When individuals are no longer viewed as being responsible for their actions, the government will treat the worst among us as victims, while law-abiding people will be treated as victimizers. This can only end in increased violence and societal decay.
If someone is an adult, and they commit a crime, should they be held accountable?
Are they responsible for their actions?
At one time, this question didn’t even need to be asked. It was taken as self-evident that once someone was 18 they were to be fully held responsible for what they did.
That was the whole point of being an adult. You get full access to all the freedoms available within your country, you can vote, you can drink (age 19 in some jurisdictions), you can smoke, etc…
With those freedoms came the understanding that you are also responsible for your actions and the consequences of those actions.
If an adult commits a crime, they are tried as an adult. They don’t get any special breaks or special understanding for being young.
But what happens when a society or government abandons that kind of thinking? What happens when individuals are no longer seen as responsible for their actions, but when individual actions are the fault of everyone else?
Well, you get exactly what we are seeing today in Canada: Surging crime and violence.
Early this morning, three police officers were shot in Bourget, Ontario – east of Ottawa. One passed away, and two remain in hospital. While details on the shooter have not been released, previous instances of violence against police officers have often been perpetrated by repeat offenders.
More broadly, surging crime is dominated by repeat offenders, many of whom have multiple convictions for heinous acts yet are somehow free to roam about.
This is an inevitable and direct consequence of the worldview – which is being implemented across the country – of the Liberal government and many collectivist politicians.
Collectivism is a victim-based worldview, in that it believes that successful individuals are only successful because they victimized others, and it believes violent individuals – the lowest of the low who commit terrible acts against innocent people – are victims of ‘the system’ or of ‘the powerful.’
This twisted worldview results in a society that becomes completely upside-down: The worst of the worst get coddled, while law-abiding, hard-working people get punished.
The reason so many of these criminals keep getting released is that collectivist politicians, judges, and parole board members think they are being ‘compassionate’ by absolving criminals of personal responsibility. They blame ‘racism,’ or ‘poverty,’ or ‘colonialism,’ thus displacing responsibility away from the individual who committed the crime. They see the criminal as the real victim, as someone who ‘never had a chance,’ and who will become and upstanding member of society if only they can avoid being sent to prison.
And since they are so stuck in their collectivist worldview, they just keep doubling-down the more their approach fails. The more a criminal repeatedly breaks the law, the more the collectivists blame everyone else. Failure begets more failure.
Personal responsibility
Not everyone starts from the same place in life. Not everyone has the same skills, or the same potential. The world isn’t fair, and it will never be fair. And we wouldn’t really want it to be ‘fair,’ since that would require holding back the most talented people.
Despite this unfairness however, every individual still has personal responsibility. If we can’t control our immediate circumstances, we can control how we respond to those circumstances.
The vast majority of people – even people facing severe challenges – don’t use that as an excuse to commit violent crime. They exercise personal responsibility.
That is what society should reward.
We have to get back to holding people responsible for their actions and abandon the collectivists victim-based ‘blame-everyone-else’ mindset. Otherwise, our society will continue to decay.
Spencer Fernando
