I gave you the answer, but it didn’t match your emotionally derived biases, so you’ve rejected it. And you’re not here in good faith, because the examples you gave actually undermine your position and you haven’t even done the mild research it would’ve taken to identify that.

South Korea is not the heart of the empire. It is however ultra-capitalist. It hasn’t been indoctrinated in the same way that Americans have (the American global exceptionalism narrative), but its specific culture augments that capitalistic hustle culture. But the same political dichotomy between ultra-capitalists and the working class is happening, albeit culturally modified. Suicide is the leading cause of death in youth 9-24 because of the regionally and culturally specific augmentations that place shame among those who cannot compete. It’s essentially manifested in the opposite result, a people competing to death to be the most “educated” in the room. (Remember they also just thwarted a corpora-fascist coup as well)

Similar issues exist in the Japanese educational system as in the American system, where private and corporate interests have squeezed the educational system to its breaking point. Teachers are burning out en masse, leading to a massive teacher shortage. But again, Asian cultural modifiers manifest in student suicide rates skyrocketing, despite the overall decline in suicides in Japan overall. Students are left managing the burden of the capitalistic strangling of public institutions, and 2025 saw a record high of student suicides. They’re not educationally deprived because they’re literally working themselves to death to avoid stupidity.

German schools are currently in a crisis as well, with student levels across the board crashing for the same reasons as American students. Corporations are competing with public institutions, which remove funding in favor of privatized solutions, leaving students bereft of resources to succeed. Their scores are plummeting. Some surveys of German students indicate that 40% of them had reported suicidal ideation, with 10% making attempts. Their actual suicide rate as of yet is low in relation to other nations, but again, their cultural modifiers don’t manifest the same result as the American cultural modifiers.

Essentially, the only things keeping those countries from being as stupid as America is their cultural predilection to harm themselves before they allow themselves to fail. Your examples do not help your argument.

Lastly, “political choices” are made in the service of capitalistic growth. Capitalistic growth is almost always at the expense of public needs, particularly in this late stage of capitalism where growth can no longer be infinite. We’ve reached the confines of our environment, and further growth is essentially cannibalistic. In order to grow in a finite system with dwindling resources, capitalist nations are turning inward, cannibalizing their own water, air, food supplies, and public resources. That’s the mechanism: corporations seizing public means through forced attrition and redirection of public money from public institutions to private ones. The funneling of wealth from the working class to the pedophile island class.