No individual snowflake thinks it is responsible for the avalanche. Being aware of your own contribution to the state of the world and being willing to change that are important, even if you account for only a minuscule part of the problem.
Individual awareness is different than individual actions. Awareness can actually scale through individual change due to the non linear way that information spreads, and that can in turn influence policy, which then operates over the whole domain. That's sort of the whole political process in a nutshell.
But individual acts of sacrifice for the common good are not scalable in the same way, due to our inherent aversion to loss.
Usually large scale acts of sacrifice are the result of worse
alternative consequences, like imprisonment or penalties for cheating on taxes.
> But individual acts of sacrifice for the common good are not scalable in the same way, due to our inherent aversion to loss.
I submit that this is a convenient excuse. You have to be the change you want to see in the world. It is easy to say "yeah, I'm making things worse, but its ok because so is everyone else", and thus nothing changes.
More of an observation that people will tend toward their local maximum utility even while global utility is compromised. Sometimes you might discover a way to increase both, but for most ongoing concerns the way to balance the two is via laws and regulation.
