Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, infamously said that 'there is no such thing as society', a widely criticised assertion that came to haunt her for years. She would have done better articulating these views in Hong Kong, where a far more receptive audience would have offered applause rather than brickbats.
Barely a day passes without someone - often a quite important someone - articulating a version of this notion, albeit without the benefit of Thatcher's ideological framework.
Instead, they focus on the specifics, which usually begin with the words: 'Why should I pay for ...' This is generally a prelude to a moan about having to subsidise the poor and feckless, while self-righteously pointing out that they pay their own way.
There was a relatively minor but classically telling example of this when a reader wrote to this newspaper last week criticising a Cheung Chau resident who had pleaded for the ferry service to receive greater subsidy. The indignant critic stated that he lived in Sai Kung and could see no reason why he should be paying for ferries going to Cheung Chau.
Let us set aside the obvious fallacy of this reasoning which implies that Cheung Chau residents should not be paying for roads to Sai Kung, nor should they be expected to subsidise the provision of water and drainage anywhere other than where they live. Maybe even hospitals outside their catchment area should also be paid for by those in the vicinity. There is no end to this stupidity.
Here we have a prime example of people just not understanding what it means to live in society. Membership of a community is not a matter of cost-benefit analysis or a simple equation of putting in what you can take out. Society imposes a wider variety of obligations and benefits, the parameters of which are open to discussion, but at the heart of which is the understanding that communities depend on co-operation for the greater good.
The debate on this subject is hardly new; indeed, it is generally so passe as to be barely discussed elsewhere. But, here in Hong Kong, the fundamentals of society continue to be questioned. In part this is because of our bizarre political structure which enshrines and perpetuates the interests of privileged sectors by giving them representation in the legislature and thus obliging their representatives to focus on advancing sectoral interests.