Balls of cotton

In class we read the article by JS Mill arguing that tyranny leads to passivity because the people don't have a saying in their own lives while Hobbes argues that democracy might lead to passivity due to the idea that your vote doesn't count and that you're not able to make a difference anyways. We can discuss weather passivity is good or bad but at least for a society to progress within the areas of economics and technology it is a necassary factor for people to be active, interested and innovative. In this post I would like to look at how wealth creates passivity and how it affects my country Norway...
Norway is a country rich on oil. After World War 2 we were poor as church mice and had to start everything from scratch. The hard work we had to put in to rebuild our country made us united as a people right untill the mid 1970's when we discovered oil in the North Sea. From that point on, we are to be considered a wealthy nation with the opportunity to create a complex welfaresystem for the Norwegian people. Up untill this point, everything seems fine and dandy. One would think that with so many resources one would be able to build a Utopia of happy-go-lucky people without any problems. Wrong.
The development of our welfaresystem, which other countries drool at, has created a bunch of lazy, passive, uninterested people without any care for their own future( exuse me the lack of patriotism). How? By offering every kind of social assistance in every aspect of our lives, the government has(unintentionally) wrapped every single Norwegian into a ball of cotton so no matter how hard you smash us against the wall, we wont notice anything.
Neglect to wake up for work, get fired and try to find another job so you wont have to sleep on the street. Wrong. If you loose your job, the government will pay you money unntill you can find another job and even get you a job if you're too lazy to find it yourself. You feel sick and you stay at home for a day or two to get better and get back to work. Wrong. Since the government will pay you the same salary from not working if you declare yourself sick, you can get payed for up untill one year without doing anything. In a Utopian society no-one would take advantage of these arrangements and it would all work out fine, but since we're not living in the land of ponies, rainbowes and pink candyfloss fairies, the Norwegian people rip the government off for what it's worth.
One would think that when given such an enormous resource, one would use it to develop other resources that can be utilized when the oil is over, but due to the constant padding by the government we are like kids that will never learn to swim because the floating devices are not taken off. We will never have the need to put any effort into progress because we are in such a comfortable place, buried deep inside our balls of cotton...