Hi Notconvinced...
"Our collective psyche on average, does what's easiest, rather than what's right."
This bit of wisdom here explains why the world is as it is. I think of it as human entropy.
The secret, I think, is in getting people to understand what they VALUE, and why they VALUE. Most people don't even know where their values come from, what they mean, and what "good" they do or don't do.
There is no way to overcome human selfishness collectively. There are individuals who will make the choice to take this journey, but unless human evolution really accelerates, the majority of people will not change; will not even desire to.
Luckily, we can look at that first bit of wisdom, and make progress. We need to make being free look attractive, and make doing the right thing the easy thing to do.
For example, I support the development of plasma energy technology (hot plasma), where over 90% of the "garbage" we produce can be used to make clean energy.
I'm a capitalist myself, but I think that consumerism and capitalism are responsible for quite a bit of the misery people experience. But this is all part of the evolution of society, a necessary step, in my opinion.
Human Entropy is a very vivid label and I agree. Freewill doesn't allow for a truly collective conscious, it's just a romanticised way of explaining it. You must have the pure and the filth to allow for everything in between. Evil is necessary for growth, but you will notice me saying this a lot that," balance in nature is not 50/50. I like to think that the perfect balance for forward evolution is mostly good with a strong touch of bad. 70/30'ish, but it's different subjectively." I am a proponent for a free market. I am not sure exactly what your definition for Capitalism is.
I just remembered reading an article a few months back explaining how the collective personality of each generation follows a predictable cycle. I never researched deeper, but now I will look it up and research it a bit. I think this knowledge is important to understand, possibly.