As often, when I see a film that's interesting, I do some subsequent research. In the course of that, I came across the following quote from Mr. Baron Cohen.
"Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudices, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism.
"But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tuscon. And the question is: did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism," he said.
Baron Cohen said the concept of "indifference towards anti-Semitism" had been informed by his study of the Holocaust while at Cambridge University, where he read history. "I remember, when I was in university, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.'
"I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic," he said.
That's something I've often observed, myself. I often catch a lot of flak for my comments about racism on the boards. I feel very strongly about the matter, and that, in essence, is one of the reasons why. It's not that I necessarily think the people I argue with are deliberately racist so much as I think that they're indifferent to it, to such an extent that they'll refuse to even acknowledge it, and I regard that indifference as just as socially pernicious as virulence, simple because it can do just as much damage.
(hehehe...)
Natural world, well, natural world doesn't care, at least now all the big predators are gone. It has to be deliberate to be an enemy.
Corollary from this discussion:
The larger the government, the stronger the opposition.
Which neatly answers the Fermi paradox, doesn't it?