What a riot

So many serious people are pontificating on the cause of the recent riots around Britain, and what should be done about them, that I feel almost too overawed to comment.

Surely such great minds can deal with this?

It truly saddens and alarms me that so much time, effort, mind power and TV exposure can be put into evading reality.

Why have individuals gone on a rampage? Because they can? But why would they want to?

As far as I can see it is the result of, a response to, the simple old control lust that runs through all of us and that a nice preacher-psychologist that I once heard referred to as the cause of all mankind's woes: The desire to tell other people what they must think and do.

The solutions being mooted are more of the same. We should do this, or that. Harsher sentences. More remedial actions. Build better social services. Simply put - interfere even more than before. That very interference and micro-management that has caused the problems in the first place.

What should be done?

NOTHING! Back off and leave alone. Stop interfereing in the detail of people's lives.

Where a crime against someone or their property is committed, sure, prosecute and sentence. And err, if at all, on the side of hardness.

But otherwise leave people alone to run their own lives.

And before the old control lust kicks in and we start trying to teach people to be individually responsible and free - again, stop!

Sure, the information that individual freedom and individual responsibility is the key to a happy community (because the individuals are happy) can be made available.

And the example of a personally free and a personally responsible lifestyle can be presented through one's own life.

But this ghastly urge to muck other people about has got to stop.

Simply. The cause of the riots is that individuals have run out of a sense of personal responsibility. They have run out of a desire to be personally responsible because someone else is assuming this for them, and doing so, if they would admit it, to further their own lust for control.

One cannot control people into becoming more individually responsible.

They need to understand the concept because it makes sense (as have better politicians understood that smaller government is better government) not because someone tells them it is true.

But of course, to the empire builders, such ideas of individual freedom and responsibility are anathema.

The empire builder in all of us - that which would would control - is the cause.