After reading "The Dark Forest" I've leaned towards the idea that we are under pervasive observation (likely by hard-to-detect autonomous AI agents of some form, the origin of which is relatively inconsequential) and once the probability tilts towards a non-zero value that we are a threat beyond a certain blast radius we'll be wiped out.

If that were true, and the message of that being the case were delivered somehow to our governments, the general status quo around these phenomena and the propaganda steering people away from caring about them would be explainable. People have barely gotten used to the idea of mortality, but to know your race was doomed to extinction with certainty would almost certainly cause massive civil unrest and a major disruption to almost all human institutions and culture that assume our collective future is unbounded.

Perhaps this is too tinfoil but it's an internally consistent story, perhaps with the exception of how or why these agents would be detectable at all, when they surely could conceal themselves completely -- perhaps it's just probabilities though since there would not be much downside of detection by a primitive civilization such as ours.