Let society crumble into a hellscape in which the majority have worse lives in exchange for the warm glow of knowing that at least they're not making life bette

Let society crumble into a hellscape in which the majority have worse lives in exchange for the warm glow of knowing that at least they're not making life better for anyone else either. It's like a religious belief in some places. People accept the evidence of how to make a better society, in which valuable people who could contribute are actually enabled to do so and ultimately the required tax take to keep everyone alive actually goes down, but they'd literally rather not do that because helping other people offends their sense of self. Like the nonsense of many prison systems. Overwhelming evidence that it's an expensive way to get worse outcomes, but people just can't bring themselves to pay less for a better world if it means prisons are less hellscape.