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In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren\\u2019t allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told you to work the job prescribed to you by your caste and gender, to marry who your parents told you to marry or at\\xa0least\\xa0someone of the opposite sex, to worship at the proper temples and the proper times, and to talk about\\xa0proper\\xa0things as opposed to the blasphemous things said by the tribe over there.

Then we got Liberalism, which said all of that was mostly bunk. Like Wicca, its motto is \\u201cDo as you will, so long as it harms none\\u201d. Or in more political terms, \\u201cYour right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins\\u201d or \\u201cIf you don\\u2019t like gay sex, don\\u2019t have any\\u201d or \\u201cIf you don\\u2019t like this TV program, don\\u2019t watch it\\u201d or \\u201cWhat happens in the bedroom between consenting adults is none of your business\\u201d or \\u201cIt neither breaks my arm nor picks my pocket\\u201d. Your job isn\\u2019t to enforce your conception of virtue upon everyone to build the Virtuous Society, it\\u2019s to live your own life the way you want to live it and let other people live\\xa0their\\xa0own lives the way\\xa0they\\xa0want to live them. This is the much-maligned \\u201catomic individualism,\\u201d or maybe just liberalism boiled down to its pure essence.

But atomic individualism wasn\\u2019t as great a solution as it sounded. Maybe one of the first cracks was tobacco ads. Even though putting up a billboard saying \\u201cSMOKE MARLBORO\\u201d neither breaks anyone\\u2019s arm nor picks their pocket, it shifts social expectations in such a way that bad effects occur. It\\u2019s hard to dismiss that with \\u201cWell, it\\u2019s people\\u2019s own choice to smoke and they should live their lives the way they want\\u201d if studies show that more people will want to live their lives in a way that gives them cancer in the presence of the billboard than otherwise.