One way to handle your very reasonable misanthropic response is to categorize this cultural sociopathy as just that: a symptom of deeper cultural problems well outside any one person's control. You can hope for how people do not actually need to be that way, but are made so by society, by our social relations, and the dominant forces around them, and those things can and will all change.
But it does mean that 95% of your society is easily manipulated into sociopathic prioritization of slight inconvenience over folks' health and the continuation of a pandemic. I think they could also be easily manipulated into the exact opposite response, if we removed the reins from capital. And hell, eventually we could create our society in a way that required no manipulation for this to happen, where we can build up ourselves and each other into truly empathetic and thoughtful people.
One way to handle your very reasonable misanthropic response is to categorize this cultural sociopathy as just that: a symptom of deeper cultural problems well outside any one person's control. You can hope for how people do not actually need to be that way, but are made so by society, by our social relations, and the dominant forces around them, and those things can and will all change.
But it does mean that 95% of your society is easily manipulated into sociopathic prioritization of slight inconvenience over folks' health and the continuation of a pandemic. I think they could also be easily manipulated into the exact opposite response, if we removed the reins from capital. And hell, eventually we could create our society in a way that required no manipulation for this to happen, where we can build up ourselves and each other into truly empathetic and thoughtful people.