> You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.
> Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nobody is, per se, afraid of low-probability high-impact events like being shot (otherwise nobody would join the military.)
But everyone is afraid of high-probability low-impact events, like being shunned by your community for committing a faux pas.
So, if actually acknowledging an elephant-in-the-room issue—or actually trying to get that issue fixed in a way that steps on people's toes, instead of endlessly debating how to get the issue fixed without stepping on anyone's toes—is considered such a faux pas; if it's considered something that gets you branded as low-status even by the people you're working to help, rather than something that gets you branded, at least in some small community, a hero—then the human mind just seems to say "fuck this strategy." We need acceptance—not from everyone, but at least from the people we are most trying to help. Without that, we see no reason to help them.
tl;dr: MLK Jr. may have had to choose to be a hero, but he never had to choose to be Batman. It's seemingly impossible to choose to be Batman. (Well, at least with normal human psychology. But even outside of that—even assuming benevolent schizoid folk who think Batman is a great life-path—we've set up our systems of education and accreditation so that such benevolent schizoid folk fall through the cracks, becoming excluded from society before they can ever make any impact.)
If people were worth saving they wouldn't need saving. I need acceptance from myself, to be able to look myself in the eye, and I have that, by now. I made plenty of mistakes in my life, but I don't regret any instance of doing or trying to do the right thing, not to get gratitude or recognition from any external source, but because I consider it the right thing. Looking at just about anyone around me, it seems that much harder than never giving in is having given in, being broken or tamed, and then reclaiming yourself. And even suckier is never reclaiming yourself, now that is suffering. I wouldn't want to swap with any conformist or even just "average person who isn't rocking the boat" I know. They generally seem unhappy, slow, and boring even to themselves. I have my worst times behind me, they have their worst times still to come.
> we've set up our systems of education and accreditation so that such benevolent schizoid folk fall through the cracks, becoming excluded from society before they can ever make any impact.
Can't really confirm that for myself. You know how they say when you get into prison you have to not shirk the inevitable fight, or you're going to be the toy of others for the whole stay? Life is like that, too. I don't care what "random person who happens to be my contemporary" thinks of me, if anything, I would care what people like Sophie Scholl or Hannah Arendt would think of me. But more than that, what are the things you would think or say or do even if the whole world was against it? Because only that is really yours and really you. The rest doesn't hold water and will leave you in the ditch inevitably.
