I suspect our capitalistic society promotes greed and a lack of empathy for the suckers that get taken in by the schemes of others.
Greed has been a part of human society since the Neolithic Revolution, when tribes combined into larger communities and people had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with someone other than their extended family members--i.e., to transcend our pack-social nature.
There was very little surplus wealth in those days because a Stone Age "economy" doesn't generate much of a surplus. Just enough extra food to survive a drought, and enough extra labor (i.e., labor not allocated to food production and distribution) to make houses, clothes, pottery, furniture, and a few other artifacts that made life somewhat more pleasant than in the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer era. So the greed people felt for non-family members could only be acted out by stealing their food and other basic necessities. Taking away their means of survival. Anyone who did this would have been ostracized, if not summarily executed.
Each successive Paradigm Shift--Civilization, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age--generated a modest increase in division of labor and economies of scale, and therefore a modest increase in surplus wealth. Yet still 99% of the population were farmers. So a greedy person had to focus on the merchants, the priests and the ruling class, where most of that little bit of surplus wealth was concentrated. These people had guards.
It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that this old paradigm was turned on its head. Within a couple of centuries the percentage of the population employed in the food industry fell to less than 10%, and by the 1890s (in the USA) the economy toggled from scarcity-driven to surplus-driven. The advertising industry arose, to convince us to buy things we never knew we needed; Christmas transformed from a religious holiday to an excuse to buy things for other people that they didn't know they needed; most people had at least some discretionary income and some leisure time in which to spend it.
Capitalism arose as a way to manage surplus wealth, or "capital" as it is now known, and an activity that produces absolutely nothing but merely keeps track of surplus wealth became the world's dominant industry: banking. Today most of us spend the majority of our income on products and services that aren't directly (if at all) concerned with our survival.
In other words, after biding their time for more than ten thousand years, it is finally the Golden Age for the greedy. It's possible to take things away from people, lots and lots of things, without endangering their survival and becoming a pariah whom anyone would be justified to kill on sight.
On a national level, every time we have a boom then a bust, we have millions of suckers. The problem is our government has people that knows what's happening and they just plain don't do enough to stop it. It's natural that many average people see and hear stories of people getting rich in the stock market or buying property, will want to get some of the action too. After all everybody else is doing it. The next big ripoff is inflation. How long has the government had to get the problem under control? At a quick guess I'd say about 100 years and another quick guess is they don't want to solve the problem.
That's too facile an explanation. Civilization has only had a surplus-driven economy for four generations. That's just not enough time for us to adapt Adam Smith's model of the nascent Industrial Era economy to what is, basically, the Post-Industrial Era. Our model does not stand up to instant electronic communication, computers, and to digital information, which can be reproduced and distributed at almost literally no cost, becoming the most "valuable" commodity.
Our species had thousands of years to adapt to the shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture-based sedentism. We had a couple of thousand years to adapt to bronze metallurgy and the trading networks it necessitated since tin and copper ore are never found close together, and a couple thousand more to adapt to iron metallurgy and the wars it made possible. We've had only a few hundred years to adapt to industry--mass production, the harnessing of chemical energy, and the overnight dominance of non-food-related work--and there are still vast swaths of the planet where the adaptation is barely underway. And now, before this transition is even complete, we have to adapt to the Electronic Revolution.
So maybe you can cut us some slack?
All things considered, we're doing the best we can. The murder rate is something like one one-hundredth of what it was in medieval Europe; the scale of warfare has been reduced to the point that we are outraged in a year when the death toll is a few hundredths of one percent of the earth's population (Genghis Khan killed ten percent of the people his armies could reach); the number of people living in poverty has dropped by almost half in just fifteen years; democracy is spreading like wildfire; in a growing number of regions people who take religion seriously (one of the greatest motivators of violence throughout history) are a shrinking minority.
Greed may still be with us, but it is hardly as dire an evil as those of previous eras.
After all it only affects low income people on a fixed income and who cares about them, there old and don't have long to live anyway right? If you had to diagnose our society, what kind of a sociopath would it be?
I would remind the diagnostician that twelve thousand years is not long enough for a species that reproduces as slowly as ours to evolve new instincts, so each one of us still has a caveman living deep down inside. We do our best to show him that stifling his pack-social instinct and behaving like a herd-social species makes his life so much more pleasant that it's worth the sacrifice: furniture, beer, air conditioning, TV, pets, gourmet food, hundreds of friends, etc. Most of the time he goes along with it. But some days he just loses his cool and does something antisocial.
Let's cut him some slack. He--that is to say
we--are doing pretty damn well considering how difficult this is!
Dogs are lucky. They have a six-month breeding cycle, so in those 12,000 years during which we've given birth to about 500 new generations with only slight genetic modifications, they have passed through
twenty-four thousand generations. Their DNA has undergone significant evolution from their wolf ancestors, particularly in the instincts they use for interacting with each other, and with other species such as
Homo sapiens.
Dogs are much better adapted to civilization than humans are!!! Maybe the solution is to put them in charge?
