People really are their worst enemies. And the one thing that kills societies more certainly than famine or plague is distrust - not always earned, not always unearned, but distrust nonetheless.
Only social groups *at any level* which have the trust, the skills, and the resources to successfully pull together in crisis survive that trial. And not all of them survive, either.
Sometimes, bad things happen to ethical, functional, prepared people.Yet they're the only ones who have a chance to survive the really tough contests.
Insufficiently functional social groups - friendships, couples, families, co-ops, neighborhoods, boroughs, cities, counties, states, nation-states, empires, civilizations, sentient species (sample size: 1) - don't even get that roll of the dice. They just ....end.
And even those societies we lionize, that had a good run - a century here, a century there, pretty soon you're talking about real time - invariably fell prey to accumulated internal dissensions and distrust.
And along comes some adventurer to save their nation...only he doesn't...or some barbarian horde or new pestilence shows up to wipe out a nation that long since stopped being one.
Or a financial setback hits a family that hasn't had any obvious slip-ups, or a radical change in life habits reveals how much the peace of a household depended on a far greater amount of social distance than a mere six feet can provide.
Or it becomes a bit too obvious for comfort how dependent we as a society are on 'the help' continuing to work, at the dishonorable wages we insist on paying them, under intentionally awful conditions, and receiving gratuitous abuse for their compliance. Also a source of distrust.
In the end, bad things happen to good people, too.
Yet at the moment, we can't even agree that a bad thing is happening to us.
Not, not "can't" - we *won't*. Because that would mean trusting each other.