We do it, because as a nation and a people, our collective conscience has been dramatically diminished since our founding. Our collective patience is terribly short, and our collective desire for instant gratification is wildly out of control. As the collective conscience has diminished, all aspects of our society have been diminished, notably including our appreciation and respect for the value of earned reward and natural authority.
One of the principle beauties of freedom is that it gives total latitude to persons who hold a high level of morality, and thus high conscience. When the collective conscience of a society is diminished, there is no alternative to enforcing high morality than through increased tyranny in the manner of heavier handed laws. With increased laws comes increased enforcement, and as enforcement is increased a people's respect for natural authority becomes diminished due to the pressure they feel from unnatural authority in the form of heavy-handed government. As the laws continue to increase, freedom decreases, and people lose sight of the purpose of laws in the first place, which are to establish and uphold the accepted standards or collective conscience of society. We have become a society who no longer upholds its own standards of morality, has lost its conscience, and instead relies on tyranny and law enforcement to set the standards of moral authority. Anything within these boundaries becomes acceptable, and respect for self-driven morality loses meaning. As it loses meaning, appreciation and respect for naturally earned authority no longer holds much meaning, and public perception of high morality becomes skewed to mean nothing more than "law-abiding."
A people with a strong conscience inherently know right from wrong, and with or without laws they will respect the natural order of things and maintain themselves as productive "law-abiding" citizens. When this collective conscience is diminished, the inherent ability to differentiate between right and wrong begins to fade away, and those who subscribe to a higher system of values are no longer respected and elevated, but cast down and made light of. This happens because it is an unwelcome reflection of the shortcomings of the collective conscience itself. When those who would (due to their high conscience and high morality) naturally be in authority are no longer respected and elevated to their rightful place as leaders, we look instead to leaders who fit our diminished standard of leadership, which is simply law-abiding members who stay within the boundaries of the tyranny of laws that we have struck up to stand in the place of morality and conscience.
A society with a diminished conscience no longer has the ability to recognize the priceless value of persons who abide a standard of high morality and high conscience. We look to the WWII Generation and inherently realize they are among the Greatest Generations of Americans, but we collectively lack the will and conscience to understand why they earned that title, and thus pursue our own modern great society molded after theirs. Theirs was a society with a remarkable height of collective conscience, and great leaders and men and women of integrity were produced by the millions as a result of this high level of morality and collective conscience. Ours is a society with few, if any of their qualities, and as such the collective conscience is in the sewer.
Society today has a greatly diminished collective conscience, and as a result it produces from its loins too few men who possess a high conscience and high degree of inherent natural morality. Thus, to the downfall of us all, including in our own lodges, there are very few natural leaders among us to be elevated into their naturally earned places of authority. Men of this type do not typically seek out high office, rather they are elevated to these offices by those who recognize, respect, and appreciate the value of their existence. Sadly, one of the most devastating outcomes of a dimished collective conscience is the inability of the collective to even recognize men of high conscience and high morality among us. Instead we are content to be lead by leaders with little natural or earned ability with whom we have a few things in common, as it gives us the ability to ignore our own shortcomings, and thus justify our own low standards of conscience and morality. A diminished collective conscience, even in our lodges, makes it easier to keep the bar low because a diminished conscience is one that doesn't appreciate the value of hard work, earned reward, and delayed gratification.
Unless there is a dramatic increase in the collective conscience of society, our lodge membership roles will continue to decrease, and the inherent natural qualities of the men in our lodges will continue to follow...
Sorry for the long winded response...but it is a topic that is near to my heart, and one that genuinely disturbs me as a man, as a father, as a Mason.
I think most young guys get sucked in the line up as I did and allot of them are the worse of for it. I know I would have been without the great group of guys I came to know during this time. So I say work with what we got with a smile and ensure justice is on our side.
