Everybody is his or her own god. Everybody follows his or her own rules, which means there are no rules. There are no absolutes, only opinions, and the common guide most people follow is what they think they can get away with. The moral, civil, and social order is dissolving into chaos because so few people seem bound to much of anything beyond themselves. Thus proving my point.
People simply refuse to submit to authority.
I agree with my concerned friends to a degree, but I also remember our country was based on a fundamental distrust of authority. Years of oppression by priests and kings led the founders to create a system of checks and balances, elected offices, renewable terms, and the separation of church and state. American democracy was based on mistrust of power. Baptists, who came to life out of some of the same currents as the American democracy, also distrusted authority. Years of religious persecution led them to emphasize soul freedom and the priesthood of the believers, that no pastor or priest or pope or executive director or denominational official or seminary president had any more business telling us what we have to believe and how we have to live than a mayor or a governor or a president or a king.