This is insidious Soviet Mathematics.

You provide general goods and services at cost and leverage economies of scale to grow your GDP despite suffering a comparatively small population in a largely pre-industrial country. You exploit camaraderie and inventiveness and curiosity rather than press-ganging serfs or periodically looting colonies full of ambitious, talented, and productive people. You educate the public en mass, instead of just relying on the gentry to pioneer scientific research and development. You build at scale, rather than doing vanity projects restricted to a handful of elites. You pursue projects that appeal to the general public, rather than following the whims of a handful of aristocrats and military commanders.

Only problem is that this can take a generation or more to show real material progress. And even as you’re improving your own community, you may have wealthier neighbors who can outrun you, at least in the short term. You might not be welcome into the network of post-colonial trade if you don’t have friends in the imperial core. And so you become increasingly self-reliant and nationalistic, which others claim signals your hostility to a global rules based order.

If people in your community can be bribed, coerced, or duped into turning on their neighbors, the network of self-reliance can fail. Your economy can drag. You don’t reap all those benefits of scale. You’re exposed to the violent intrusion of foreign militaries and the looting of the colonial era. And people lose faith in your system of social welfare, because they fail to see it benefiting them in the modern moment.

The hard math of capitalism is that there’s more easy money to be made fucking over ten neighbors than helping one out. And while the long term trajectory of such a society is decay, an insulated tier of individuals can bring in windfalls over the course of their adult lives that make life significantly easier and more luxurious.

For folks in their prime years, there’s a real economic incentive to use your superior strength and that of your immediate circle to loot your elders and tyrannize your kids. This feels justified when you were abused as a child. And by the time you’re an elder, there’s little you can do to protect yourself from the next generation, save to pit them against one another with your accrued savings.

Pragmatically, you need people who understand the bigger picture and have a sense of place within the community over the longer term. For folks who don’t see a future among their neighbors, playing nice isn’t pragmatic at all. It’s a sucker’s game.