Have you ever watched Perry Mason, the original TV series? (It's on Amazon Prime right now). Apparently, while the oil companies were taking over the world in the 50's, Americans were so rich and corrupt that everyone smoked while blackmailing each other for money and sex. The only people who actually did physical labor were building office parks, highways, and digging graves for their victims in cheap lots in the Hollywood hills.

The Greatest Generation's Big Idea was to keep all of the war factories from WWII running at 100% employment. Ever since then, every politician has been running on the "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" platform as well as giving away roads for the cars to get to those jobs (or to warm places for 'vacations').

Not since James Garfield was shot has there been a president concerned with humans being useful to their places (it used to be called "increase") except as tools to extract something buried there.

That is the fundamental "Economy, Stupid" problem: our Economy of Stupid is exactly backward, and human creativity and value flows in the wrong direction. Money is used to put gold on toilet fixtures in private yachts instead of creating better soil or managing forests for the future humans.

'Think' tanks are used to manipulate educators so they teach children to Compete to the Death for the sake of an Invisible Hand (Big Money's attack dogs).

Entertainment for people who supposedly don't have better things to do than pay for products that they don't need (if they really needed anything on advertisement, they would already have it).

We can't save the world because the world doesn't want to be saved: it wants to be fat, dumb and happy because that's cheaper (less physical work) than actually living in the world that spawned us.

It's all in the marketing, and it's ALL marketing. God is the marketing department for town meetings. They used to build towns (for aristocrats) at those meetings. Now, they just build followers and scramble to feed the people left behind by the One True Faith (Big Money).

Step away from the rat race.

If you have a rat problem, you have to stop feeding them. You don't go on a rat diet. The rats win because they are faster and more coordinated than you in their environment (jobs, stores, advertising, politics, cities). Have you ever seen the tunnels under cities? Those are for the rich rats to coordinate the movements of the poor rats.

If humans are going to impress aliens, we'll have to stop emulating rats.