You bring up Japan as example of what can be done, group think. But you're jumping cultures. Japan is a hyper homogenous and conservative country. There's a dark side to it, from the high suicide rate and deaths from overwork, lowest birthrate in the world, its well recognized war time atrocities, its debt rate, its corporatist economic structure that Mussolini would have drooled over, the hyper hierarchical society .. yes, America/Canada are very, very different; young, multiethnic, multicultural and often anarchic societies driven by hyper individualism. Most of its people are rejects from other nations who found opportunity and ran with it, some becoming very successful in the process. It's the antithesis of Japan!
The advent of web communication, giving the individual a world stage, was like handing out a concoction of steroid and meth to everyone. Individualism turned into "look at me!" hyper competition for attention. It's a mayhem of social anarchy that everyone jumps into, from the far left to the far right, from the most liberal to the most conservative trying to outshine everyone else for no other purpose than attention. Neither government nor uniformed authority can or cares to bring order to this chaos because the cost in lives would be too great. Dictatorship doesn't have much of a following in America, despite recent efforts.
The greater the anarchy, the more individualistic society becomes. From nation to statehood to hood to family to me. Full circle to primitive societies.
