It's not their fault as the nature of neoliberal capitalist society dictates the slow erosion of the soul
When you have no prospects, when being unique is turned by another into a meme for the pursuit of tiktok clout, when your main form of interaction with others is from behind a screen, on a corporate, moderated platform, what do you believe is the natural outcome of a society? As we have become less connected, we have embraced it; everybody is looking for their "niche", everybody wants to be unique, but they don't want to do introspection, so they substitute unique interests for uniqueness, wearing them as a badge of sorts. Once, we were a world of thinkers, full of bright ideas and love for fellow man. Even in the time of my childhood, it seemed the people of our nation believed in the benevolent uplifting of the needy around the world, in leveraging our power to fix the messes of imperialism, colonialism, religious fundamentalism, and less abstractly, to tackle issues such as disease epidemics and world hunger. Case in point, while it was before my time, I imagine that at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, there was very little in the way of a feeling of "triumph over the enemy", but instead a profound feeling that the people of Russia had turned a page in the book and were looking towards a bright future, arms locked with the rest of the world on the path of unanimous human progress.
Ask yourself, do the people of today have the same capacity for restraint? The answer is most certainly not. Today, we are obsessed with the idea of smashing our enemies, projecting dominance, and insisting that our adversaries exist in a state of submission to us. This is a sign of the times; short-sighted vanity, chest-thumping revanchism, these have become the default mode of operation for at least a portion of society. Even those who opposed, for example, Venezuela: while the sentiment was correct, there was little talk of the fate of the Venezuelan people. When they spoke of international law, one got the feeling they actually cared very little, that while perhaps marginally more important to them than their opponents, international law, and the reasons and context behind the international framework we have today, being World War II and the horrors it inflicted, is not quite as important to them as humiliating the President overseeing their violation, to "own" him, and his followers, put succinctly.
My ultimate point is that society has become, at scale, cynical. We now know that we are little more than pawns for corporate interests, and a good part of the population has surrendered to this truth, which is how we've come to soulless, consuming hordes, looking for their next niche interest to prove they're different from their fellow drones, to facsimilate for themselves some lie of rebellion against the system, to prove they, ostensibly, are more "unplugged" than another, better than them, less of a cog in the machine, when really it's all to chase validation anyways, which is exactly where the machine wants them. Was the lofty, benevolent patriotism of yesteryear a lie, designed to tell the voter and the soldier that their nation was indeed moral, pre-empting incidents like Abu Ghraib? Yes. Unequivocally. However, the positive impact it had on the ambitions and issues of focus for the American public cannot be discarded with that conclusion.
We have thrown out individualism and morality in order to achieve a modular, but hollow, mask thereof, one that can be advertised on social media but runs shallow.
