides information rather than catastrophe

When you don’t have fuck-you level:

• You must prevent everything preventable
• You can’t afford a single mistake
• Caution becomes the only rational choice

Europe front-loads fuck-you level through taxation. The money comes out of everyone’s paycheck whether they use the healthcare system or not. This creates collective downside absorption, which enables looseness in daily life. You can let your kid take risks, you can try challenging physical activities, you can switch careers, because the system will catch you if things go wrong.

America back-loads everything through litigation. Costs get redistributed after disasters through lawsuits. This forces defensive prevention of everything because there’s no collective insurance—just the hope that you can sue someone afterward to recover costs. And that hope doesn’t help institutions at all, because they’re the ones getting sued.

The result: institutions without fuck-you level must eliminate risk. Not because they’re cowardly or don’t understand the value of challenge. Because they’re responding rationally to the incentives they face.

Who Can’t Say Fuck You

This creates a distinctive pattern of who can and can’t take risks in America.

The wealthy buy voluntary physical risk as a luxury good. Mountaineering, backcountry skiing, general aviation, equestrian sports, amateur racing. These activities are overwhelmingly dominated by people who have fuck-you level through private wealth. They’re not risking their economic survival. They’re purchasing challenge as recreation because they can absorb the medical costs, the equipment costs, the time costs. A broken leg from skiing means good doctors, good insurance, and no financial stress. They have fuck-you level, so they can take risks.

The poor accept involuntary physical risk as an employment condition. Roofing, logging, construction, commercial fishing. These are among the most dangerous occupations in America, with injury rates that would be unacceptable in any middle-class profession. Roofers face injury rates of 48 per 100 workers annually. Loggers have a fatality rate of 111 deaths per 100,000 workers—nearly 30 times the national average. They’re risking their body because they have no other way to earn. This is the naked short not as strategy but as necessity. They have no fuck-you level, so they sell their physical safety because they lack alternatives.

The middle class gets trapped in a sanitized zone. They’re too wealthy to risk their body for wages—they don’t have to—but too poor to absorb the costs of leisure injury. A serious mountain biking accident, a rock climbing injury, even a recreational soccer injury requiring surgery could mean $30,000 in medical bills plus lost income. They can’t take risks for survival (don’t need to) and can’t afford to take risks for recreation. This group faces maximum constraint.

The system isn’t “no risk allowed.” It’s “risk only for those who already have fuck-you level.”

What This Explains About American Life

Once you see the fuck-you level framework, it explains patterns that otherwise seem contradictory or irrational.

Helicopter parenting: Without collective support, parents know they bear the full cost if anything goes wrong. A child’s broken bone isn’t just painful—it’s potentially financially catastrophic. The behavior that looks like overprotectiveness is actually a rational response to lacking fuck-you level. Parents can’t let kids take risks. Additionally, with fewer children per family, the stakes per child are higher. Losing an only child isn’t just family tragedy—it’s lineage extinction.

Liability waivers for everything: Schools, youth sports, summer camps, climbing gyms, trampoline parks—everything requires signed waivers. These organizations are trying to protect themselves because they have no fuck-you level. One lawsuit could destroy them. The waivers often don’t hold up in court, but they’re a desperate attempt to establish that risks were acknowledged.

Warning labels on everything: Coffee cups warn that contents are hot. Ladders warn not to stand on the top step. Plastic bags warn about suffocation. These aren’t because companies think customers are stupid. They’re because companies are completely exposed to litigation and must document that warnings were provided.

Kids can’t roam unsupervised: In the 1980s, children regularly walked to school alone, played in parks without adult supervision, roamed neighborhoods freely. Today this is often reported as neglect. Parents who let their kids do this face visits from child protective services. The change isn’t that dangers increased—crime rates are actually lower. The change is that parents now bear full financial and legal liability for anything that happens. They have no fuck-you level, so they can’t permit unsupervised risk.

Can’t quit bad jobs: Without healthcare through employment, without savings buffer, without safety net, workers stay in jobs they hate because they’re dependent. They lack fuck-you level, so they can’t walk away even when mistreated.

The Exceptions Prove the Rule

But America has roughly 400 million firearms causing approximately 45,000 deaths annually. How does extreme caution about playground equipment square with that level of gun violence?

The answer reveals something important: political power determines who gets fuck-you level.

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, passed in 2005, gives gun manufacturers unusual statutory immunity. It bars most civil suits seeking to hold manufacturers liable for criminal misuse of their products. This protection is essentially unique in American law—no other major consumer product sector has comparable federal immunity.

Before PLCAA, cities and victims filed lawsuits based on public nuisance and negligent marketing theories. After PLCAA, those cases got dismissed and new filings were sharply constrained. Gun manufacturers got legislated fuck-you level. They’re protected from liability for the costs their products impose on others.

Meanwhile, the parkour gym has no legislative protection. Small constituency, easy to frame as “unnecessary danger.” Nobody’s lobbying Congress for parkour gym immunity.

Cars have established insurance frameworks that spread costs across drivers and manufacturers. Everyone carries liability insurance. Manufacturers face normal product liability but not open-ended tort exposure.

The pattern is clear: constraint falls heaviest on those who can’t politically defend themselves. Those with power arrange for costs to be borne elsewhere—they get fuck-you level. Those without face the full liability system—they don’t.

