"America is leading in this social pandemic for reasons we struggle to understand"

Well, consider America's forefathers, in other words, the kind of people who were the first settlers -- soldiers, religious fanatics, criminals, gold diggers (aka greedy economic migrants), rich cowards (e.g. in recent history, not every Jew during WW2 had the means or willingness to emigrate), etc. In essence, that's the kind of people who gravitate toward US. Americans are (descendants of) that lot. Not to mention the responsibility for genocide of natives and participation in slavery even until recently.

I'm not aware of any modern study that would deal with propagation and influence of destructive ideologies across generations, but in Mosaic Book of Exodus you can read that every idiocy is estimated to influence (roughly) three subsequent generations, even if the descendants correct the course in the meantime. Seems pretty spot on (where I live, I can observe it on generations damaged by Leninism -- different idiocies, but the same mechanics).

"Can we force the beginning of social planning to prevent, at least, the disasters we can see so we can slow the disasters we cannot see?"

Of course. Switch to gift economy. Every person counts. If transactional system had no participants, it could not syphon resources (technology as one of them) toward unscrupulous incompetents.