I don't think it's a matter of people being good or bad. I think we're mostly emotionally childish, and that what gives us the ability to act maturely is a sense of control, independence, and empathy. When we understand how the other person is feeling, and feel that we're able to handle that reaction safely, we can let compassion guide our actions.
That isn't to say that expressions of compassion are necessarily understood as such. "Idiot compassion" enables rather than uplifts. True compassion can be as threatening to someone mired in their own negativity as an attack.
I think it's easy today to reach the point where we act from a self-centered perspective rather than a communal one.
So much of life today is online, and it's really hard to read emotion, let alone understand and empathize with it. Also, there's big money in making people scared, so a huge portion of media is dedicated to stoking people's fears. Years of being told to be scared, to be afraid of opening ourselves to the needs of others, have affected us. Fearful people don't feel in control or independent. As a result, we've started having reactions that are all out of proportion or even just mistaken. If everyone is so touchy that we can't respond to criticism, or even just facts that we perceive as criticism, without going nuclear, then all we can do is keep hurting one another.
For instance, I've seen lots of people talk about traumatizing violence as a justifiable response to someone re-posting images of someone else's art. That's just not proportionate. Worse, I'd say that most of the times I've seen this, it's involved either fan art, or art inspired by very specific works. The people wronged haven't been wronged to the point of physical injury _and_ have committed the same wrong or worse. These reinterpretations of others' art is usually more sexualized, or changed in ways the original artists could easily find offensive. They often offer prints of their work, with no money sent back to the original artists.
And they relate conversations that tend to go like this: "You're doing something horrible by reposting my image. Stop at once." "You're a horrible person for accusing me of being bad! I'll change nothing! You should be ashamed of yourself!" No matter how polite (but angry) they tend to be, the response from the other person tends to be an off-the-charts escalation. The other person isn't able to say, "Sorry. I meant no offense. I'll remove my post/tweet/whatever." The site gets involved, it all gets messy, and everyone goes away furious and hurt, carrying an even greater grudge against the world for its injustice.
Everyone involved thinks of themselves as a good person. But they also think of themselves as generally aggrieved and embattled. They're so focused on their own victimhood that they can't even see how they hurt others. Worse, when someone points it out, they feel like that person is denying the victimhood they spend so much time building up. It is not, for instance, as bad to have someone tell you you're stepping on their foot as it is to have your foot stepped on. But we act like it is. We'd be a lot better off if we could hear people's honest grievances against us, and appreciate when our reaction gets out of proportion. But that takes feeling safe. Many are so fearful and full of righteous victimhood that they can't accurately assess their safety. They never feel truly powerful, so they hurt a lot of people by just trying to feel secure.
