The issue is not the level of suffering, the issue is what do you have to lose.
More precisely, it is what you believe you have to lose. And humans seems to have a cognitive bias that they take all advantages of the current situation for granted, if they existed at least for a decade.
So when people see more options, they are going to be like: “Worst case, we fail and everything stays like it is now. Best case, everything improves. We just have to try.” Then they sometimes get surprised, for example when millions of them starve to death, learning too late that they actually had something to lose.
In some sense, Brexit or Trump are revolutions converted by the mechanism of democracy into mere dramatic elections. People participating at them seem to have the “we have nothing to lose” mentality. I am not saying they are going to lose something as a consequence, only that the possibility of such outcome certainly exists. I wouldn’t bother trying to convince them about that, though.
More precisely, it is what you believe you have to lose. And humans seems to have a cognitive bias that they take all advantages of the current situation for granted, if they existed at least for a decade.
So when people see more options, they are going to be like: “Worst case, we fail and everything stays like it is now. Best case, everything improves. We just have to try.” Then they sometimes get surprised, for example when millions of them starve to death, learning too late that they actually had something to lose.
In some sense, Brexit or Trump are revolutions converted by the mechanism of democracy into mere dramatic elections. People participating at them seem to have the “we have nothing to lose” mentality. I am not saying they are going to lose something as a consequence, only that the possibility of such outcome certainly exists. I wouldn’t bother trying to convince them about that, though.