Since the institution of their finalized democratic Constitution in 1996, South Africans of all walks of life and in all places have been flooded with workshops that were established with the goal of educating citizens to ‘Know Your Rights’. Driving this approach is the notion that citizens have rights of all kinds that the state should support, and that the state is capable of supporting these rights to the degree necessary to assure them. The citizen's responsibility is to remind the state of its responsibility to protect the citizen, in an interesting transference – interesting for the breadth of its scope – of accountability for the self to the state. One thinks here of the extent to which subjects of the Western democracies depend upon the state increasingly to mediate interpersonal relationships of all kinds. An unsettling irony appears: the subjects hand over responsibility for an increasing sphere of their existence to the state in the name of democracy. This is not to deny at all the fact that rights-based discourse has led to some crucial victories in South Africa in the area of HIV/AIDS care, women's and children's rights. However, the problem of the ability of the state to single-handedly construct an environment in which basic human rights are exercised, rather than the actual exercise of these rights remaining in the realm of the ideal, runs as a fundamental question mark through the fabric of post-apartheid culture, alongside the assumption of the achievability of this ideal state.