Social experiment continued.

Actually, I got one useful comment on my question on Yahoo Answers. Well, it's not like it was useful by itself (in fact it was another postcount troll), but it contained a link to an article I found interesting: http://www.voxy.co.nz/lifestyle/climate-change-are-we-apathetic/268/23963

Of course, I saw this article before. It is one of the top links you get when you enter "New Zealand" and "apathetic" in Google. But it is sort of characteristic if you come to think about it. The author explains the traditional Kiwi (and her own) apathy in this way:

I don’t have a war that directly influences me; the whole nuclear-free waters thing has been achieved, there aren’t any rugby tours I’m particularly opposed to, and while I wish my pay was a little more even and some wolf whistles a little more infrequent, I’m not about to start burning my bras.
Other people have already fought for me on these issues.
The issue of my generation, and affecting every other generation, is climate change.

Well, first of all, when I said "New Zealanders are apathetic" I didn't mean "climate change". I can totally expect that the climate change is treated more seriously than most other issues in New Zealand - mostly because of all that posters, brochures, TV ads and so on: "Climate change is real!", "Sign on!", "We can make you feel you are doing something important for a nominal fee"... The state and trans-national corporations like Greenpeace make people consider the climate change as a serious threat that will impact on their lives and lives of their children.

Of course, climate change is real and there's no way one can deny it. Well, some do try denying, but it is kind of stupid. In fact, there are lots of conceptions based on denying obvious, well-known and nearly unanimously accepted facts. Some of them - like denying genetics, biological evolution or the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun and not vice versa - are plain stupid, others - like denying the Holocaust, mass murders and repressions by "communist" regimes or the on-going genocide in Chechnya - are both stupid and connected with dodgy politics. And I have a very strong suspicion that denying the climate change is one of that last category - a conception created by sold-out scholars on command by industrial corporations that do not want to spend money on cutting carbon emissions. There's some difference whether people say stupid things just because they are stupid, or crazy, or just having fun creating intentional logical fallacies - and when they deliberately try to fool people for political goals. And lies about the climate change are obviously not just some harmless craziness like creationism or the Flat World Society, but a deliberate attempt to create misconceptions in people's minds.

All that said, it is quite obvious that the climate change receives way too much attention from all types of media in New Zealand (and possibly in US and Europe as well). Of course, it's not the most important issue of our time. It's hardly even in the Top 10. I mean, yeah, raise of the sea level by one meter in the next hundred years is a rather unpleasant occasion, but it's not like all the borders will flood in one day. Most people will have plenty of time to build dams, wavecutters, raise the borders, apply drainage and what not. And even if the death toll from natural disasters grows 10 times from what it is now, it still will be much less than deaths from car accidents, coronary heart deceases or cancer. There are much more important things that impact millions of people right now and are able to jeopardize existence of humanity as a whole: wars, totalitarian dictator regimes (including very powerful ones like Russia or China) and loss of civil rights and freedom in known-to-be democratic ones, spreading and mutations of AIDS virus in Africa, agricultural crisis, energy crisis... None of those issues attract much (if any) attention here in New Zealand. Is it because people don't feel how such things affect them and there's no transnational corporation that would pay a bunch of celebrities to appear on TV and "raise awareness"?

There are as well other issues, that do not actually threat to kill anyone, but can easily make life pointless. For example, the copyright laws - what's the use of saving humanity if in the end it falls into the hands of some corporate pigs and their lawyers? What's the use of creativity, if the creation is only used to make money, not even by the author, but for some slimy agents and middle-men? What the use of technology, if it's not owned by the people but by some big companies that impose their own limitations on using, studying and sharing the technological advances?

And one can't say that those problems don't affect New Zealanders. Most computers here have Windows installed (and thus are, in judicial sense, owned and controlled by Microsoft), it is all but impossible to buy a netbook without paying the Microsoft tax, torrents are throttled on the network level and are directly forbidden by many providers, people can have their connections terminated on the basis of mere suspicion of "copyright infringement", universities have to buy ridiculous "licenses" to allow their students to copy excerpts from the books in the library... Yet, these issues don't seem to concern New Zealanders as well. The Software Freedom Day in Auckland must be one of the sorriest SFD events in the world, gathering about a dozen people together with the organizers, LUGs are ephemeral and apparently exist only on the internet websites, and there's no signs of any lobby neither for Free Software nor against idiotic copyright legislation. People are just being sheep led into the capitalist slaughterhouse without even realizing the awkwardness and danger of the current situation. That's the real face of New Zealand's apathy.