Posted on 08/27/2002 1:32:00 PM PDT by gofast
Individuals and Personal Responsibility: Losing the ability to self-govern.
Bradford Schmidt, July 18, 2002
It has come to this: Americans are beginning to require the government to tell them how to act. By ceding decisions that ought to be guided by morality and personal responsibility to our elected officials and their employees, our moral compasses have apparently fallen into such disrepair that we now seem to need legislation to guide our actions. Though obvious, it bears mentioning that we created this mess ourselves by attempting to micro-manage the behavior of individuals in the first place, so we have no one but ourselves to blame when behavior requires micro-management. Inevitably though, the more behavior needs to be managed, the less personal freedom we all have.
For decades we have willingly allowed legislators to govern decisions that we as a free people were once able to make on our own, and the situation is getting worse at an alarming (to those people not writing the laws) rate. Already we apparently can't be trusted to drive safely without laws barring cell phone use. For years we have been told we were incapable of respecting other people without being legally bound to leave the building before lighting a cigarette. Don't forget that we also can't be trusted to own land without laws governing what we can and cannot do with it.
Want to swim in the ocean? Sorry, you might drown so you can't unless we watch you. Want to ride a motorcycle? Sorry, you might fall so you can't unless you wear a helmet. Want to exercise your right to defend yourself and your family? Sorry, you might shoot yourself, so that's a job to be undertaken by professionals only. The bottom line is that regardless of the relative merit of any of these regulations, we have allowed legislators to treat us like children and the result is that Americans are not only losing their right, but their ability to self-govern. We are becoming people that don't seem able to make decisions for ourselves about the most minor behavioral issues that fall outside pre-specified conditions. An entire nation that increasingly requires specific guidelines from the Official Arbiters of Behavior.
And oh we are paying for it, because a direct result of being given instruction in behavior down to the most minute detail is that a sense of responsibility is lost for those actions that are undertaken outside the bounds of those instructions. After all, if we continually ask to be guided, how can we be responsible when we receive no such guidance? So, the logic continues, if we ourselves are not responsible for our actions, then someone else must be.
The effects of this idea are as obvious as they are depressing. We are becoming a nation of finger pointers; blaming anyone convenient for anything less than pleasant that occurs in our lives, regardless of where the responsibility really lies. We are people that spill coffee in our own laps and sue the restaurant that sold it to us, who relinquish parental responsibilities and blame schools when our children behave badly, who encourage generations of Americans to become dependent on the government and then blame them for not knowing how to do for themselves. We abuse prescription drugs and blame the manufacturer, we go to theme park haunted houses and sue for emotional distress, we get drunk, injure ourselves then sue the bars where we bought the booze.
A legal profession with an apparently bottomless appetite for lawsuits clearly doesn't help, feeding as it does the sense that we are all victims of something. But frankly, had Americans not gradually lost their sense of personal responsibility between our declaration of independence from Great Britain and our passage into the 21st century, we wouldn't be living in a nation in which lawsuits run rampant and over-reaching regulations supposedly for the "greater good" are seen as necessary.
Another damaging effect is that as individuals relinquish their personal responsibilities, so also do they become under-achievers. By living more and more according to strict guidelines handed down by others and therefore being absolved from the responsibility for our own lives, we lose our ability to learn from our mistakes, gain from our victories, and ultimately are unable to believe that we can achieve anything that is not granted to us by others.
Which brings us back to the issue to individual self-government. In a society in which there is no necessity to conduct our behavior in a manner guided by morality and responsibility to our fellows, the very ability to do so falls by the wayside. Slowly but surely, generation by generation, we move farther along a path from a free and responsible people to a people who try to get away with whatever we can, because we can. If we haven't been told it's wrong, it must be ok. If there isn't a law against it, it must be moral. If we weren't prevented from doing it, it's just not our responsibility, no way, no how. This runs completely counter to the principals on which this country was founded and deeply damages our society.
So once again we turn away from ourselves and towards the government to fix it for us. We draft new laws and tighter regulations over behavior, laws that seek to rectify those problems which they themselves helped create. Laws which lead to a further loss of self-government, which leads to blame, which leads to.... you get the point.
Sadly, in each cycle we give up a bit more personal freedom, we shirk a bit more personal responsibility, and our moral compasses that are so necessary to the existence of a free and open society are forgotten - surrendering to entropy, slowly rusting away, becoming unable to function when we need them.
Copyright 2002, Bradford Schmidt
No it does not. The only time the government is justified in meddling is when someone's life or property is endangered, not the morality of a community. The singing of Christmas carols does not violate the above, therefore it cannot be outlawed.
Even as it destroys the character of our people and imposes a universal blandness on our public life.Behold the birth of political correctness, and all the stupidity that engenders. Libertarianism was the midwife at that birth.
Wrong. No Libertarian has ever been elected to public office. The decay of our culture and its accompanying stupidity occurred under the auspices of Democrats, Republicans and Conservatives.
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