Some Mumblings Regarding Choices

The other day I had some sort of epiphany regarding the choices we make as humans, and the repercussions of those choices.

To begin, it seems likely that way back in the days of the Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal, when a human, child and adult alike, made a poor decision the effect was immediate and quite probably very painful. All lived under the constant shadow of imminent death and because of that I can imagine that they (we) were perhaps more careful to "do the next right thing", whatever that was at the time.
As time has marched on we have created these nifty safety bubbles around our lives by killing/caging the majority of our natural predators and obtaining tidbits of knowledge of powers far greater than we have any entitlement to. The aggregate effect seems to be (at least in Western culture) complacency in the face of our self-propelled destruction.

Let me elaborate:

A boy of school age makes a decision early on in the game that school is crap and he would much rather be doing anything else right now. He makes the conscious decision to defy the precepts that have been made obvious to him by the seemingly endless hours of schooling that have already taken place, and by the effects of his actions when he does or does not comply with the rules of modern schooling. So when our boy wonder makes the decision to disregard this paradigm for long enough, he becomes a social liability who, as an adult, is unable to land/keep a job that earns him enough money to pay for insurance (or food, or rent, or ...) which in turn generates sympathy in the bleeding heart Extreme-Left which then lobbies to create another government program that feeds on taxpayer dollars.

I know that this is a bit harsh, and that all of us make mistakes, but could it be that we have maybe been shooting ourselves in the collective foot in a way by diligently creating this system that we perpetuate daily? Could we be causing our own destruction by blocking sorrow and suffering and locking our predators up which in turn causes the herd to grow weak and complacent?