[2] They are described as highly competitive and individualistic, focusing on private interests over public welfare, through prioritizing commodity production and profit maximization.
[10] This perspective was most evidently portrayed through colonial logics which asserted that Indigenous peoples belonged to more "primitive" cultures and therefore should assimilate into more "civilized" societies or face genocide (e.g., "Kill the Indian, Save the Man").
Means-end rationality has held importance in Western culture for longer than modern capitalist societies have existed and historians have identified that this concept may have origins as early as Homer.
[...] The result of this evolving orientation was that citizens learned to obey societal laws which, in turn, served as the basis of dominant and legitimate types of authority in society.
[22][23] As described by political scientist Kenneth Good, "the rewriting of history 'forged a new pedigree for the concept of democracy' traceable from Magna Carta, through the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the Founding Fathers of the American constitution–all largely aristocratic and elitist events with an absent or passive people–taking precedence over [the alternative canon of] Athens, the Levellers and Diggers, and the Chartists and many others of the 1830s and 1840s."
Though new urban working classes struggled for self-determination through nineteenth-century Britain, democracy moved away from active citizenship to 'the passive enjoyment of constitutional rights and safeguards'; checks and balances, the division of powers, the rule of law."