Individual freedoms are at odds with the corporate world
In America, a capitalist utopia, the charter for corporations, the lifeblood of this utopia, states that the bottom line (the cash flow of a company) MUST come before anything else. You can rally for or against this rule, or argue that it’s just an ideology more than anything, but the fact is, a CEO can be voted out by shareholders if he or she fails to uphold this unsustainable rule. Dogma aside, it is highly enforceable, and legal too.
This mentality trickles down and permeates all employees, creating a general “fog of war”. If a corporation is by nature capitalist, thus taking no prisoners, and its employees are all held to the standard of the bottom line and little (if anything) else, then what you’ve created is a machine that is out to destroy all competition, by any means necessary.
And this is exactly what you see. Very little cooperation amongst companies, incessant meddling to drive up stock prices, consumer demand that fluctuates violently, all held sway by the markets and media.