There's a simple illustration of this at work at every major intersection in every major city in America. When I was a young child growing up in Bronx, New York, I remember I liked sitting on the corner of a busy intersection and watching the traffic. Light turns red, the mass of vehicles would obligingly come to a halt. Light turns green, the mass would move on. So on and so forth. Nice and orderly and all under control. Until the traffic light stopped working. One day the light just up and quit, and I marveled at how what was once an orderly and behaved mass of cars descended into a chaotic, bombastic mess. It was utter mayhem - cars packed bumper to bumper in all directions. People screaming horrible things at one another. Two fights broke out and somebody got hurt. Bad. The ambulance could not make it to the scene for over an hour because of the gridlock. I ran home crying, not sure exactly why at the time. But it was the utter baseness of it - I got to see humanity with the 'civilization' illusion (in this case, something as small as a series of colored light bulbs) stripped away. And it was terrifying. It doesn't take much reflection on such a thing to come to understand that humanity teeters on the edge of complete regression at any given moment.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
- Mahatma Gandhi