As a visual artist i know what it's like to feed people the ideal picture... Everything rendered is better than reality, everyone knows it, but they still want to see the rendering... they still want to see a building concept with lush hanging gardens knowing full well that they are not going to actualize that in reality...

Then, as you mentioned comes the issue of apathy... after a while we dont even get upset about the lies we are fed... our ability to react is finite and it is getting exhausted by the media daily... everyone is pointing fingers, fear-mongering and telling you to pick a side... which is also a factor in compassion fatigue...

LOL i feel like i could go down the rabbit hole to no-end based on this post alone. But i'm going to stop myself here and just say that your writing is superb - Inspires me to do something a bit more edgy.