An interesting read, that article. I think perhaps it's more a "where could we end up?" piece than a "where we are" tho'.
The fundamental problems we face are those of a reduction in respect of people for their fellows (especially amongst the young), a catastrophic loss of faith in our government (regardless of political colour) and an unrestrained rise in unjustified "I know my rights" legalism.
Of these, the most important is the first. When people don't think of others as having equal importance to themselves or consider what their actions will mean for those around them then everything else falters too.
Part of this loss of respect is the past couple of generations have grown up without having a healthy fear of authority knocked into them at an early age. I use the word 'fear' deliberately because, when you are very young, 'repect' is an alien concept. I did not 'behave' myself when I was a child because I 'respected' my father (in the adult meaning of the term) but because I feared the punishments that would be the consequences of my transgressions.
When the children rule the houses, then the crumbling of stable society is not far away and that's what we're seeing now. They've grown up without the internal checks and balances that most of we older generations take for granted and have been given no reason to fear for consequences.
Cossetted from any harm whilst growing on the one hand and desensitised to violence by the entertainment media on the other, it's little wonder that a significant percentage of them are indistiguishable from Lord of the Flies savages.
Even if action is taken now, it will take another couple of generations to get back to where we were when I was a kid and the spread of lawless behaviour will only get worse before it gets better.
The problem with that is that it encourages a totalitarian mindset in those that govern, as they can only see the application of draconinan security measures as the answer to the problem they created by restricting reasonable discipline in the first place!
Ah, the glories of Liberal Democracy ... are sometimes hard to see against the glaring light of self-serving expediency
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