Yes, when a society fails morally to a really drastic extent, then its general collapse is definitely on the way.

Governments as we now know them inevitably arose as human societies moved beyond a band or tribal stage, got much larger and more complicated, and started dealing in money, the printed word, property, trade, commerce, the creation of trained armies, and so on. You simply can't regulate and manage all that stuff without a modern government, so for us to pursue our present way of life government is not merely a choice...it's a necessity.

The breakdown of morality in society has, I think, occurred primarily due to people's constant quest to make more money...and they sacrifice normal morality in pursuit of that objective. Find almost any vice that is festering in a society, follow the trail back to how it got started, and you'll discover that someone stood to make a lot of money from starting it.

I don't believe, Oldude, that government is set up primarily "for (to secure and protect) individual freedoms". It would be really nice if it was, but I don't think it is. That's one of the things that a government concerns itself with, yes...because the public demands it...but it's not the essential or primary concern of a government.   It's a much secondary issue. The primary concern of government is to organize and manage a nation's commerce, its jurisdictional concerns, its hierarchical authority structures, its military concerns, its territorial concerns, and its body of law.

After they get all that in place...yeah...they'll give some thought to individual freedoms... ;-)

I don't believe, for example, that your American Revolution was fought primarily to secure individual rights. Uh-uh. That's the popular myth, but it wasn't the reality. The American Revolution was fought primarily over financial and jurisdictional issues between the Yankee traders and businessmen in New England and the British Crown. They fought that war over MONEY! The British crown could have avoided the whole mess had they had the sense to make the financial concessions that the New England traders wanted and not put a tax on various imported goods to the USA, but the Crown was too arrogant and set in its ways to realize how serious the situation was until matters got quite out of hand. They blew it.

I think you'd find that when it came to "individual rights", people in England and in Canada had just the same kind of individual rights on a day to day basis as Americans did in the years both before and following the American Revolution....and that has remained so to this day. Americans aren't any freer than Canadians or Englishmen, and they never have been in my opinion. When it comes to individual rights, we're pretty much dealing with the same basic situation.

The Revolutionaries, however, had a new government to found, and they had to strongly motivate the people who were being recruited to fight for them. They couldn't just say it was just about money and jurisictional issues...although "no taxation without representation" was a major slogan nonetheless. They had to put it in more dramatic terms. They had to say it was about "freedom", "liberty", and grand stuff like that. So they did. And it's been believed ever since.

Well, if you'd grown up in Canadian or English schools, you'd be perhaps surprised to find that the British are just as proud of their "individual freedoms" and their "liberty" as Americans are...and they figure it all began with the Magna Carta! ;-D