For about 1500 years, people were trained to think that the world of "belief" really matters more than real life. They've been trained there was one "correct" belief, i.e. some religion like christianity, judaism, or islam, and that even minor variations on the random pile of ideas that constituted those religions were "evil". The original wrangling about Arian Christianity versus what became Catholic Christianity is abstruse arguments over total nonsense, for example, to modern ears. Then during the reformation similar arguments about Jesus and crackers were life or death matters.
Religion morphed into something different in the 19th and 20th century. It really turned into the mass media. The mass media cultivates opinions about current affairs and the stupid schemes of scumbag politicians and oligarchs. People began to think their opinions were significant. Party politics became an expression of that tendency. Two or more parties pretend to believe the same set of nonsense that masses of people do.
Party politics created the concept of "activism", like in the 60s. Mass movements of people participated in quasi-religious activities around civil rights or the US involvement in vietnam.
What has any of that investment of time and energy ever really accomplished? Not much as far as I can tell. The vietnam war sort of ran its course until the US went broke. Organized crime used it to smuggle heroin into the country. Lots of money was wasted on military equipment. Lives were wasted. Land was poisoned, etc... The opponents of the war--in the idea sphere did fuck-all to really stop it.
The same thing is true about the civil rights movement. A huge amount of mental energy went into trying to "change" the system. What's the black-on-black murder rate today versus 1962? Did anything really fundamentally good happen from that "activism"?
The activism to "end apartheid" in South Africa is similar... Energy went into some political cause, rather than into improving anyone's life or infrastructure or whatever. It's just so much talk and nonsense. It's quite conceivable that country slides into total chaos and destruction.
People really are trapped in the matrix--more than ever, really, thanks to social media. Time gets invested in arguing about nonsense. Covid is the greatest example. Countries that did literally nothing had better outcomes than the countries that "locked down" hardest. States in the US that did nothing had similar results. The worst hit areas, like NYC in the US were the most "active" and the most inept.
To argue online with brainwashed minions is totally pointless though. It energizes what's basically a trans-dimensional vampire that "lives" off the mental conflict. People believe they have to change the mind of their neighbor, really the same way some religious person in 1000AD thought they needed to "save the soul" of their neighbor by getting them to believe in some rando collection of religious dogma that some assholes dreamt up.
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