Technological civilization and losing object permanence

In the grand tradition of physicists writing about areas outside their expertise, I wanted to put down some thoughts on a societal trend.  This isn't physics or nanoscience, so feel free to skip this post.

Object permanence is a term from developmental psychology.  A person (or animal) has object permanence if they understand that something still exists even if they can't directly see it or interact with it in the moment.  If a kid realizes that their toy still exists even though they can't see it right now, they've got the concept.  

I'm wondering if modern technological civilization has an issue with an analog of object permanence.  Let me explain what I mean, why it's a serious problem, and end on a hopeful note by pointing out that even if this is the case, we have the tools needed to overcome this.

By the standards of basically any previous era, a substantial fraction of humanity lives in a golden age.  We have a technologically advanced, globe-spanning civilization.  A lot of people (though geographically very unevenly distributed) have grown up with comparatively clean water; comparatively plentiful food available through means other than subsistence agriculture; electricity; access to radio, television, and for the last couple of decades nearly instant access to communications and a big fraction of the sum total of human factual knowledge.  

Whether it's just human nature or a consequence of relative prosperity, there seems to be some timescale on the order of a few decades over which a non-negligible fraction of even the most fortunate seem to forget the hard lessons that got us to this point.  If they haven't seen something with their own eyes or experienced it directly, they decide it must not be a real issue.  I'm not talking about Holocaust deniers or conspiracy theorists who think the moon landings were fake.  There are a bunch of privileged people who have never personally known a time when tens of thousands of their neighbors died from childhood disease (you know, like 75 years ago, when 21,000 Americans were paralyzed every year from polio (!), proportionately like 50,000 today), who now think we should get rid of vaccines, and maybe germs aren't real.  Most people alive today were not alive the last time nuclear weapons were used, so some of them argue that nuclear weapons really aren't that bad (e.g. setting off 2000 one megaton bombs spread across the US would directly destroy less than 5% of the land area, so we're good, right?).  Or, we haven't had massive bank runs in the US since the 1930s, so some people now think that insuring bank deposits is a waste of resources and should stop.  I'll stop the list here, before veering into even more politically fraught territory.  I think you get my point, though - somehow chunks of modern society seem to develop collective amnesia, as if problems that we've never personally witnessed must have been overblown before or don't exist at all.  (Interestingly, this does not seem to happen for most technological problems.  You don't see many people saying, you know, maybe building fires weren't that big a deal, let's go back to the good old days before smoke alarms and sprinklers.)  

While the internet has downsides, including the ability to spread disinformation very effectively, all the available and stored knowledge also has an enormous benefit:  It should make it much harder than ever before for people to collectively forget the achievements of our species.  Sanitation, pasteurization, antibiotics, vaccinations - these are absolutely astonishing technical capabilities that were hard-won and have saved many millions of lives.  It's unconscionable that we are literally risking mass death by voluntarily forgetting or ignoring that.  Nuclear weapons are, in fact, terrible.  Insuring bank deposits with proper supervision of risk is a key factor that has helped stabilize economies for the last century.  We need to remember historical problems and their solutions, and make sure that the people setting policy are educated about these things. They say that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.  As we look toward the new year, I hope that those who are familiar with the hard earned lessons of history are able to make themselves heard over the part of the populace who simply don't believe that old problems were real and could return.