The mechanism that allows selflessness to propagate, what makes it worthwhile and a survival strategy, is culture. And culture is falling apart. Human institutions and communities cannot survive in a society where people do not know their neighbors and where families are cut to the bare minimum, or disappear altogether. The village and the neighborhood are vanishing, we all live in housing projects or suburbs, in isolated households, often of just one or two., Our acculturation comes from the schools, which teach us vocational skills without educating us, and media, which has its own commercial agenda. The workplace yields no cultural or social solidarity either, we all tend machines, or administrative structures that function in a machine-like manner.

Technology and improved communications do offer alternatives, this very forum is one. But can they substitute for the cultural connections that took thousands of years to evolve, which in turn serve biological needs millions of years in the making? Human beings are great at adaptation, but this is the first time in history where society can become totally unrecognizeable through the change occuring in one man's lifetime.

If you want to see where society is going, look at the barrio, the ghetto, the slum. It's not just poverty that's causing that social collapse, poverty and overcrowding has always been with us. It's the deterioration of cultural institutions like family, school, community, church, and the workplace. These institutions are either being allowed to whither away, or being taken over (inadequately) by the state.

Even affluence cannot fully make up for this cultural erosion. How many well-to-do families are falling apart?