Where a society's imagination is kneecapped by unbridled advertisement economies, the population's perspective of the future and definition of pain converges.

It begins with advertisers' selective pressure for the civilization's communication systems to maximize emotional bandwidth, to enable instruction and conversion. This in turn enables centralized businesses to scale with a focus on certain commonalities in human behavior.

And what is something human behavior can agree upon? Existing theories of evolution highlight our unprecedented coordination and communication. The classic examples are communicating to avoid the tiger, or find food to avoid hunger. We've been most adept at fight or flight judgements followed by action to avoid fears, pains, and threats to the things that make us "human."

Most importantly, there's the idea that humans are reliably driven into action only by fears:

it is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails

Machiavelli

It's true in many now-important contexts (business, cynical relationships, work), but this might not have always been true. Take the culture in European countries. While acknowledging their current state is interdependent in some way on America's existence, it would seem that their cultures' ideologically diversity — better mimicking history — is related to their sociopolitical programs requiring more demanding coordination. Those approaches contain dynamics outside of pure forced-hand economics — they take action via shared communication outside of just fear and prisoner's dilemmas. Nonetheless, America's success in coordination was due to leaps forward in hegemonic abilities while also being led by relative virtue — hence Teddy's "speak softly and carry a big stick."

But in recent years, connectivity and advertisement certainly grew whatever slight wedge existed. Any problem a culture has with inequality is truly only rooted in their emotional inequalities. In particular, those that culture's perspective of positive-sum love, versus zero-sum fear and jealousy. The latter is more efficiently triggered by a given circulated meme in that culture — the right approach for centralized businesses. It was not necessarily agentic — just a pattern, like natural selection, observed in retrospect — but the path that was selected for was companies focusing first on maximizing our connectivity and convenience, then using universal pains with a spray and pray.

*People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

Banksy*

But the other end, of human potential and taste and excitement, needs a mention else hope would not exist. Despite a common fear of lack of acceptance, we still hang onto our deepest desires to feel fully natural and ourselves.

We are on the way there, but it is a tough battle. The markets have found that the numbers work well enough if they just go halfway: minimalism is apparently now in vogue. They are attempting to bring humans' taste towards a lower common denominator to satisfy their numbers and extract your humanity.