To play devil's advocate -- Liberalism, or the idea that the people who are ruled should have a say in the rules, started coming about ~500 years ago. The elite's were all always evil and bad to the masses, enslaving us, paying us very little, even clocks and timekeeping were used to trick workers into more hours and when pocket watches became available, they were just banned in early industry.

A lot of people fought and died to establish the idea of Liberalism all the way up to unions and workers rights. So, in a way, 'we' did fight for those things and earned them over a long time. It does kind of feel like now the same 'we' has forgotten the value of that stuff and the sacrifice it took to get there.

I still don't really see this as our fault. We live in gilded age II where money is virtue no matter how its acquired. The internet broke the stable propaganda machines and we're in flux of stabilizing around the new ones and kicking out the smaller bad actors.