What have we become?
What we always were.
I think, ultrathule, that your perspective is a little naive in many respects. You seem to be expecting that people should "care" about the situations of other people that they do not personally know, without really considering just what you are asking of those people and whether or not it is a reasonable expectation.
Over the years, I have realised that life throws an extraordinary amount of fairly horrific shit at almost everyone. You really have to be extremely lucky and privileged to get off scot free. In the last 12 months alone, amongst my family, friends and colleagues, there have been three stillbirths, two violent deaths, a sudden spousal death, two nervous breakdowns, a number of job losses, five family breakdowns, a very nasty divorce, a number of serious health crises and a bankruptcy ... and that is just the stuff I know about. I have three friends and two family members that will probably have stress-induced mental health problems for the rest of their lives. One of my closest friends has a son with so many behavioural problems that she has had to turn to medication to deal with the stress.
With this in mind, and I doubt my circle of family and friends is unique, I would question whether the majority of people these days actually have the psychological capacity to give a damn about the circumstances of people they don't know -- purely because their own lives are just as difficult, stressful and traumatising, albeit for different reasons.
I am late Gen X and one of those people who will never attain the standard of living that my baby boomer parents have enjoyed, so I understand the arguments of the twenty-somethings that have suddenly realised the same is true for them. Yet, in the same vein, I just think: "Crikey, you think life is unfair now. You have no idea of the earthquakes to come."
It strikes me that what you are actually channelling here is the fearsome notion that those who say "to hell with everyone else" say that because they are evil Gordon Gekko types with no empathy, emotion or compassion. From this assumption, you are looking at the sheer number of instances of "to hell with..." online and projecting those numbers onto the population at large.
Well, Gordon Gekko was a classic psychopath and, in reality, only about 5 percent of a population falls into this category. Considering this, you have to accept that people from the other 95 percent may hold the views they do for valid reasons borne of their own life circumstances and experiences -- not because they are demonic arseholes who laugh in the face of others' misfortune.
All that said, I admit I used to feel the same way as you. I campaigned, I protested, I was very heavily politically-involved. I even lost a job over my political radicalism.
But I slowly came to see that my political frustration was rooted in the false belief that we could actually do something about a particular problem, that we could solve it once and for all, that we could make things better -- when actually, in most cases, we couldn't. In some cases, not even the British government could do anything. In many cases, doing something actually made things worse through unintended consequences. We simply do not have that control or authority over other people and the choices they make.
No-one does.