As I recall, there have been some studies into why everyone always thinks the past was better than the present, when it is absolutely, 100% demonstrably false. Think about it: You can meet someone who lived through massive world wars, people dying the streets from easily-preventable diseases, women being treated as little more than property, black people being lynched for the color of their skin - and they will still somehow think yesteryear was better than today and that society is going downhill. The Society preys on this thinking very effectively.
The reason, is our brains don't like to dwell on the negative, and we whitewash a lot of our memories, filtering out a lot of the bad and focusing instead on the good. So, we idealize our past and remember it how we wanted it to be, not how it actually was.