An institutionalised state.

I have been increasingly amazed and dispairing of the way so many people seem so sanguine about losing their rights and freedoms under government legislation. Why are so many happy to give these up? Why are they not angry at the all-encompassing belief that the adults of this country are like small children who need to be guided and controlled by an overseeing 'wiser head' to prevent them making terrible mistakes? Why do they not feel constrained and threatened by the increasing lack of privacy and loss of ability to make their own choices?

I believe it is because they are institutionalised.

They have grown up in nurserys and schools, entered the world of work by joining large corporations, and therefore spent their entire lives living by other people's rules and being actively encouraged not to think for themselves.

This has led to fear, fear of being responsible for their own lives, their children, their neighbours. They want to be told what to do and how because that is all they have ever known. Worse, they have been indoctrinated with the belief that any other course of action is wrong and must be punished. So they look to those in charge to tell them what to do.

And those in charge are also scared, by the wieght of the responsibility being forced on them, the apparent inability of the populace to think for itself. But they are also institutionalised. They have also grown up in the 'system' and find it hard to imagine other solutions beyond more and more controls. It doesn't occur to them that removing the controls and forcing people to take the responsibilities that are theirs might be the best cousre of action, that the very 'solutions' they are currently implementing time after time are the cause of the problem, because that is what they themselves know.

It takes a lot to break free of this. Ask ex-prisoners, ex-slaves. Freedom is scary. It is easier to let someone else tell you what to do. The more controls we have, the more institutions we put in place, the fewer people there are who will have the strength, or understanding, or sheer bloody-mindedness, to break out of this mindset and the closer to death our society will come.