Exactly, CJ. The problem you outline is an absolute sod!
My personal fall-back hope, though, is always the multi-lifetime long-haul towards a slowly-evolved improvement.
I think that ‘we’ - that’s to say the immortal-soul essence of us - re-incarnate serially, in pursuit of the Great Purpose of constantly reducing entropy. (Sic! )
This odd imperative is imposed on all thinking entities simply by the basic - entropy-inclined - nature of reality, which threatens permanently to reduce all of us and all creation progressively into a state of total white-noise disorganisation.
For that background reason, I see what we do, in this virtual-reality holodeck where we play multi-player games between each death-and-rebirth, as a long, slow evolutionary process requiring multiple lifetimes.
The bugger of it all is another basic condition which is also apparently inherent in the nature of reality: In that, for any of this epic story that I’m sketching here to work, absolute free will has to be an inherent element in the body/ego avatars which our souls run during each incarnation. They - or rather we, the souls, their operators - have to be able to choose freely what we do, including the whole deluge of deeply unwise ‘bad’ things…
Lacking that in-built condition of sovereign free will, the whole enterprise of the Great Purpose of Big Mind - of which each of we individuated souls are all still-connected outgrowths - would fall flat; so it seems.
Big Mind, faced with the inherent ever-present slow slide towards absolute entropy - the white-noise-ing of everything - is obliged always to drive things towards low entropy, simply to go on existing as an organised, mind-based, self-aware entity. Awareness-entities, once they have appeared and evolved by pure, random accidents in the endless hiss of white noise, don’t want their organised being to die and fall apart again.
As Tom Campbell points out, a less desiccated, more humane way to characterise this process of working perennially at lowering inherent entropy is to think of it as “growing towards love”.
According to this Campbellian vision, that’s why we’re here: Each of we “Individuated Units Of Consciousness” - aka immortal souls - are in the nature of special organs of Big Mind, exactly analogous to the special-purpose organs of our (virtual! ) physical bodies. We too serve vital, life-support purposes: driving down entropy by growing towards love. That’s why we come to the holodeck: to take part in this elaborate anti-entropy game.
And all around us, other IUOCs/immortal-souls also take part in the dance; hosts of us making lamentable mis-steps as we go, because - with free will - we can.
Yet I do believe that the whole bloody dance is indeed evolving, with near-intolerable slowness, towards the good: ten steps forward, nine bleedin’ steps back…!
I sympathise with your anguished turmoil about it all, CJ, especially when we’re in the thick of one of our repeated addictive bad-choice festivals, aka war.