Hacker News people tend to be pretty well-off and poorly understand the concept that most people don't have the bandwidth to get disrupted in that manner. Talk of life's joys and pursuing passions doesn't make sense in lives that are completely overwhelmed with the basic details of survival, whether it's keeping up with the dynamic schedule of several 'precariat' jobs or keeping a car on the road or a cell-phone plan alive without the income to properly support it (when the dynamic schedule requires that you're reachable on such a phone). That's just the example off the top of my head but there are many other situations that arise.
Having life joys that can be disrupted by this rage is a luxury, and not nearly common enough. I do feel that's a political truism, though: change only happens when problems are serious enough to upset the well-off who have disposable income and time, and who can afford (both materially and existentially) to maintain this sort of boiling rage and do something about it.
Your comment seems fundamentally misguided to me and it’s very telling that your first thought is that somehow the magnitude of lifestyle privilege factors into it in any way (it does not).
Even societies in which most people are barely living at a pure subsistence level have historically had revolutions, and in fact subsistence commoners becoming angry to the point of revolution has repeatedly been one way that nature corrects concentrations of power.
I’d go even further and say that your argument is not just wrong, but dangerously wrong because it offers an excuse for why a person might not cultivate their indignant rage at the corruption. You invite them to self-pity and woe their poverty as an excuse to not direct that rage at social progress, which is unacceptable even if you’re all the way at true subsistence level poverty (most aren’t, even by world standards).
And you also create an excuse for not being upset with other people who fail to act on their indignant rage over this issue too. You can just write it off as someone not “privileged enough” to sacrifice for the sake of acting to stop corruption.
Much of the west is more in the 'panem et circenses' camp.
My co-workers don't follow politics (except what gets shovelled at them by the red tops) and largely don't care as long as they get to go on holiday a couple of times a year and upgrade their car every few.
By and large they are comfortable and so they are happy with things as they are.
Exactly, that is the phenomenon I pointed out in my first comment above as being deeply surprising and incongruent with the pervasiveness of the corruption. I agree it’s very real, that’s the unsettling & surprising part.
Having life joys that can be disrupted by this rage is a luxury, and not nearly common enough. I do feel that's a political truism, though: change only happens when problems are serious enough to upset the well-off who have disposable income and time, and who can afford (both materially and existentially) to maintain this sort of boiling rage and do something about it.