most people live a complacent life making the best of what they have got. its not easy to change one's conditions, environment, society etc. even if the change is highly desirable. and so most people comfortably settle down in the world around them as it is.
but most of these most also subconsciously always want to do something to bring about a desirable change. its a wish most die with. and as long as this wish is unrealized there is glued to it a feeling of failure, of incapacity, of inferiority compared with one's ideal. i have it and maybe you do too.
if not to change something then at least one wants to contribute to some higher cause. this is a compromise, an "at least". many think they achieve success with at least this compromise by forwarding an email that's supposed to benefit people in either spreading some critical information or in getting people together for some cause. doing this gives people a sense of contributing, of pushing aside their feelings of failure. and people can do quite a lot to feel that they are not failures.
in the last some years i have had a natural instinct to check every piece of information that i come across. and this naturally includes some forwarded emails i receive. some claim to be the cure to some fatal disease and passing them on will apparently save lives. others claim to be information and/or efforts to garner support for some 'good' cause. these are the emails people forward unhesitatingly, in order to rid themselves of those feelings of incapacity/inferiority/failure to bring about a change. its sad that i can confidently now (with some experience) predict that 90% of these forwards have wrong/misleading information.
sometimes its the same kind of belonging to some great thing that brings people out together to join some mass demonstration/protest/celebration. (i am not saying all mass movements are this, but sadly quite a few are). they either want to congratulate themselves for (and claim) a success that they are in no way responsible for, like the cricket World Cup win; or they want to be out there (and part of) what they think is the power of democracy to bring about a change.
if to achieve democratic success means to cripple democracy itself; then those smiling faces, singing patriotic songs and claiming to be heroes are dangerous crowds supporting blackmail. and all they had to do was to come out of their comfortable drawing rooms, look good on camera, and go along with the flow, blindly, without studying what it was they were trying to do. and they even managed to suppress that demon of failure for a little longer.
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