re: The underlying word that describes everything which plagues the world today, what is it?

Social Media

Selfishness is literally why a species is successful. Everything we do, we do it for ourselves. It has created all the good and all the bad. Even when we donate to charity, or open the door for someone, it’s to fulfill and obligation we have to ourselves, to self actualize, and become the ideas that we have adopted from society.

Previous mentions of greed and consumerism are a product of capitalism, or the age of enlightenment or democracy. All the good that it has created, there are also downsides. I would say the downsides are just a fraction of the benefits from those movements.

We are so ingrained in it, normalized, we don’t even realize it has literally changed the American psyche. What we are now is equivalent to what we can produce.

We traded interdependence and purpose for radical individualism and consumerism.

We are traveling at a parabolic change from the way we have lived for all of our existence. There is no time to evolve, and it’s about to get real crazy.