re: The current state of the west was inevitable.

No, the problem is that once technology started freeing people from being needed as unskilled labor for mass cultivation of crops and manufacturing, rather than allowing those people to then innovate and figure out ways to make a living to support themselves and their families, we started paying them simply to exist and paying them more to reproduce. Of course, rather than innovating, starting businesses, or creating products, they simply created a cottage industry for extracting more and more revenue from the government by various means.

While farming may have started the process of freeing man's time from having to constantly be focused on survival, it is government that permitted a large subset of the population to subsist while contributing literally nothing at all.