Extremism as a "metric". To understand if society is "doing a good enough job"

I've been thinking a lot about politics recently. As I'm guessing a lot of you all might be as well.

A lot of what I read online tells me that most people treat far-right (and other) extremism as an unnatural phenomenon. But the more I think about it I am starting to think it's a very natural phenomenon.

Does it strike you that what we're currently experiencing is a systematic loss of faith in humanity and its institutions? Does that just mean these people were born with, or derived these feelings from nothing? Or are they just like the rest of us who ended up "on the short end of the stick" in life?

I think what could follow from this reasoning is that extremism in a society could be used as a metric for us all, collectively, to understand whether or not we're "doing a good enough job" for our fellow citizens and humanity in general?