….We all pay our high taxes and mostly obey the law and get on with it. Unfortunately, a society that lives merely by the “Golden Rule†will soon struggle to function economically or socially, as we are now – you need to live by the Platinum Rule, which is to do unto others better than they would to you.
And this is where Dave’s Big Society runs into its first major problem – volunteering is, and always will be, dominated by religious groups, almost all of which have views that are incompatible with the moral ethos of the elite; some of them have views that give me the willies, let alone Dave’s new Independent-reading friends in the SDP.
….Not only that, but religious groups are also by their very nature exclusive, and some are actively separatist. Although most of the mainline churches now see themselves as a wing of the race relations industry – which helps to explain many an empty pew – not all religious groups see “faith communities†this way.
And just as a civil society is, arguably, impossible without the strong social networks of a religion, so it’s perhaps impossible in a society with many religions. One of the reasons socialists love “diversity†so much is because it has to be policed and regulated by the state.
This is especially problematic here because of the ambiguity of how much these groups will be entirely voluntarily and how much state-subsidised.
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