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In America, life is so good and devoid of meaningful values that leftists create artificial struggles to fill the void.
Humans require meaningful struggle, sometimes intensive struggle, to achieve their potential. When societies attempt to eliminate the essential struggle for survival, people must voluntarily assume responsibility, something they’re frequently unwilling to do. If they don’t, they invent artificial alternative struggles.
Governments too often accelerate that process by subsidizing dependency and insulating people from the consequences of their actions. The result is social policy that rewards the wrong behaviors, to the detriment of society but to the advantage of some politicians.
Consider how simple life is for those who wake up hungry each day in parts of the developing world. Their daily mission is brutally clear: feed the family, avoid violence, and survive another day.
Thanks largely to the spread of market capitalism—and aided by America’s unmatched tradition of private philanthropy—fewer people live in extreme poverty today than at any point in recorded human history. Virtually no one in the Western world faces that kind of existence. That is unquestionably good. Yet the disappearance of natural struggle also removes the forces that once compelled people to develop discipline, responsibility, and resilience.
Prosperity itself isn’t the problem. Prosperity without responsibility is.
Throughout history, people found meaning through faith, family, productive work, sacrifice, community, and raising children according to moral principles. These voluntary burdens replaced the burdens of survival while producing stable and prosperous civilizations. When people abandon those responsibilities, they rarely stop searching for meaning. They simply begin looking for it in all the wrong places.
America offers perhaps the clearest illustration of this principle in the modern world.
Over several generations, the government has steadily assumed responsibilities once carried by families, churches, neighborhoods, and voluntary associations. Each new promise has come with a hidden cost: fewer opportunities—and fewer expectations—for individuals to solve their own problems. As government expands, the institutions that cultivate responsibility steadily weaken.
Millions of healthy young adults delay marriage, postpone careers, remain financially dependent upon parents, and drift through extended adolescence. Rather than assuming adult responsibilities, many continue to search for their identity well into their thirties and beyond.