It goes deeper than that in the UK. There's a large (and electorally powerful, as they're often older) proportion of the population who want, no expect, the government to step in and regulate social harms, and has a genuine belief that the good outweighs the harms.
Unfortunately as a nation our culture appears to have shifted away from taking personal responsibility for anything. It's always someone else's fault now. Some else's responsibility. Someone else's job.
I have seen many comments that this has become worse since the isolation period caused by COVID. I tend to agree but I also think it goes deeper than that. We have some problems in our society that have been festering for much longer and have root causes like inequality, lack of opportunity, and a lack of constructive facilities and positive role models.
I hear a lot from friends who work in education about children coming to school with profoundly disturbing attitudes and other children who have experienced nasty forms of abuse. And yes - absolutely the schools and the government should push back against problems like bullying and misogyny and racism where they can.
But maybe the answer here isn't just trying to lock up this week's negative social media influencer or introduce unusual and potentially dangerous concepts like regulating online content that is "harmful" yet not illegal or expecting governments to spy on us all and interfere in our lives more often. Maybe we should first be asking why so many kids think they have nothing better to do than spend all day watching that nasty online content in the first place. Maybe we should be asking why so many kids are given unsupervised and unregulated access to ideas they aren't ready to deal with yet.
That's about education and children but you can pick almost any hot button topic and find similar examples. Try immigration or people who live entirely off state benefits. You can find plenty of examples where people advocate for papering over social problems but there's a sad lack of discussion about properly fixing the cracks underneath. Those are the real social harms we should be trying to reduce. Unfortunately their perpetrators are often among the first to assume it must be someone else's problem.
> Unfortunately as a nation our culture appears to have shifted away from taking personal responsibility for anything.
That's as old as hierarchy. The Hillsborough disaster was in the 90s: every one tried to shift the blame. The different sex abuse scandals (Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford etc.)? Same shit started early 90s and still going on with looking for people other than police to blame.
I think that it's not just on that scale anymore though - it shifted to affect literally everything in your personal sphere too. Dropped the knife and hurt yourself? Blame manufacturer for making such slippery handle! Drove without adjusting speed for the conditions and ended up in a hedge? Better complain to the local council for not setting the right speed limit! Failed an assignment at school? It must have been badly written!
I could keep going and going and going. It's so incredibly rare to hear "yeah that's my fault" nowadays, the first reaction is almost always to immediately blame anything else as if it's a magic get out of jail card(because actually, it is a lot of the time).
> There's a large (...) proportion of the population who...
That's sadly true in a lot of places. Throw in all the optimism vigilantes - who react badly to any suggestion that the police & justice systems aren't straight out of some "Happy Sunshine Good Guys" children's book - plus all the folks who are trivial to stampede with claims that the gov't somehow needs Yet Another Power (to fight pedophiles, terrorists, or whatever pushes their buttons), and the convenient de-emphasis of history in recent decades...
Yeah. Outside of those currently being beaten with the short & dirty end of the stick, freedom has very few supporters.
