My view probably sounds even more conspiracy-like. I think that since national currencies abandoned the gold standard, people lost the incentive to save money and they forgot the importance of lowering their consumption of goods and services.

New money enters the economy through arbitrary financial channels and is backed by nothing so this distorts our collective sense of what is valuable and worthwhile.

These days nobody tries to cut back on consumption. The current fiat-based economy rewards production but doesn't punish consumption. The reason is that everybody feels that cash is worthless because it's not backed by anything. The focus therefore is on amassing assets; any assets, even if you're dirt poor and can't afford anything of value, you're better off buying junk that you don't need than to hold on to your paper fiat which is always losing value.

You make an interesting argument but I am afraid that you are correct about it sounding even more like a conspiracy.

There being misaligned incentives is a reasonable point, maybe that merits further thought. Thank you!

>At this point it almost seems more worth it to just sit back and sip water while the world slowly burns around me, but of course that is far too cynical.

Is it though?

What other option is there really..

> What other option is there

As I was asking the grandparent, there is always a way to communicate it more effectively than you are doing. Maybe they have the answer! I can't know that, but I can know it is an option because people have been convinced of much more evil and much dumber things by people good at talking.

>people have been convinced of much more evil and much dumber things by people good at talking.

Sure, but it usually follows this scenario..

People ignore issues, accumulate technical or monetary debt, ignore issues, accumulate debt, ignore issues, accumulate debt, lie cheat and scheme to keep ignoring issues... start to suffer because of historical laziness and avarice... someone comes along and says, "Hey, you can solve all these problem with violence, you know..", then evil shit happens.

People are not really persuaded "out" of being lazy or amoral, generally speaking. They're just given social "permission" to do bad things because of tough times.

Morality being fundamentally subjective, I don't see amoral as necessarily a bad thing. You don't need morals to have a positive impact on society.

Lazy is not handy, but then again I'm not convinced that people can't be motivated out of this. Wars and other really unfriendly things cost a large amount of effort from many people. Laziness is seeing problems and doing absolutely nothing about them, not doing the wrong things. That's just being misguided.