I was going to comment on this before I read your last paragraph, and I'll just pretend I didn't read it so I can pretend this was a constructive comment.

> … the powers that be…

This turn of phrase has a special property in my life. I have noticed that whenever someone says this, invariably the rest of the conversation will become a guilt trip without any actionable advice or concrete learnings. There will be a lot of confusion, bad feelings, and if you try to empathise, you will feel bad. But think on it as you might, for days, weeks or months: you will not find anything you learned can be used to actually change your actions or behavior.

The only other phrase I know to share this property, is "let me finish". When you hear or say that, time to hit the eject button.

So it is with your comment. What can I learn from this? What can I do? How can I change my way of thinking to improve this? All that happens is I feel bad. Ok: feeling bad can mean you are learning something uncomfortable. But what?

I reject this idea of "powers that be." Who do you mean? Kissinger? The Koch brothers? The Clinton foundation? Soros? Xi Jinping? OPEC? The pope (which one)? Genghis Khan? "The powers that be" sounds cool because it is vague. Everyone can fill in their preferred group of bogeymen. We all have at least one. But once you start being explicit, it comes falling apart.

I also reject this idea that somehow, there is an evil controlling power which can manage to steer us all in some dystopian direction of consumerism and obediance "for the sake of it". Of what? Money? For whom? Oil? Groceries? Walmart? "Big Coal"? And how? By curbing innovation society-wide, but somehow still raising the GDP? Again: start looking for specifics, and the idea begins to unravel.

The world is more disjoint and segregated than this suggests. It is hard to control. There is a lot of emergent behaviour. Society evolves, and I have not seen evidence that it is not merely chaos theory at work. Our intuition for evil controlling overlords is likely to be false, based purely on the human bias for narrative. We look for narrative everywhere. For example, look at how ingrained and persistent the idea of "mother nature", and "why". "What is the point of ticks?" Nothing. They just exist. "Who designed this culture of obedience, benefiting the .01%?" Nobody, it emerged from a system of independent agents choosing what they desired most at every point in time.

Look, there is probably a parallel universe somewhere where Evil Corp infuses a steady dose of consumerism and obedience in the school systems because of some imagined long term amortised benefit, through... trickle up economics?... increasing their bottom line. And I bet that loads of people did and do try to sway society in limited, concrete ways (accepting smoking, denying global warming, thinking prop comedy is funny). But I doubt that we are the subject of a massive conspiracy to influence our entire society's style of thinking about.. everything. There are too many moving parts, and too many independent actors. Most people are not evil. We just inherit it all from the previous generation, tweak some things, and pass it on.

Evolution. Not intelligent design.