As we ponder human nature and our ability to comply, one wayward thought. We really have no useful perspective. Whether through seige, invasion, or great visitation of plague, the many once walled cities of the world were subject to bunkering down off and on for centuries. There were plague visitations that kept people locked inside their homes and cities for years… compounded by actual famine…
Do you know how people die in the US from literal starvation? Complications of prolonged malnutrition? Plenty. Starvation? Statistically zero.
Enforcement was often much crueler, but the individual fear that self-enforces was also much greater, too. The idea that human beings are too undisciplined has more to do with the context of our behaviors than anything. We no longer execute people for not disclosing their symptoms, we no longer seal the doors on buildings ravished by plague so that the 500 or so afflicted inside can be left to die that the 10,000 outside might live and the city not be brought to ruin.
The reality is that we have survived these periodic events due almost entirely to irrational fear, over-reaction, and inhumane utilitarian cruelty… and that was all pre-Bentham, boys and girls.
That is not the people we have largely become, but our fear is also less acute than that of our ancestors, our stress response by relative degrees less routinely tested, such has been our level of relative security for so long. We really are less disciplined than they were, not because our nature is different, but because the environment within which it operates is an unbridgeable chasm of difference.