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Miram I really like that last line of stone laid over lifetimes. It's like that saying, where society grows great when old people plant trees in whose shade they'll never sit in. Looking to the future is really what it should be all about. Our species has a biological imperative to continue, and our best chances of doing so, for the sake of all our progeny, is to build a world free of the societal ills and institutional rot that plagues our current one. Tearing things down simply leaves everybody with less.
I think you can get a lot of people on board with that argument. To harness people's love of their children or young relatives, and realize that every child should be loved and cared for the same. I doubt you can extrapolate that into a universal kind of love. It's easier to defend that which poses no threat to you.
But the principles underlying it, like kindness, patience, caring, respect, etc., would best be shown by example. And that would benefit so many more people. Maybe it could lead to reframing our view of others, by seeing them as somebody's child. Realizing that whatever harm you inflict on someone, you also inflict it on their parents. It's a stretch, but the more we can do to humanize people the better. It's like Gandhi said (sort of, we're paraphrasing) "be the change you wish to see in the world".
I've often noticed that when people think about what changes they'd like to see, they tend to focus on others. They come at the problem by arguing over who should be doing what. Their solutions are in the form of directives. And for many that seems straightforward from a practical sense, but people by and large are not practical. They merely respond to whatever their incentives are. If there is no reward for doing things a certain way, or punishment for not doing something, most people will simply choose the way that's most convenient to them.
This inevitably paves the way for instant gratification. If that dopamine kick you mentioned isn't there, many simply aren't interested. People want ideas that are simple to digest, that appeal to their biases, that require them to do as little as possible. This way of thinking is saturated throughout the internet, with people so easily believing and behaving like ideology is more important than truth. That dogmatism is more important than perspective. That righteousness comes from identity rather than from action. It turns closed-mindedness into a virtue. People are basically colonizing morality and claiming it as theirs alone. It's hard to convince people to get off that sanctimonious high.
The problem becomes worse when you have pundits and public commentators and various groups who can easily take advantage of this sentiment. It's invariably a self-sustaining propaganda machine. And when they can identify areas of anger and desperation, it becomes a galvanizing force towards specific political causes. Authoritarian dictators have always relied on promising rapid results to justify their uses of force and violence to take over institutions for themselves and eliminate any checks against their power. This invariably leaves war as people's only recourse, which may make society better in the long run as they begin to actively seek peace, but it demands a very high human cost before that.
Ultimately, you're right, people need a better way of thinking. Something more critical, more honest, less immediately gratifying. Something more difficult, which goes against many people's nature. How you get there in today's social media landscape is an incredibly fraught proposition. I don't know how you can achieve it within the existing institutions. They are so deeply entrenched and resistant to change.
Maybe the moral arc of the universe will eventually bend towards justice. I'd like to have faith that people's capacity for reason can at least make cracks within their existing ideologies, but the systems are so overwhelmingly present that you're always competing against a cacophony of other voices each seeking to stroke the egos of their audience in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. I'm not sure what else can be done besides planting seeds and hoping they grow into the trees whose shade we'll never sit in.
