"Infantile Adult Syndrome"

Steve Miller, writing Sept. 13, 2005, for the Nevada Policy Research Institute, looks at a horrific case of child abuse and asks of adults responsible for the toddler's death, "How does it happen that human adults become so monstrously irresponsible?"

He looks in part to the book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple, for some possible answers. He also quotes from an amazon.com review of the book.

Miller also notes:

...The Adacelli Snyder case is already being flogged in Southern Nevada as a scandal significant merely because it reveals “shameful neglect by government” of its responsibility to protect society’s most vulnerable. Amazingly, however, the fundamental problem—the degeneration of parents into inert drugged-up onlookers who’ve discarded all their responsibilities—gets nary a word.

This has to change. If Nevada is ever to genuinely cope with the demonic springs of such atrocities, the inherent dignity of human beings as moral actors must first be acknowledged.

Handing off responsibility to ever-bigger government?

That just feeds the beast.