Greece and Rome were openly homosexual societies but lacked gay marriage. A permissive environment for deviational enjoyment does not have to twist the values of commonsense.
Liberalism as an all-permissive culture flourished in America because immigrants lost their core values and traditions in the melting pot of American assimilation, and developed no new system of values besides the objective of getting rich. An experiment in cultural meltdown failed in the US, as it did in Russia and Israel; actually, the experiment succeeded while the societies failed culturally.
The Netherlands are permissive not because the locals lack values but because they are abnormally kind to others. Hard communal work building dams, an absence of mortal foreign enemies or expansionist ambitions, a mild monarchy and non-aggressive clergy, prosperity, and relatively mild domestic economic competition together created a rare well-wishing national mentality; we’ve yet to see the results of its accommodation of deviants. Nations that lack statutory enemies are extremely rare.
A “national mentality” does exist in many places, and values do vary across nations. The Norwegians but not the Danes, the French but not the Italians, are anti-Semitic. Few if any people value freedom above security or order, and still fewer interpret freedom as an all-permissiveness which is not, in fact, a value but rather the absence thereof.
Immigrant societies like the US, Israel, and to a lesser extent the originally culturally homogenous Canada lack values, and thus tend towards valueless liberalism. They will either eventually build a cultural core suitable for a nation, or dissolve. The US survived and prospered for so long because it was formed in an incubator of oceanic isolation, it retained some Puritan values, and it consistently suppressed multiculturalism, which calls for the lowest common denominator among various values. Today, the US cities look like intergalactic airports, swarming with aliens. Small faraway towns and to a degree the South retained the original American ideology: tolerant, but not permissive beyond the bounds of common sense.
All-permissiveness historically correlates with decadence, which kicks in before societies enter free fall. Affluent and afraid of violence toward themselves, people shrink from violence to others. In search of still more enjoyment, they abandon moral restrictions and in their arrogance disregard seemingly irrational values. Societies which lack commonsense values, whether decadent like Rome or rationalist like the communist Russia, always fail.
Israelis imitate the Americans and study humanities relatively little. More attention is paid to the cash crops of applied sciences. Americans build complicated enterprises but fail to understand complex international relations. Israelis are sliding in the same direction.
