Again, this is my understanding with probably a little headcanon bleeding through. I'm sure some nice folks on Youtube have more in depth videos on the subject, but this is what I gleaned from their work and wookiepedia:
After the First Death Star blew up, the Empire had to do a lot of damage control. They just pissed off a lot of people with the destruction of Alderaan, the "heart of the Old Republic", and had exposed that they were planning on holding a big gun to the rest of the galaxy after disbanding the Senate (the Monarchy no longer being constitutional, now more of an obvious Totalitarian Police State Dictatorship).
So the Empire, at first pretending to be a nice boyfriend to your single mom, just shot your grandma, just cut the cord so you couldn't call the police, and was holding a gun up to you, and then the destruction of the first death star was like the dog stealing the gun from his hand. Woops. Oh ship. Now what? Well from what I understand the Empire had to scramble to do what they could to keep the galaxy under control because the jig was up. So they started forcefully recruiting and conscripting as many humans as they could before they could be recruited by the rebels. Probably pumped out the occasional batch of flash clones to fill quotas, but their main focus was getting a bunch of humans into stormtrooper armor before the rebels could get them into camo b.d.u.s.
The Empire was in such a hurry to get as much ground covered that they rushed their training of the new Stormtroopers with their already inconsistent military training academies. The Empire was always dehumanizing, as a lot of militaries have to be, but the empire focused all on the "break em' down" part but not so much on the "build em' back up stronger" part.
They promoted fanaticism to the Emperor's cult of personality, and fed into a lot of people's hatred for chaos, political dissidents, and aliens, but they didn't inspire a lot of comraderie to their fellow troopers or patriotism for their people. It didn't help that some of the Imperial Officers were more business men or politicians serving just to advance their careers, and were prone to compete (and later, after the empire started to fall, kill each other) than cooperate. Morale was low on top of the rushed, inconsistent, and fear based training. A balance of self preservation and self sacrifice was achieved, but it was done in a demoralizing, harsh, some might say nihilistic way.
"Duty is the mistress of fools."