Gadzooks! Discussion!

Greetings, gentle readers.
When posed the question of the cause of Canada's seeming dearth of innovation and scientific creativity, particularly in the field of entrepreneurship, Dr. Peter Hackett made some very poignant, yet very mildly-targeted remarks.  I expounded on one of them, and was helped along in the exploration of the topic by several individuals.  Shayne Tymkow, James Kropfreiter, and Fritz Kropfreiter, take a bow.  The point changed from education failing to nurture so much as to instruct, to big business as the barons of industry and commerce controlling the economic welfare of society, to governments increasingly dependent on worker-drone mentalities in order to maintain power, and finally to society at large for failing to create a socialist nirvana where the proletariat control the means of production.
I followed that up with this contribution:

I'm reminded of the Monty Python "Church Police" sketch, where the officers of the church/peace petition to find the murderer through the use of prayer...
"O Lord, we beseech thee—tell us: who croaked Leicester?"
(at which point, a large Gilliam-esque hand descends from the heavens and points to Eric Idle. A voice booms:)
"The one in the bracers, he done it!"
(Idle is seized by the detective-parsons before admitting:)
"It's a fair cop, but society's to blame."
"Right," comes the rejoinder, "We'll be charging him too."
In short, I think it a bit of a cop-out to lay the blame on the nebulous invisible limbs of "society" at large.  Sometimes, economic adversity can act as a stimulus for innovation, as people look for ways to use creativity as a means of escaping seemingly deterministic economic strata.
As evidence, I offer this:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/12/1205_sb_necessity/1.htm
I think there's something more existential going on, and our society has done nothing to arrest its progress - we're reaching Hegel's "End of History." No one wants to be the progenitor of his or her own values any more.  The thymos, or superego, or whatever you want to call the part of the human existence that strives to achieve beyond precedent, is in serious decline, and as much as that process is being encouraged by big business, government spending, curricular design, and identikit educators, the ultimate responsibility is an individual one.
Not to just act as a mouthpiece for Fukuyama and Bloom, et aliter, but isn't North America a wallowing sty of political and philosophical apathy?  Doesn't the political right historically grow in power and stature when people cease to critically analyse and act upon conclusions drawn?
James is probably right.  No one cares any more.  Voter apathy has never been more pronounced.  As long as our material needs and creature comforts are provided, we can lead lives of quiet desperation and never worry about the greater good or the examined life.  The more anxious of us will take up some spurious cause and use that as a rationalization for intellectual torpor.  Stop global warming, save the muskrat, end third-world debt, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, fur is murder, meat is murder, KFC is murder, murder of a murderer may or may not be murder, feed the children, feed the fur-wearing murderers to the children, blah, blah, blah.  People can champion these little short-term, third-rate, first-world indulgences until they choke.
Bottom line - we're not achieving, creating, or innovating because we've got comfortable little cages.  It's not the fault of our captors.  We just built a very cozy jail, and we don't want to get out.
Just my tuppence-worth.
—mARKUS