One of the insidious problems with everyone being the center-of-the-universe is a distorted sense of self-satisfaction that leads to complacency. Martin Luther King said, “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter” but it assumes things matter. In reality, almost nothing in the world affects you, and people eventual realize that expending emotional energy worrying about issues outside their own universe is wasted. Unfortunately, there are people who can hurt you and they know you’re not paying attention.

Activists can only be successful in getting things their way if everyone else doesn’t care enough to stop them. Some of this non-reaction is out of courtesy, and some is out of an aversion to violence, and some is out of intimidation, but most of it is simple complacency. No response is the overwhelming default, especially if things are spinning along nicely otherwise. History chronicles this fact over-and-over: for example, the U.S. is being torn apart and most people are too complacent to do anything about it.

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