Nothing is ever anyone's fault. Let's all wear matching grey suits and get bar code tatoos.

This was written by a New Zealander but it is prescisely relevant.

Victim Culture Puts Paid to a Sense of Responsibility
By Lindsay Mitchell
Many would share Peter Kammler's impression of society, that "every day we are sinking deeper into the quicksand." He blames values and goals destroyed or distorted by advertising, the lubricant of the market economy.
I read this astonishing claim whilst waiting for a bus. A friend parked at his nearby shop. Seeing me waiting for the bus he ambled over and asked if I was without a car for the day, and did I want to borrow his? He didn't need it as he would be working in the shop all day.
This set me to wondering about his values. I was tempted to ask him how much TV he watched - obviously not enough, because his values seemed intact.
This sort of kindness and generosity isn't rare, but homes without TV are. We are all exposed to advertising but we don't all let ourselves be manipulated by what is good only for the advertiser, thereby losing our own capacity to make an ethical judgement.
For most of us advertising is merely a tool we use for information. By letting us know about products or sales, it increases competitive pressures on producers. And that increased competition brings down prices saving us all some money.
The societal ills Kammler describes such as failing education, rising violence, health scandals and crumbling infrastructure feature a common denominator ; the state - not private enterprise. It is the state which has most recently been responsible for setting our values and goals, not the market.
We tend to trivialise political correctness but it's effects are serious. State school curricula and teachers are often too politically correct. I recently overheard a teacher aide admonishing two young children for "comparing" things. "It's not nice to compare things," she said, obviously concerned that one might get upset if they came off badly in the process. But did she realise the significance of what she had said? We learn by comparing.
Judging is also out of favour. Judgement is now a nasty concept thanks to moral relativism. Things aren't better, or worse, just different. A short step from this thinking is, behaviours aren't right or wrong, just the result of circumstances beyond one's control. A dogmatic reluctance to hurt a child's pride early in life can lead that child to grow up and hurt a lot more than just other people's feelings.
Then we have rising violence. What value does the violent criminal lack? He (or she) certainly has no fear of consequences. He probably copied the violent behaviour of his parents and found the system made excuses for him because it was their fault. He learned to blame, young. He discovered that as a 'victim' of his upbringing there were no end of people prepared to cut him more slack.
The thinking coming out of public-sector academia and permeating the education system, social services and courts has contributed far more to rising violence than have advertisers and PR and marketing companies. Writer and psychiatrist, Dr Theodore Dalrymple describes this best;
"Most of the social pathology exhibited by the underclass has it's origin in ideas that have filtered down from the intelligensia." In his book Life at the Bottom, whether his subject is sexual relations, alcoholism and drug addiction, marital abuse or attitudes toward education, Dalrymple finds an essential self-deception at work amongst his patients. He finds an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives.
These 'victims' are a huge cost on the rest of society. As their numbers grow, so does the state sector. At one end, it is busy producing more 'victims' by paying people to have children and at the other, it is frantically busy growing the armies of social workers, health workers, court staff, police, counsellors, prison staff, etc who try, in vain, to contain the havoc wreaked by the 'victims'.
We get the 'health scandals' because the state insists on a largely nationalised health system. With all the money being poured into producing and containing 'victims' it is hardly surprising that little is left to run hospitals efficiently. We get the 'crumbling infrastructure' because the state insists on managing the roads. Again we know that the money we pay to build and maintain roads is going elsewhere.
So when Peter Kammler concludes that we must reassert our prerogative to set our values and goals by political process I shudder. The only political process most are ever involved in, is the general election. Most have already allowed the state's influence over their thinking to go so far that they will only vote for more of the same anyway. It is as though they are suffering from a sort of 'battered' spouse syndrome and keep going back for more.
John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, 1859; "A state that dwarfs its men......will find that, with small men, no great things can really be accomplished."
Peter Kammler draws an analogy between socialism and capitalism. They are two patients, he says: one has died and the other is not feeling too well.
State socialism hasn't died at all. It is still alive and kicking - kicking the guts out of productive, hardworking New Zealanders.