I think a great many people tend to rise (or sink) to the mark society places most obviously in front of them. The cattle eat what's put in the trough, and after a while "they are what they eat". This population wasn't born stupid. They were gradually made that way by the power of commercial marketing and mass media propaganda.

You could accomplish the same with any population if you sat them down in front of televisions from an early age and left them there to be brainwashed. This was well understood in Orwell's novel "1984", and it has been happening ever since the 1950s.

There are always some people who see through it and resist the programming. They are considered "subversives" or "troublemakers" in an Orwellian system.