I am reposting this beautiful article by a friend and Chairman of the Lion Rock Institute in Hong Kong, Nick Smith. Too many "bright" boys and girls these days and they think their "bright ideas" should be legislated and enforced/imposed on everyone else in society. Enjoy.
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See also:
Lion Rock 20, Hong Kong's labor welfarism and rising unemployment, July 08, 2016
Lion Rock 21, Dangers of Universal basic income (UBI) philosophy, August 11, 2017
Lion Rock 22, Hong Kong's early policies on free trade, zero income tax, October 24, 2017
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Nick
Sallnow-Smith
Open any op-ed page of most newspapers (at least the
English language ones that I read) and you enter the world of “should” and
“must”. Many, on some days most, of the opinions expressed are about what
others should be doing, or must be compelled to do, to make Hong Kong/the world
a “better” place.
Many of you in my age group may remember a world when the
advice of our mothers tended to include well-worn phrases like “mind your own
business”, “live and let live”, “don’t interfere” and similar pieces of ancient
wisdom. Underpinning this view of society was the thought that you should look
after your own affairs and not interfere with others in pursuit of theirs. This
had the admirable result that one focussed on one’s own responsibilities,
rather than spending energy trying to alter the activities of others. I think
the benefit of that concern with one’s own life and accountabilities first has
been lost at a great cost. Today, the focus is not on what you are going to do
with your life but an obsession with why others are not helping you. I am not
sure when this view of an individual’s role in society changed. But it seems to
me that there may be a link between the public policy angle to this and the
“social” aspect. Let me explain.
As expectations of the role of the state have changed, so
has the focus of discussion in newspapers’ pages shifted. Politics in the West
was largely a class-based debate in the postwar period; rights in the workplace
etc. The idea that the state could have a role to play in all walks of life,
including what happens within a family was not thought of. But as the
interventions of the state have grown, then the need for ordinary citizens to
take an interest in, and push for, policy changes has also grown. Because
public policy will affect your daily life, the need to be heard grows. Op-ed
writers accordingly appeal to you to support their pet way of changing the
world. And you may take an interest, because if the state responds and enacts
laws, then indeed your pet project may be forced on everyone. If you don’t take
a position, then perhaps someone else’s pet project will be imposed upon you.
What is, for many, a natural aspiration to want society engineered into a shape
that they desire, leads politicians to propose such schemes for popular
support.
The process becomes self feeding. The more states seek to
enact legislation to intervene in more and more areas of previously private
conduct, the more important it is to push parties to adopt your pet scheme.
That “activism” then motivates and empowers the State to increase the
intervention yet further.
As I indicated, this had gone far beyond the push to
protect employees in the workplace. Today, well meaning folk will write urging
parents to stop their children from using smartphones, urging laws against
sugary drinks, and so on. Already in the West the range of behaviours in the
home for which children can legally be taken into care is quite astonishing.
Gradually as the spiral of ever more policy intervention gathers pace, what for
all of human history has been the responsibility of parents is now being
assumed by the State particularly in Europe.
The extent to which this assumption, that there must be
intervention in every aspect of society, was borne out for me when reading an
op-ed article last week on school curricula. Written from the perspective of
desiring more “diversity” of thinking amongst the younger generation, the
writer actually uses the phrase “schools must teach respect for different
views”. There is no way, in that authors’ view, to have respect for diverse
opinion unless we force schools to teach it. And of course there must be a
common platform of curricula content and means of analysis. The writer seems
not to see the irony in compulsory education on freedom of thought.
So much for the public policy aspect of this. What about
the social sphere? My belief is that the “social justice warrior” world that
Western societies have now entered is in effect an extension of this public
policy dynamic into all of social life. Look at discrimination as an example,
there are inevitably limits to the effective enforcement of anti-discrimination
laws by the state, as these have grown since the 1960s. Those “should” “must”
citizens, to which I alluded at the beginning of this piece therefore move into
the social sphere. Enforcement can now move on from the state, to impose social
penalties: ostracism, shaming, career destruction. Many have been claiming that
this is somehow caused by social media. I disagree. It is of course enabled by
social media but the cause is much deeper. If politics is conducted in a way
that if your group can command enough support, it can enable you to enforce
your mores on the whole community, this encourages behaviour in the social
sphere towards imposition of your view. The effect is more frightening however.
In politics, there are some institutional constraints on the speed with which
this happens and on the levels of madness it assumes. In the social context, no
such restraints exist.
In the West today, it is no longer enough to obey the law
and “mind your own business” (and it is hard enough to know all the laws you
are required to obey). Now you need to adhere to an ever changing morass of
“social” codes of behaviour the breaching of which may lay you open to social
exclusion. Even more concerning for freedom of thought and behaviour, is that
these codes are applied retrospectively. Even the law is seldom does that. But
today you can be found to have transgressed a new social code of behaviour 30
years ago and have your social standing destroyed. You should have known that,
30 years later, it would have become “politically incorrect”.
Now you might be thinking that this is only a problem in
the West. The East is of a different culture and could never see such a
transformation. I am not so sure. The media flows that influence so much of the
thinking of new generations are now global, not local as they were 50 years
ago. A slide into a world where your peers try to impose what you “should” and
“must” do in every aspect of your daily lives, may not be too far ahead.
There is a thought for a Happy New Year!
Nick Sallnow-Smith
Chairman
The Lion Rock Institute
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See also:
Lion Rock 20, Hong Kong's labor welfarism and rising unemployment, July 08, 2016
Lion Rock 21, Dangers of Universal basic income (UBI) philosophy, August 11, 2017
Lion Rock 22, Hong Kong's early policies on free trade, zero income tax, October 24, 2017
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