ITS A CHOICE ... SORT OF.

I sympathize that the will to improve must come from within, and without it nothing will change. True.

But different societies have very very different rates of these non-functional cases. And when we find a society that is slipping for worse or already is much worse, it is not plausible it is the genes of the population, rather it is the cultural context that is setting the population up to have no will. At the scale of a large population, the only variable changing here is the context created OUTSIDE the person.