Children want a lot of things that aren't good for them. If they have bad parents or their environmental conditions are down-trotten enough, it's not a mystery of what becomes of the majority of them. Democracies are a viscous feedback loop which in modern times has been functioning at the highest levels based on corporate interest in lobbyist. It's a fit of bread and circuses. A system run down in the long run as all do. So, it's hard to definitively point the finger. However, it can be summarized as the collective. The question becomes more critically as to who alters the broader rules, game, and game state and who simply is just a peon player trying their best to optimize. When a problem festers long enough, it becomes systemic. When the environment becomes toxic enough, the individual player becomes as ruthless as those at the top albeit within their own scale. Take an honest look at the west and this is where we are at now. Most politicians do nothing for the greater good of the country besides waste tax payer money and in many cases do things that harm people's overall wellbeing. Trillions of dollars are siphoned out of people's pay checks and the basic infrastructure of the country is dilapidated. Education K-12 is a hollowed out mess. Our gateways to the internet are profiteer centers instead of public domain. Our healthcare system centers on profit maximization over patient health. Our food products are filled with cheap junk fillers that cause diabetes/cancer... Common sense telling people this for years only to find a decade later companies like Monsato did the obvious damage to society. No worries... They pay a fine that goes predominately to regulators and lawyers.

Economic progress occurred significantly in the 90s and early 2000s and it seemed the west was on a path towards brilliance. Then came the b.s wars .. Then came the greed that destroyed the middle class. Then came the over-financialization. Then came the unregulated housing fleecing (which is still going namely in the bay area). Then came the wave of Academic Institutions joining in on the free-for-all w/ insane inflation of tuition.

Technology meanwhile was solving problems. There was no need for insane tuitions/fees given that we had high speed internet and video anywhere. However, it was put under wraps.

Then comes the social junk for the masses in which a broad based information utility that could bring society to a higher level was turned into an information warfare tool.

We had economic progress. Technology intensified. Individualism really isn't all that pronounced. There is more group think than ever as masses of people became social media zombies. Critical thinking is gone. Families and long lasting wholesome interaction is gone. It's essentially a big manipulative profit maximization experiment gone wrong. There are no social standards guiding production. It's a free-for-all.

The obvious outcomes are now being realized :
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-cu...

Social Media has had detrimental effects on people's psychology and mental health.

The obvious was obvious before these trends. They were ignored because profit was the central theme and the purpose was to maximize it. Things don't spontaneously just happen. They occur for a reason.

I've spent some time in Germany. It's expensive and the pay is lack luster. They don't have career mobility of ascension as people are staffed based on Age. Young people aren't having kids because they don't feel a deep connectivity to their home land. They don't see the need to preserve their culture/roots because culturally the country shunned and shamed it. So, with a globalist chancellor like Merkel they decided to decimate the local populist with a flood of immigrants all for the mighty dollar.

Socially, Germany killed off a range of cultures. Women don't have the connection they do to their kids as they do in other cultures... It would take me pages to detail. Suffice to say, the powers that be didn't allow Germany's population to slide for long did they? Nope.. The economic engine must persist. So, they're flooding it with immigrants w/ zero regard to the local populist. Its in this moment, you see what is being looked out for and why such conditions persist. It's the flawed economic engine over people and when this is the game being played .. People indeed become divided, selfish, and stop broad considerations of the long term and earth. Why invest in an entity of the future when it is clear that the world they will be born into will turn to crap? To a country trying to destroy its own culture and people? as evidenced by the trends and things you see before your very eyes? So yeah, a smart person goes towards 'individualism' and short term enjoyment will it is still to be had.