People will be more likely to have good intentions if they expect others to have good intentions. If there's a lot of distrust in society good intentioned narratives will lose their power.
Organisms on this planet require resource to survive, but resource is limited. The nature is fundamentally a zero-sum game so that's what everything tends to fall back to when hard time comes. This is so predictable, played again and again, like we're cogs in a machine. Well, maybe we really are.