A collection of recent events—unrelated yet very related—leave me feeling like we all have front row seats to a most breathtaking and disturbing spectacle: the end of the Anglo-American era.

First though, look for a moment at America in the 1860s. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Farmer Boy, 9-year-old Almanzo Wilder grows up working on his family’s farm, embracing considerable responsibility and yearning for more. The story culminates in the boy being offered an apprenticeship by the owner of the wagon shop in town. Almanzo’s father explains to him all the benefits of the shop job versus farming: an easier life, out of the weather, fewer worries, plenty to eat, money in the bank. “But,” he tells him, “there’s the other side, too, Almanzo. You’d have to depend on other folks, son, in town. Everything you got, you’d get from other folks. A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you’re a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please, and no man can tell you to go or come. You’ll be free and independent, son, on a farm.”

I got somewhat emotional reading that to my children the other day. In part because of the touching interchange between a manly father and his son—but also because of how foreign, how remote it is from what we see around us.

There was a time in “the land of the free” when this was freedom. Being free to work, to provide for your family, free from dependence on others. Today, “freedom” has come to mean nearly the opposite. People seek freedom from responsibility. Freedom from consequences for inaction and failure. Freedom from having to work, to provide, to contribute, to give or serve. The country that ascended the mountain to greatness has been utterly transformed—from rugged, moral and hard-working into soft and decadent. A 9-year-old today is way ahead if he’s responsible enough to make his own bed.

America’s rash of race riots and England’s burning, lawless cities are sobering scenes of fraying civilization. They expose an element in our midst shockingly devoid of purpose, principles or conscience—in fact, of virtually anything that makes us human. We watch, agape, and ponder: Such remorseless mayhem could spread suddenly. To enforce law, our law enforcers need a largely cooperative, self-governed people; yet here are anarchic mobs not just lacking respect for authority but filled with contempt for it. This practically reduces safety on our streets to a mere question of numbers—and the brash youths wildly outnumber the unsettled, feckless police.

Read the Apostle Paul’s prophecy in 2 Timothy 3:1-4 (“in the last days perilous times shall come”) and see if isn’t a dead-ringer portrait of this feral horde: covetous, boasters, proud, swollen with conceit, slanderous, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, without self-control, brutal, reckless, despisers of good, lovers of their own selves, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. Well, maybe disobedient to parents rings a little hollow: It’s unclear how many of these kids have parents who actually try to tell them what to do.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is sputtering, it is plunging into deeper debt at an accelerating pace, the nation’s credit rating has been downgraded, and the government is tackling this unsustainable, unavoidably ruinous problem by taking on more debt—by the trillions. But if you want to blame Washington’s budgets, its programs or its policies, rest assured that the president disagrees with you. He said yesterday the problem is simply that “over the last six months we’ve had a run of bad luck.”

Well, count on that luck getting far, far worse. Remember the caution about that job in town forcing a man to depend on other folks? Today we’re way beyond that. The folks in town with jobs are the least dependent among us; they’re generating wealth in the private sector. Beside them we have millions of people on federal, state and local government payrolls, comprising the biggest sector of the national economy. And the percentage is growing: As unemployment soars, the vast majority of jobs being “saved or created” are government jobs, paid out of deficit spending. Then there are the additional millions of people depending on hundreds of government social programs, on welfare, on ever extending unemployment benefits, on nationalized retirement funds, on healthcare entitlements. Even our once “free and independent” farmers live off federal subsidies.

In Britain the millstone of socialist entitlements is even heavier. Are all the handouts solving Britain’s problems? Evidence suggests that no, in fact they’re creating them. Misguided welfare policies, for example, reward single mothers more than they do intact families. Of course, if you subsidize something, you’ll get more of it—and Britain’s welfare system has patently created a surge in broken homes, which are proven breeding grounds for future criminals. Unsurprisingly, the nation is suffering an exploding epidemic of 16-to-24-year-olds who aren’t going to school and aren’t working—and lo, a simultaneous epidemic of youth antisocial and even criminal behavior.

In the recent riots, there were boys 9 years young and even younger smashing windows and stealing trainers and flat-screens with the worst of them. Pluck hard-working Almanzo from his 1867 American farm and drop him in a 2011 Tottingham single-parent welfare home, and he may well have joined the mutinous mob.

There’s a connection, see, between all this big and bloating government and the hollow souls trashing our streets. Government tends to create dependents in order to justify and amplify its own existence. It promises the kind of freedoms Anglo-Americans have come to crave—freedom from responsibility, from work, from consequences. But the more we depend on government to care for us, the more we surrender our actual freedom—and compromise our character, and shrink within the confines of childhood in the shadow of the nanny state. Then the greater our legions of grown men less capable, less trustworthy and responsible, than the 9-year-old farmer boys of yesteryear. There is a reason Paul commanded that “if any would not work, neither should he eat.” Ignoring that wisdom is feeding the shiftless, animalistic mob—and bankrupting our nations, to boot.

At its heart, the rapid decline of the U.S. and Britain powerfully demonstrates the truth that God’s spiritual law, codified in the Ten Commandments, remains inescapably binding on all men today. Our godlessness, idolatry, blasphemy, sacrilege, family breakdown, hatred and murder, sexual sins, thievery and corruption, deceit and covetousness have called down a hailstorm of curses upon us.

The colossal wreckage in our nations proves the incontestable failure of trashing the pillars of family, personal responsibility, hard work and biblical morality in favor of selfish individualism, public welfare and materialism. It’s difficult to say just how quickly it will unfold, but here we are with front row seats watching these two nations, which have a common history, careening toward their shared end.