Reply #23: I think the point some are making and you are missing is: [View All]

[TalkingDog]

Children learn what you teach them. Not only by word, but by deed.

If people of the next generations have grown up with a mindset that they have no personal responsiblity for their choices, this generation has demostrated how that is possible. In Spades.

I neither agree nor disagree with what these people are doing. Conditions have been set that a)promote the behaviour by example (i.e. the bank didn't concern themselves with the impact of their choices to generate profit, therefore it is an institutionally acceptable behaviour) and b)when the culture at large spend the years from 1969 onward suggesting that the individual and his selfhood (self fullfillment, self awareness the whole section of any bookstore entitled "self help") is primary, then don't be so surprised when that seed bears bitter fruit.

We stopped teaching our children about the social contract they implicitly agree to by enjoying the benefits of our society and our culture. We talk about pollution and crime and poverty in the abstract, as if we had nothing to do with producing it. And seemingly no way to have prevented it. We see sacrifice and relinquishment of even a portion of earnings, time, labor and luxury for the common good as "quaint" or "socialistic" or as fundamentally "wrong" because it suggests that those "other" people are as important, if not moreso, than "ME"

Even in your responses, you suggest the primacy of your experience: "I also have lived within my means for 40 years..." "They're making money and you and Ilose because neither of us has we didn't try to live above our means." and your inability to empathize or comprehend why the "others" would make self interested choices. They do that because we've spent years teaching them to.

When the "President" and a Congress full of Baby-Boomers gets around to abandoning their essential hedonism and self-centered approach to the rule of law, then they can begin to set examples by punishing those people (human and corporate) who insult the social contract.

Does this post address the minutia of your concern? No. It is an overview of some of the broader mechanisms that allow the behaviour you are addressing to become widely accepted. A point to ponder, nothing more.



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