By David Hegg

Sometimes great things, essential movements and seemingly necessary events end up being the cause of unintended consequences. Laws meant to curb illegal behavior can have loopholes that create opportunities for new kinds of criminal endeavors even as the introduction of miracle drugs can, years later, be seen as having caused unintended health problems. Simply put, what appears to be progress can sometimes cause damage in the future.

Stay with me here as I suggest that one of America’s greatest triumphs, our independence from England in 1776, laid the foundation for the crippling autonomy we now see all around us. We threw off the shackles of the king’s authority and declared that every person has inalienable rights, which was a grand and glorious thing to do. Centuries later, however, we are experiencing the unintended result of replacing mutually agreed-upon ethical and legal absolutes with personal autonomy. In escaping the tyranny of the Crown, we’ve ended up creating a society where, today, everyone seems to wear one.

Autonomy comes from the Greek word autonomia, which is a compound made up of autos, meaning self, and nomos, meaning law. While it is often poor exegesis to consider that a word’s meaning equals the sum of its parts, in this case, it actually does. To be “autonomous” is to be under “one’s own law.” Today, we........

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