Public apathy

Every day we are witnessing many things that give us discomfort. It is easy to hear about a robbery,murders,accidents with lots of deaths in them or even war. The massive wave of information provided by the media and the Internet every day makes this possible. The result of this dose of daily sight of unfortunate events is that people get used to them. You may have witnessed it on yourself. You may saw about a murder on the news and your mental response would be that happens every day who cares. This may be an extreme example and that situation depends on each person's sensitivities but you get the point. Anyway this paragraph just described how public apathy is made.

Year by year people become more used to the bad things which happen in this world. I described the progress above. Other people have another opinion about this. They believe that the phenomenon of public apathy is coming from the governments who drug people in order to prevent them from taking action. In my opinion this is nonsense. It is the human nature that makes us more apathetic to things we see every day. For example seeing a man dressed like a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder in a bank may be a surprise the first day you see him. After fifteen days of seeing him dressed like this every day though? I am sure that after those fifteen or even less days you would be surprised of the banker not being dressed like a pirate. That's how our mind works. It notices a routine and provided no excitement or benefit becomes apathetic towards it.

Now you may say are you implying that our mind thinks that war is natural? My answer is yes after seeing images of war for years it thinks that it is a natural thing. Don't forget for example the success of the Saw movies. They provide images of extreme violence. For some people they were very enjoyable because after being fed so much violence by the sources mentioned above those images are a delight by getting the violence to another level. Something that I forgot to mention is the importance of progression in this procedure. By this I mean that if someone for example is reading about small scandals every day he wont be that surprised when a big one will happen and he wont take any action.

The problem lies on what I mentioned on the last sentence. Apathy prevents people from acting. A way to prevent it is to limit the flow of information into our minds but this in today's society is not sufficient and possible most of the times. Even by completely avoiding to see the bad things of the world doesn't mean they will stop happening sadly . The conclusion for me is that apathy can me neutralized by taking action and showing that things can be done.