Let's take a step back and think about what should be the role of society?
The predominant answer today is that of neoliberalism which started to take hold from the 1970s, but had been developing since the 1930s.
Neoliberalism posits that outside immediate family, people are selfish, and that apart from government intervention the world is a meritocracy and people deserve their position in society.
Therefore, neoliberalism says, we should structure society around this assumption. We need to put people in competition with each other via the free market letting people selfishly pursue profit.
Public services such as education and healthcare should be privatized under the assumption that profit seeking businesses can deliver those services more efficiently than the public sector. For the public services that are not privatized, a bureaucracy of compliance is created to monitor the public servants who are thought to have no intrinsic motivation beyond profit maximization.
In practice Noam Chomsky says, neoliberalism is implemented only for the poor, while the rich are able to lobby for their interests, and receive government subsidies and tax cuts.
A similar story plays out between rich and poor countries where rich countries are able to exploit cheap labour and resources from the poor countries via unequal exchange furthering the exploitation the imperial core has done to the imperial periphery.
Where does this lead us?
45% of the population is food insecure, and more than 42.3 million people face emergency levels of hunger with more than 300 million people facing chronic hunger . All this while 20% of food produced for humans are thrown out never to be consumed that is one billion meals per day.
Rich countries export poverty at astonishing rates: 700 million people live in extreme poverty that is $2.15 per day, not counting the people who still live in abject poverty but are above the artificially low line which does not properly account for the true cost of living, but is used as evidence of improvement while relative poverty measurements have stagnated or gotten worse.
Meanwhile, there are people who have hundreds of billions of dollars. Does Elon Musk really work harder than the combined effort of the 700 million people living in extreme poverty to warrant his unprecedented pay package as his defenders argue? He must be one hard working man. Perhaps that is why he only sleeps 6 hours per night, so he can put in more hours than the 700 million people. I'm sure his job doesn't require concentration, strategic planning, cognitive, or physical abilities all of which are severely impaired with 6 hours of sleep.
Not to mention climate-collapse looming on the near horizon, and is already responsibly for 14 million deaths per year, the industrial scale systemic animal suffering, the lack of accountability for corporations, or the rising global conflict.
But society's role is just to enforce a minimal set of laws protecting private property and encourage competition neoliberalism says. It bequeaths the individual to create their own happiness and prosperity.
If you don't like the prospect of dying or being displaced due to climate change, you just need stop climate change - vote with your dollar, and hope someone with more dollars doesn't vote against you, and if you don't like living in extreme poverty, you just need to work harder! Perhaps try to sleep 6 hours per night, and bring that hustle! If you're one of the 1 in 69 people in the world fleeing conflict, well good fucking luck. You're seen as an intruder to another sovereign nation that must be stopped.
I think we can do better.