As the great Jane Austen once observed, for some people, the more you do for them the less personal responsibility they will have. They will grow lazier and more entitled as you grow kinder. That is a truth that we are unfortunately seeing play out on a wide scale in modern American culture.
Today is the anniversary of Austen’s 1775 birthday, so it seems particularly appropriate to remember her and learn from her ever-brilliant and incisive observations. “There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves,” Austen wrote in her novel "Emma." As a matter of fact, I think that observation applies to most people. It is part of fallen human nature to grow lazy if one does not have to work; we all have a touch of that inclination in us. This is not, of course, an argument against charity, but an argument in favor of having personal, familial, and cultural standards requiring individual responsibility from every person, child or adult.
Even within my own lifetime, over about 20 years’ time, I have seen a significant decline in expectations for personal responsibility and meeting behavioral standards. When I was a toddler, everyone in church from our parents up front to the church ladies in back expected us to behave ourselves. And we did. We did chores every day, we were punished when we behaved badly, and we had to try for good grades (not as hard, of course, as our grandparents tried, but certainly harder than the average student is expected to do today).
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Nowadays, the family section in church more often resembles and sounds like a zoo than a religious gathering, I had to teach some fellow college students how to hold and move a broom across the floor, and children who are barely literate get passed on from year to year. These are not only my own personal observations, but observations made by parents, teachers, grandparents, and employers across multiple states and demographics. Now whenever a crisis or perceived crisis is identified, everyone’s first reaction is that government must do something about it, and that is just as true of Republicans as it is of Democrats. That is a recipe for disaster.
America has become a society where a person’s comfort and emotional whims are prized and prioritized above anything else. We see it with the transgender fiction, we see it with the fractures in families over voting choices, and we see it in the high prevalence of divorce and illegitimate pregnancy.
I know a government contractor whose boss was ordered to hire a young woman unqualified for the job and whose former employer strongly recommended not hiring her because rejecting her application was somehow considered too prejudiced. I know a teacher who was told she couldn’t fail kids who don’t turn in their work and refuse to learn anything. I know more than one college grad who was passed along for years, turning everything in late or not at all, only to get into the workforce and be unable to hold a job. And some people wonder why our businesses and institutions are so often inefficient, ineffective, and illustrative of awful customer service.
It is not necessarily the children’s fault that they are badly behaved; it is not necessarily the teenagers’ fault that they are shocked when an employer expects them to work hard and meet standards for the first time. They were badly taught by woke or overly indulgent parents and teachers. Nor am I expecting that three-year-olds will never throw tantrums and new employees will never mess up. The Founding Fathers were certainly not perfect men, but they were great men, and a significant factor in that was their great emphasis on individual responsibility. When a customer came to their business, they took pride in producing an excellent product or service. When an overseas tyrant attacked their rights, they themselves took up arms, believing it was their job to do something about it.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed how the American values of personal responsibility and individualism drove people across the United States of his time to contribute actively to their communities. We must reclaim that individualism and sense of responsibility again, and pass it on to our children. Because, as Jane Austen wisely warned us, otherwise the trend of entitlement will grow worse until it destroys America.
