A post came to my Facebook page last week that struck me as significant, “Society has gotten to the point where everybody has a right but nobody has a responsibility.”  This statement is actually speaking about the necessity of greater personal responsibility.  It says that society has become so lax in its maintenance of the standards of liberty, freedom and the expression of the right of self-determination that the social and legal structures that support a functional society and nation have become dysfunctional.  

Caveat:  I’m going to make some pretty broad generalizations in the following.  Usually what we see when the population of a nation increases in size and number is that the freedom of individuals to express deviant behavior decreases significantly.  The life of the individual becomes less valuable as the necessity of preventing more widespread deviant behavior.  In dictatorships, military governments and communist governments the rights of self-determination lessen as population increases because the authority that holds the fabric of that society together emanates from the central government, not from individuals.  Remarkably, in a democratic nation as the U.S., we are witnessing the actual opposite.  The tolerance for individual deviancy has increased as the population has increased, as witnessed by more lenient sanctions by the courts.
  
The reason this laxity of moral backbone has occurred is that the political, civil and social rights of individual citizens have increased over the term of this nation without a like expansion of their obligations to become more personally responsible for their behavior.  Being more fully educated and informed to make more responsible decisions in their expression of their rights of self-determination has not been attended with a commensurate increase of individual political, civil and social responsibilities.  Incredibly, in a democratic society as the United States, as the population has increased, the value of an individual life has increased.  Citizens take for granted that their freedom to express their right of self-determination is almost without bounds. 
 
As the above has occurred, the processes of democracy have continued to grind out more and more laws to define socially, politically and economic/financially acceptable behavior.  The result is the early development of a police state for statutory enforcement of the multitude of laws.  And this is untenable in a democratic society.  What are the alternatives?  They are many, as we will discover in later posts.