There's a good argument that most venture backed software companies are exactly "a selfish and cynical bargain".
It's been a good few years since I've met a senior technical staffer at a 'successful' Bay company who genuinely thinks they're "making the world a better place".
EDIT: Not that I disagree with your broader point that selfishness is an undesirable characteristic for an individual, society or ideology. But it seems inappropriate to attribute the problem to ICs or their managers.
1. We're obviously materially better off than any point in history.
2. Much of modern economic theory is built on the idea of selfish individuals pursuing their own interest. It's clearly been effective in a material sense (see #1).
3. Modern companies are obviously better than some of the obscene abuses of early capitalism.
All of that said, it seems like there was a time when a person's work was connected to and respected by the society around them. You could argue that was always a sucker's game, but I don't think so. Human beings are wired to operate in social communities, and we take a lot of our cues from the people around us respecting and admiring our work.
Many companies at one point followed that model. You were "part of the team/family/whatever." What you contributed was valued. That made it possible to take pride in it. You might work your entire career at one company.
That model is obviously totally dead, and I think the companies fired the first shot. Once workers became chips in a game instead of fellow human beings, they were bound to play the game right back. So here we are, trying to scrounge out some sort of structural meaning to the work we do, when it's obvious to most people that nobody around us really cares or respects what we do. It's just "let's churn this out so we can all get paid." That's a poor way to motivate human beings and I think contributed to a lot of our malaise.
I'm not sure it was "companies" in general. I think a major cause was the shift in stock ownership in public companies from individuals to mutual funds and other financial institutions, over the decades after WWII.
From the standpoint of a company that actually wants to build lasting value, you want your public stock owners to be individuals, investing on long time horizons for things like their retirement. Then you can implement longer term plans and strategies without having to worry as much about immediate returns.
But if most of your stock is owned by mutual funds, then the fact that the individuals whose retirement savings are in those mutual funds are investing on a long time horizon doesn't help you; the funds themselves are looking at your short term returns, and if those don't measure up, they'll sell your stock and buy some other company's.
In short, a system that was set up with the best of intentions, to help people diversify their retirement savings and earn better average returns on them, has had the unintended consequence of putting Darwinian selection pressure on individual companies to prioritize short term returns over everything else. Which in turn has led to the demise of the "work for the company your whole career and the company will take care of you" model; no company can afford to do that in the new selective environment.
I think that you are idealizing historical societies here. Yes, society and values of people in it change. But that supposed connection and respect was never guaranteed to all that many people. No matter which period you talk about, past societies had large social, interpersonal and cultural problems of exactly this kind.
This isn't actually true, but there's a lot of people invested in interpreting Ford vs Dodge that way. Pretty much the only thing you can't do is directly hand investor money to rank and file employees. Everything else can be done just fine if the management wants and is prepared to put up a decent cover story.
- management largely has asymmetry when it comes to remote knowledge worker output, especially high performers (contrast assembly line: easy to flag slackers)
- we don't have equity or input on direction (contrast worker cooperatives)
- and we're getting paid a lot of money to "hack" on problems (contrast e.g. whalers, dangerous as hell)
so yeah, i'm gonna let y'all rationalize all this, but i think it's just a great time to be a US computer laborer. won't last forever, but you can use your immense savings (you ARE saving, right?) for all that good stuff whenever you want or are forced out.
We're basically in the "Beautiful Souls" phase of Hegel's Philosophy of History