Creating a Civil Society in a Famine

Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did. Burial crews were paid according to the number of bodies collected, which led to certain abuses. Crews would take the weak along with the dead and then bury them alive. So how do people who have lived through this behave? How do they build the thousand little daily sinews of trust that it takes to create a civil society? I asked a moment ago, how you get unrelated people to transcend local identities and pull together under a larger symbolic identity? As if that equation wasn't already difficult enough to solve, how do you accomplish that task with a dramatized people who have seen