Somebody far more eloquent than I am summarized the problem with this attitude: https://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/3tsd5o/comment...
By poking fun at everyone who tries to do anything, you end up defending the status quo
By poking fun at everyone who tries to do anything, you end up defending the status quo
The average South Park episode has Cartman representing the extreme of some issue, and the issue is mocked. But there will also be a foil, possibly Butters or Stan, who represents the core of the issue, ignoring the hyperbole surrounding it. This character is the one who succeeds.
Is that really an issue? Looking at our democracies, is the real issue that people take their causes seriously and extremely? Or is the issue the cynical apathy that opposes that?
History is full of pompous self-important people who took their causes very seriously indeed, and advanced humanity through that dedication.
I mean there's a very steep diminishing returns curve for most kinds of activism. You can't protest 0-24, because eventually you will run out of food, water, money, etc. Of course social networks and the constant breaking news media pours napalm on everything continuously, just because. (And yes, Trump is going to be Trump every day, just as China will be run by a paranoid oppressive power-hungry regime for the foreseeable future.)
And this kind of overdoing things, not backing down, not compromising, not accepting incremental change even if it costs people a lot what seems to be the problem. (Eg. see how some people unironically think that a big collapse is an acceptable way to get to whatever next glorious stage the world will get to. See also how most far-anything ideologies all operate as very simple recipes and try to derive "solutions" - or maybe they are better called proposals - for every problem they see. And this ideological purism is what SP seems to ridicule with contrived situations, that are allegorical - usually to an almost direct correspondence - to the complexities of reality. )
FWIW, South Park’s main impact on me has been to make me constantly wonder what stuff I believe that is actually wrong and ridiculous. It’s raised the bar for when I feel it’s appropriate to force my beliefs on other people, which could look like apathy, I suppose...