The interesting thing about morality is that it’s an internalisation of self-oppression, it gets people to police themselves so they don’t need policing by others as much. But today people feel they don’t need to be moral because they feel they can be trusted to be free to do whatever they want to do to themselves.
Some other significant factors at play are that communication is increasingly enormously: if something good or bad happens, more people are able to find out about it and/or share it - even unintentionally, accidentally or opportunistically via their mobile communication technologies - and also, populations are increasing globally and local population densities are increasing: more people are closer to more other people. Travel technologies result in an increased potential for more and more people to be surrounded by more and more unfamiliar people, each communicating about one another more and more.
i.e.
Advances in technologies and the corresponding growth in populations have perhaps inadvertently resulted in both a better policing of one another by one another, and less trustingly so.
So putting all of this together: with these better technologies, higher and more blended populations, and more demands about our personal freedoms, we’re under much more pressure to act socially acceptably and less able to slip under the radar, we’re less trusting of others to act socially acceptably and more exposed to one another whether we do or don’t, we feel more and more entitled to do whatever we want, and we even have less time to gather a bigger picture about the whole thing, leaving us vulnerable to cherry-picked one-sided pictures of everyone else.
Cue the hysteria and feeling like we have less rights than we used to, on pretty much all accounts and from all sides and every angle - simply as a result of our own success as a species!
As an aside, I’m not convinced it’s a political thing at all. People seem to either distrust centralised powers more, or decentralised powers more. The former are more accountable but less free to do good or bad, and vice versa - it’s basically a choice between lower risk lower reward and higher risk higher reward. The existence of the theory that it’s all down to your brain chemistry is not surprising at all. But what if neither is the real issue, and seeming to have less rights is happening either way regardless and apolitically?