Indeed, a child growing up away from the modern western culture would not adopt many of the negatives of our culture. Humans are programmable, especially in their formative years. After that, we're no less programmable, but it requires intentionality to program us, and each of us has the right of first refusal over what we allow ourselves to be programmed with (though unfortunately, most of us do not exercise that right because we never learned how). I'm sure @hypno has plenty of comments on that. :)

You're exactly right: money is not a natural thing. It is a technology (albeit a very old one) and a tool (an extremely powerful one), and it is useful, but we have let it be subverted to do great harm even while serving its useful purpose. We must take back control of the money and only use moneys which follow rules which we can inspect and understand. Federal Reserve dollars follow rules the fed makes up on a whim and does not allow us to inspect or veto. This is one of the great potentials of Steem: making a cryptocurrency that everyone can understand and use, with publicly auditable, open source rules.

So if everyone would influence their friends, everyone surrounding them positively, couldn't we make this world a better place?

Exactly! Criticize by creating. Be the change you want to see in the world. Creative destruction. :) All in the pursuit of human flourishing. This is exactly the point of the Voice and Exit conference; it's worth checking out if you're not familiar with it.