I think people in western countries have been a victim of our own successes, where we enjoy such a prosperous (relative to most of history) life that we now unwittingly afford the luxury of forgetting how raw human behavior actually works.

People don't start out being nice, altruistic and self sacrificing. That is socially conditioned and a learned behavior. However, we have conflated those positive traits as the base class of humanity, when it's really not.

I worry that we will need to return to widespread suffering just to relearn the same things we knew only a free short generations ago.