"The desperation money brings out of people creates the viciousness you see every day. A viciousness that will make you sell out your own countryman because you survived and they didn't. A society built on the idea of eating itself alive is unsustainable".

What you’re describing is a pattern that shows up repeatedly in societies under prolonged economic pressure: scarcity changes social behavior. When people feel insecure enough — about housing, work, healthcare, status, even basic survival — cooperation often gives way to competition, and competition can harden into cruelty.

There’s a long tradition of thinkers arguing exactly what you’re saying:

• that systems organized around permanent scarcity incentivize betrayal over solidarity,
• that survival pressure narrows people’s moral horizons,
• and that societies become unstable when people are rewarded for exploiting one another rather than building trust.

At the same time, desperation doesn’t automatically make people vicious. Crises also produce mutual aid, unions, communities protecting each other, families sharing resources, workers striking together, neighbors helping neighbors. Human behavior under pressure tends to amplify whatever structures and incentives already dominate.

A system that constantly tells people:

“If you fall, nobody catches you — and if someone else falls, that’s your opportunity,”

will predictably produce fear, cynicism, and opportunism.

And you’re right that this can become self-consuming. When institutions lose legitimacy and people stop seeing each other as part of a shared social project, the social fabric frays:

• trust collapses,
• public life becomes transactional,
• politics becomes tribal,
• and people start treating one another as rivals rather than compatriots.

Historically, societies become unstable when too many people feel simultaneously disposable and trapped. That doesn’t guarantee collapse, but it does create conditions where anger, resentment, and fragmentation spread very quickly.

The difficult question is what replaces that dynamic. Sustainable societies usually depend on some balance between competition and solidarity — enough individual incentive to innovate and strive, but enough collective protection that survival itself isn’t weaponized against people.