Posted by
John Caile on Wednesday, June 03, 2009 12:45:58 PM
The human ability to adapt to our social environment was once a survival mechanism - 40,000 years ago it allowed our ancestors to endure famine, drought, and even the Ice Age. "Going along" with the tribe ensured that you remained under the protection of the group.
This tendency persists even today - psychologists and anthropologists have christened it the "cascade affect." It's what happens when any idea or viewpoint reaches the point where "most people" seem to share it ("global warming" for example) and to disagree with it is to risk "ejection from the tribe."
But while "adapting" had its advantages, all human progress has come from those who refuse to adapt - the mavericks who would not accept things as they were, but instead were willing to challenge the conventional wisdom.
Today, in a world of large and complex societies, mindlessly following the group can easily lead to a disturbing erosion of something arguably more important than life itself - personal liberty. Look how many people "just go along" with each new restriction on their freedoms.
OSHA, EPA, FDA, EEOC - the number of Federal regulatory agencies that didn't even exist a scant few decades ago should be enough to give any libertarian nightmares. And that's just the Feds. When you start going down the list of State and local bureaucracies that exert control over our lives, it is even more frightening.
Permits for this, licenses for that, "impact studies" for everything. In most states, you can't even put a gold-fish pond in your backyard without jumping through at least a dozen hoops (each with an attendant fee, of course).
Then there are the explosion of laws governing what used to be private behavior - smoking bans, seat-belt laws, motorcycle helmet laws, laws against leaf-burning, even laws restricting what foods you are "allowed" to eat.
And what do most people do? They simply shrug their shoulders (if they even think about it at all, that is) and just "go along" with the incremental growth of government control over their lives. Many seem unconcerned about relinquishing their freedoms, even eagerly trading them for the promise of "security" - usually in the form of some "safety net" or other (i.e. "free" healthcare).
Perhaps even worse are those who jump on the bandwagon, actually embracing each new governmental restriction on personal freedom because it's what people "should be doing" anyway.
Astonishingly, not only have we gotten to the point where the Obama administration has cavalierly plunged the country into a $2 TRILLION deficit, but we now have the United States government literally taking over private corporations - banks, insurance companies, and automobile manufacturers (to, ahem, "save" them, you see).
And the response from the average citizen to this outrageous expansion of government power (not to mention debt that your grandchildren will still be paying off)?
Not a peep.
Instead of mass demonstrations in the streets, we have...apathy. Most folks seem disturbingly content to just sit back and let "the government" take care of things.
But liberty is worth fighting for - or at least, it used to be. One can only imagine what Patrick Henry would think, were he to see what his country has become...