You can't make a broad statement like that. In most places, for most times, people have been pretty passive. The mass of people being involved is the exception, not the rule, and even then, it normally was not a majority, but a local minority that acted at the right time that changed things.

I think both statements can be true. It's just when there are only two hundred people around, each voice has more influence then even an enthusiastic politician nowadays.

So just by living like we do today with having opinions and voicing them you've already influenced your society back then. If you do the same today, nothing would've changed.

But that's comparing apples to oranges. You're defining society "nowadays" as being hundreds of millions of people, and society "back then" as having only two hundred people. That's like complaining that people are more involved in their family and their workplace than they are with people across the country. It's absurd.

I also can't think of a time period or large geographic area that's had writing being common and most people were constrained to a society of 200 people, unless they were purposefully insular.

while you're once again correct that i'm comparing oranges to apples, my point nonetheless stands. the world population before the industrialization was in the lower hundreds of thousands.

the usual town did house significantly less then a thousand people. compared to a usual town of today with >40k inhabitants.

By year 1500 world population was 500 million, so my point is that your claim how "before industrialization world population was in the lower hundreds of thousands" is completely incorrect. That's my point.

World population by early 19th century was already 1 billion, what are you talking about?

yes, it was.

the first industrialization started in the middle 18th century though, so not sure what your point is.

Probably that already in the "middle 18th century" it was close to a billion people (and in any case, many more than low thousands: hundreds of millions).

Heck, ancient Athens alone (a single Greek city) had a population in the "low thousands" in 500 B.C.

There is no point in the past 2000 years where world population is estimated to be "hundreds of thousands".

Kids these days!

Yeah, I don't believe (or see historical proof) for eternal stasis, so I don't find the argument "haha, he complants about kids these days, like tons of people did on their day, so it must have been always wrong to complaint about that" convincing.

There was a Rome, and then a fall of Rome and the dark ages. And the same for tons of institutions, states, cultures, etc.

Heck, there was the pre-war Germany and then there was the Nazi germany.

"Kids these days" is often very true compared to what preceeding generations did at various times.

There were many "past people" who did absolutely nothing when faced with atrocities brought upon Jews in Nazi Germany, just as there are "now people" who risk their very lives by engaing in various forms of activism regarding societal change. Making broad statements about level of engagement of "past people" is akin to statements like "in our time music used to be much better!".