Social Responsibility

“When social conformity becomes our only standard, concepts like duty, obligation, responsibility and honour come to seem antiquated and irrelevant. Emotions like guilt, shame, contrition and remorse are deleted from our vocabulary, for are we not all entitled to self-esteem? The still small voice of conscience is rarely heard these days. Conscience has been outsourced, delegated away.”

“So, in place of an inner code, we have regulatory authorities. Where once people believed that God sees all we do, now we have CCTVs and video surveillance. When self-imposed restraint disappears, external constraint must take its place. The result is that we have become the most regulated, intrusive society ever known. And still it fails, and will always fail, because without an internalised sense of responsibility to others, people will always find ways of outwitting the most sophisticated systems. In fact, it becomes a game to see how much and how often the system can be beaten.”

The Great Partnership, Chapter 8, p. 130