You can’t do anything about that. Everyone’s corrupt. You just can’t help those people. All these things are tied up in the notions that we make real by how we operate.
Remember, a lot of the things we treat as real are actually fictions—legal systems, boundaries and borders, political entities, countries, political parties, identity groups, grammar … they aren’t physical things; they don’t really exist in the except to the extent that we agree to behave as if they do.
So we bring these things into existence just by agreeing to pretend that they exist and to behave accordingly.
In the same way, an attitude that things can’t improve and what I really long for is to have everything fall apart so I can be the lone survivor … that attitude of nurtured long enough becomes manifest in the decisions people make and if enough people start making those decisions along those lines, we manifest what we fantasize.
The other things about post-apocalyptic fantasies is that they’re basically a fantasy of a giant RESET button combined with a very fluid set (i.e. mostly nonexistent) set of societal rules. That’s why they’re attractive to so many people- they can fantasize about starting over or doing something different, etc… and outside the confines of everyday life.
I kind of wonder if the rise of those sorts of post-apocalyptic fantasies corresponds to the essential elimination of frontier/wilderness/exploratory opportunities for the vast run of people. I mean some guy in 1870 had little need for that kind of fantasy- he could just go West, and live it for real if he really wanted out of his current life. But what is someone in today’s society going to do? There’s nowhere to go to reset yourself/reinvent yourself- with today’s technology, there’s no getting away, unless you go somewhere non-technological, and most of those places are settled already and hostile to you in ways that the West wasn’t in 1870.
Preppers OTOH, are mentally ill, if you ask me. They’re basically conspiracy theorists who are scheming up various end of the world scenarios and then legitimately preparing for them. That’s not sane. That’s not to say that a level of disaster preparedness commensurate with the risk where you live is inappropriate (e.g. maintaining food/water/etc… if you live in hurricane-prone areas), but that preparing for what basically amounts to fantasy scenarios is.