The banality of evil.
This is what I keep telling people to be afraid of. Not the nazi man around the street who screams at racialized people, but everyone else around them who let them be and the system that does not keep them in check.
Slowly but surely, the banality of evil grows, normality becomes a system of silent oppression, social structures get rigged to prevent ethical politicization, activists start being laughed at, marginalized and attacked and slowly but surely the normal person becomes the silent Nazi that are just "doing their job" but who actually know very well that more marginalized people will suffer long before they do. Which prevents any interests in changing anything.
When you hear "you are hurting your own cause by screaming too much or this or that" it's already the banality of evil at play. The silent hand of oppression sliding upon one's mouth and jumping to everyone they feel risk to shatter the status quo.
When you let your fear transform you, you let your spirit open to the darkness of fascism.
It's the moral equivalent of the frog in boiling water. You slowly turn up the temperature, and they don't resist.
Good souls live without fear, but with plenty of objective doubt. We have raised generations of cowards who doubt the truth and then suckle whatever dopamine fix tickles their brain.
"Just doing their job."
As if nature gave them that job, when they chose it themselves. There's a certain level of oppression, where people have no choice, and are forced to either submit or be crushed.
And that is why America and Europe are the armpits of the world.
For centuries, they've had the choice to live well, and always chose to treat each other and others like absolute shit.
They could choose to be this, that, anything, and listened to the fear implanted in them by their obese overlords.
Good times don't make weak men. Fake times make fake people. Every "good time" groups talk about in history, almost exclusively has someone under their boots propping their empire up. Name me a famous empire that wasn't built through thievery.
Castles built on sand.
Good times build strong people, and that's why the people in power want our lives to suck, so we become weak.