Apathetic Majority

I don’t know what to do with this just yet, but I keep returning to this notion of an apathetic majority.

I return to this thought because I was just reminded about the USA’s terrible turnout rates for voting. Consistently people say they care about mechanisms that affect their lives, and yet also consistently fail to vote for the candidates and policies that would change things.

There’s an apathy that permeates the malaise, and it leave the vocal minority to dictate the outcomes for everyone.

This is a very old-school example of something that lives on in this digital era. That a vocal minority distorts the severity and magnitude of any particular topic. 

But as a relatively new invention, the internet is too immature to go beyond the vocal minority. There’s no accounting just yet if the consensus is of the smaller percentage, or if it actually represents the majority.

I suspect that on many issues or topics, the general baseline hovers around apathy. Sure, the key issues are likely big: religion, war, safety, money, etc. But say the release of a new video game? Or two celebrities having a baby? 

I truly wonder if there has been a genuine shift in apathy about that, or if it’s still proportional to the population growth over the centuries.