You'll notice I'm not the most prolific blogger. Right now I'm taking a brief break from writing my doctoral thesis to type out this brief rant.
Something I've noticed increasingly in recent years (though perhaps it just escaped my notice before) is the amount of do-gooders , ideologues and moralizing. Much of this happens around politics, but also discussing issues of the day and the way to address the worlds problems.
So what's the problem with the aforementioned. I would say it's that they have elevated good intentions over reality. That is, it doesn't matter what the outcome is, only the feelings involved. Well that's my assessment, since the reality of the situation is ignored in order to wave the flag of ideology. John Lenon's Imagine is their anthem. Nothing wrong with the song, but seeing as people are largely the source of problems and not systems (for the most part) it will remain illusive.
There's this suspicion of individual success, especially in any financial sense, that it's not deserved. On the flip side that poverty or disadvantage, automatically makes someone a victim. They love to disconnect any sense of personal responsibility for one's situation in favour of assigning privilege or victim status, with broad brush strokes. Are there privileged people and people who are victims, absolutely, but I don't think this is the rule.
The political solution is ever increasing expansion of government to chase the dream. Equality will be mandated from the level of government. But it's not equality of opportunity, it's equality of outcome. The funny thing about this is it involves treating people unequally, since outcomes will always be different, since people are all different.
Right now we are essentially taxing success and rewarding dysfunction. Lets be honest, alot of poverty springs from dysfunction, which believe it or not free money doesn't solve. Australia has a robust welfare system that pays out an awful lot of money to fund people's laziness, drinking, smoking and drugs. High crime rates are also associated with welfare hotspots.
How can a society that does not encourage individual responsibility hope to break free from this? I'd ask the ideologues, but we know they don't have any answers.