The 1980s Paradox

Many people remember the 1980s as looser. Kids roaming unsupervised, riskier playground equipment, less institutional oversight. But safety nets were weaker then. If the fuck-you level mechanism is right, shouldn’t weaker safety nets have produced more caution, not less?

This is the hardest case for the framework. Several factors likely mattered. Litigation culture was still forming—the explosion in liability insurance costs and institutional defensiveness came primarily in the 1990s and 2000s. More people had direct experience with physical risk through manufacturing and construction work. The occupational shift away from physical labor hadn’t yet changed who was writing policies.

But most importantly, people still expected collective support even if it was weak. The expectation of support—the belief that things would work out, that communities would help, that disasters could be absorbed—might matter more than the actual material support available.

This remains the genuine puzzle in the framework and deserves more investigation.

The Catch-22

Frank’s prescription assumes you can accumulate the $2.5 million first. But to get there, you need to take risks. To take risks safely, you need fuck-you level.

This creates a fundamental catch-22: you need fuck-you level to build fuck-you level.

For individuals, this forces a choice. Either you’re born with private fuck-you level through family wealth, or you take catastrophic risk without protection—what I call the naked short. Immigrants who arrive with nothing and bet everything on one venture. Startup founders who max credit cards and sleep in offices. Historical pioneers who left established areas without safety nets and took enormous risks.

The naked short sometimes works. Some people gambling catastrophically succeed. But most fail. You can’t build a functioning society around the expectation that everyone must gamble their survival to reach basic security. The human cost is enormous.

And increasingly, the American economy has transformed this desperation tactic into a business model. Gig work is industrialized naked shorts—Uber drivers, DoorDash workers, gig contractors execute unhedged risk not as temporary strategy for reaching fuck-you level but as permanent condition. Over 40% of gig workers fall into poverty or near-poverty levels. They bear vehicle costs, injury risk, income volatility with no benefits while platforms extract value.

The system doesn’t just tolerate people gambling catastrophically. It depends on a permanent underclass doing it.

The American Inversion

Frank said “The United States of America is based on fuck you.” The colonists told the king with the greatest navy in history: fuck you, blow me, we’ll handle it ourselves.

But that rebellion worked because the colonists had collective fuck-you level. They had enough people, enough resources, enough distance from Britain to absorb the downside of failure. They could tell the king to fuck off because they had the material capacity to survive his response.

Modern America destroyed collective fuck-you level. Geographic mobility and ideological individualism broke apart traditional support networks. This was celebrated as freedom—the ability to leave your hometown, escape your family, reinvent yourself anywhere.

Then America failed to build coherent replacements.

For physical and economic risks, America replaced networks with a litigation system. But litigation doesn’t prevent catastrophe—it just redistributes costs afterward through lawsuits. Without something to absorb downside beforehand, institutions ban everything defensively. The result is that almost nobody reaches physical fuck-you level except through private wealth.

Europeans have collective fuck-you level through healthcare and safety nets. They can take risks because the system absorbs downside. The money comes out of everyone’s paycheck, but in return, failure isn’t catastrophic.

Americans have a litigation system that assigns costs after disasters. They must prevent risks because nobody has fuck-you level to absorb them when things go wrong. The freedom is rhetorical. The constraint is material.

Walk into a European playground and you see the result of collective fuck-you level. Kids climbing on challenging structures, taking falls, learning to assess danger. Parents relaxed because the system will handle injuries.

Walk into an American playground and you see the result of litigation without collective insurance. Plastic equipment bolted into rubber surfaces, warning signs everywhere, no challenge that could produce injury. Kids learn to be safe, not to assess and manage danger.

The country supposedly based on “fuck you” now structurally prevents most people from ever saying it.

What This Means

When you see the constraint in American life—the liability waivers, the warning labels, the hovering parents, the machine-filled gyms, the sanitized playgrounds—don’t think it’s because Americans are more risk-averse or because institutions are cowardly.

Look at who has fuck-you level.

The Dutch parents at the pallet playground aren’t braver. They have collective fuck-you level through healthcare. The American parents refusing to let their kids climb aren’t cowards. They lack fuck-you level and are responding rationally to exposure.

The gym full of machines isn’t run by people who don’t understand training. The gym owner lacks fuck-you level and must optimize for legal defensibility rather than effectiveness.

The school banning dodgeball isn’t run by idiots. The school lacks fuck-you level and can’t risk the lawsuit from an injury.

This is structural, not cultural. It’s about incentives, not values.

A society that gives people fuck-you level can permit risks. A society that leaves people exposed must prevent risks entirely.

Frank was right about one thing: a wise person’s life is based around fuck you. The ability to say no, to walk away, to take risks from a position of strength rather than desperation.

What he didn’t explain is that you need systems that let you build it.

And in America today, those systems are missing. The fortress of solitude Frank describes requires either being born rich or gambling catastrophically. For most people, fuck-you level isn’t achievable through prudent accumulation. The ladder has been pulled up.

America still celebrates the rhetoric of “fuck you” while systematically denying people the material conditions to build it. We’re told we live in the land of the free while navigating more constraint in daily life than people in supposedly overregulated Europe.

That’s the inversion. That’s the problem. And until we understand who actually has fuck-you level and how they got it, we’re just arguing about symptoms while the mechanism grinds on.