How Being Indifferent Destroys Progress

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who  declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes  responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now  spilled in the world.  Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute,  a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life.  Whether you  live or die is an absolute.  Whether you have a piece of bread or not,  is an absolute.  Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a  looter's stomach, is an absolute.

There are two sides to every  issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is  always evil.  The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth,  if only by accepting the responsibility of choice.  But the man in the  middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no  choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any  battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on  his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the  robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the  thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway.  In any compromise  between food and poison, it is only death that can win.  In any  compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.  In  that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the  compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”   ―     Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

I stumbled across this passage from Ayn Rand and immediately had a flash-back to something I had read about in Martin Luther King Jr.'s biography.

In the heat of the civil rights movement, MLK realized that the road-block for civil rights was not from the White Citizens Council or the Ku Klux Klan, but "the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice". He emphasizes by saying, "A shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute understanding from people of ill will".

But the question is -- why was MLK right then, and why would he still be right about it now?

In other words, why do the majority (and not the minority) of people remain indifferent, decide not to get involved, or hope to maintain status quo?