Quote Originally Posted by thir View Post
Which makes me think how research has shown that in a crisis (war, natural catastrophies), people start working together and take care of each other.
It's more than that: people work together all the time, in the background, but it only gets noticed when the structures fall away and it's all that's left. Then everybody marvels at how this wonderful thing appears out of nowhere.

I think of it as what psychologists call a figure-ground illusion: we see the small striking thing in the foreground and don't notice the much bigger background. So economists can convince us that the world runs on the profit motive, and tough-guy theorists can make us believe that everyone is naturally at war with everyone else, and make us stop seeing the enormous background of everyday friendship and mutual help and support without which the whole society that the tough guys and exploiters live off would fall apart around them.