>And people who say that want to guilt-trip the entire civilization into self-destructing

And people who say that haven't noticed that the "self-destructing" is going quite well by itself, and that some guilt-trip is actually needed to avoid it...

No, a lot of this guilt-tripping and politicizing is actually contributing to the self-destruction - it divides people more, makes them less likely to care about each other, and sucks out the oxygen in the media, so that the big problems cannot be discussed productively.

The eras when "big problems [were] discussed productively" (and something was done about them) were the eras when the division was at its highest.

E.g. the division between the civil rights people and those that wanted a segregated society.

Or the division between the anti-war movement in the later sixties and the "patriotic" pro-Vietnam war establishment.

Else, the bipartisan consensus (or small differences) just leads to the incremental management of what's there, and no real initiative for change (e.g. like the last 3+ decades regarding the environment or inequality).