I have a different feel that society simply does not condition people to involve themselves in the world. Society has become a teeter-totter of concern, a cycle of advancing to not having to care to suffering the ruin of having forgott4en what was so hard earned. I can only paraphrase the top quote, for I don't remember it nor who said it, but here's some related concerns,

> 'Society's advancement is measured by that which it may take for granted' I forgot! Help! (until it cant/that fails)

> "Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet." -Aldous Huxley

> "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members." -Mahatma Ghandi

But this sometimes requires not just aiding them, treating them well, but re-socializing them, re-educating them, informing them, breaking them out of their ignorance & failings.

To simply say that we must

> [re-]"engineer our environments so unhealthy choices are [not] so easy to make"

feels a folly to me. We must socialize. We must foster an aware, awake, able society. Striving to simply prevent all faults is not how we achieve success; it results in a vision of domineering & the absolute & fixedness: it bespeaks a belief that there is one true path for society & that we need only set it out & all will walk this course. It's singular utopian, a singular destiny, not a polytopia, not letting us many people discover & hunt for our own ends. Imo society must remain a dialectic, a conversation, a hunt. We must encourage growth & awareness & hunts for meaning, without insisting on a systematic & singular top choice.

I don't think social media is a part of this question:

> "Everyone believes whatever they want to,"

is a false Boogeyman, a false god, a Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD), meant to scare us. We have to allow plurality, we have to allow polytopianism, we have to allow many systems, many beliefs. But we can still in aggregate steer towards informed, towards good beliefs, towards healthy ends. Trying to demonize the availability of voices & options- "safetly cocooned in their own social media echo chambers"- just misses the real point: that society doesn't have a progressive vision at large, that basically no one has a real bead on a healthy, progressive, gainful society. Everything is beset by conflict, and we are trying to make choices with very biased, limited, local regards. And there are very few clear paths, very few regardable winners.

For sure, much of what presented in the world is faulty & awful. But this too feels like a part of evolution. Simply wishing for authoritarianism, for everyone to make the right choices, for everyone to accept good dogma in the place of bad dogma: it's a disaster. And I don't think "Everyone believes whatever they want to", I think they have complex experiences which shape what they are most susceptible to, and I think most of us lack good positive role models & experiences to shape us properly forward. The world does not reward the just & righteous, it doesn't promote the healthy: it showcases greed & taking & exploitation, it showcases narcisim & delusion. It shows us an all too recent history of medical abuse & experimentation of our minorities. These aren't social media problems, these are the actual world: the actual evidence of the actual world is unclear, is deeply shadowy, is ghastly.

"The longer this state of affairs persists the worse things will get". Such appeal to authority & Fear. Such terror!!! "Inability to deal with a pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg" it itself a promise of horror & terror, it insists on & demands we obey or conform, & demands that anything else we do, any other permissiveness we permit only Immenatizes the Eschaton. To me, this high capitol fear uncertainty & doubt is the chief Immenatizing of the Eschaton there is. I don't like what people pick. I think people are incredibly stupid & full of shit. But I don't see that conformity & authority are the reagents here, I don't see that a more structured society that informs what decisions we must make will help. I believe society from the top needs to demonstrate better health, needs to make better choices easier to pick, needs to make better icons & references we can respect, that will inform what choices we freely make. Right now society simply lacks meaning. That social media is out there making it complicated is merely incidental, a scape goat, a convenient anti-authority to blame this all upon, but authority itself is shit, useless, cowards, good for nothing, and no one respects it, rightfully. Make a social contract worth believing in, society.

Arden authoritarianism is far worse than the too many choices of the very very young ur-connected world we have recently arrived at. We do need to surface & democratize better choice-making, create better supporting info-networks & options of choice. But recognize first that the 4th age information society is very young, and that simply wishing to stuff it back in the bottle/box, blaming it, & being upset we don't do better is not going to help. And recognize that there are so many 1st 2nd & 3rd age society problems still dogging us, still making things enormously difficult, and recognize that those need remedy & addressal to before society can ever really right itself & find progress. Fearing pop-culture society, it's superficial glam, is a misdeed: what is really weak is society itself, is the unhelpful, unprogressive, un-gainful world that has failed to create better circumstances. I don't blame the people. I don't think we must outmanuever people, to make unhealthy choices impossible/harder. To me, it's less about trying to fight against the baleful/evil, and more about creating the construtive/positive. Social media will spread the good too, will snuff out the darkness, if we have it, if there's the sunlight to spread.