We’re Not Responsible Enough to be Free

The most notorious failing we Americans experience as a society is our utter refusal to accept responsibility for our own lives in the presence of liberty. We’re a nation of busy bodies worrying over what everyone else is doing with their lives. We’re a nation of control freaks and micro-managers, obsessed with achieving impossible ideals at any cost. We don’t take responsibility for the sheer insanity of our governments spending, waste, and debt.

We don’t even think other people should take responsibility for their own lives, and anyone arrogant enough to suggest that each individual is responsible for their own lives, for their own poverty and wealth, for their own achievements and failures, and for the natural consequences of their lifestyles and personal decisions is shouted down as some kind of sick jerk.

We allow irresponsible spending because that spending addresses problems we caused for ourselves. We pass endless laws and regulations because we refuse to allow the lives of others to bounce into our own without an umpire or referee standing by to call a foul. We’ve sacrificed immeasurable liberty because we cannot stand the weight of our own sovereignty. I find this disappointing.

What’s worse, is that most Americans know that the way we have recently arranged this society of ours is all wrong and will inevitably collapse under the grotesque fat of each new irresponsible government fiat.

Do they speak out? Of course not; they are just that concerned with how other people view them. Americans are scared to death to be called “selfish” or “anti-social”. I suppose there are some Darwinian antecedents behind this condition, but the negative consequences are such that there can be no excuse for our inaction and silence.

We fear the mob. We indulge in group think. We accept “truths” without understanding them or even knowing that they are true.

How can a man tolerate any belief held for any reason other than that he knows it to be true? Has our society’s prejudice against knowledge really impacted so many otherwise intelligent Americans, that they allow society to tell them what’s true and what’s false? Have we sacrificed even the sovereignty of our own minds?

The American people are spoon fed contorted realities by the news media and by their politicians and teachers, and they are just too damn lazy to bother learning enough about the world they live in to know anything for themselves.

Americans don’t seem to know anything about the world. They simply have faith that what they are taught (or told) about the world is true. If you cannot reach a conclusion on your own, using premises that you know to be true, then you are, in point of fact, dependent upon others to tell you what’s real and what’s not! This is irresponsible! This is insane.

And isn’t that the moral of the story?

We Americans are irresponsible and we’re squandering our liberty at an increasingly rapid pace. We have given up responsibility for our own knowledge, our own ethics, and our own lives over to a mob… over to the government.

Faith in the inevitability of American Prosperity and Liberty is a crime. Does anyone really believe that they’d survive if they behaved the way our government and society behaves?

I find us debating the political issues of the day, and I think, “for what”?

What’s the point? We’re not responsible enough to be free. Until we are, this rapid descent, this evaporating sea, will continue on a countdown to extinction. No society is eternal. No nation thrives by virtue of being itself. Reality has no respect for feelings nor ill-informed opinions. There is only cause and effect and the laws of nature that govern them. America is dreaming and wishing and pretending itself into extinction. That we’re doing this out of laziness is hard for me to bear.