Almost every single virtue that makes for public spirit is stigmatized by our society.
Call me old-fashioned, but when I was young you volunteered because you believed in something. You wanted to help people; you wanted, for instance, to give blood. You didn't do volunteering because it looked good on your CV. So, while volunteering certainly has a virtuous potential, it has been turned into a process that you adhere to much in the way that you clock on to a job.
Machiavelli and other humanists feared the professionalization of public duty. If you look at their writings, time and again they point to the danger of their city states relying on mercenaries instead of the services provided by citizens. From their perspective, the employment of mercenaries absolved the people from taking responsibility for the future of their community and served as instruments of the corrosion of public duty. That's more or less what the bureaucratization of public life has achieved today. It leads to a world where even family responsibility can become outsourced to 'carers'. In such circumstances the public can't do anything until a bureaucrat ticks the right box.
I think politicians are in a very difficult situation. It's not their fault.
What I do have a problem with is the fact we don't recognize that ordinary people have been silenced, that we've forced people to censor themselves in terms of what they actually believe and what they think.
