The other people are just so bogged down trying to survive that they can't focus on anything else. It's not that they accept this as correct or agree with it. It's just like someone holding a gun to your head and you can't do much else but be shot.
True. It is mentally taxing to think about other things especially if one is in survival mode. So if we want poor people to care about the environment, politics and other stuff, maybe we should have them meet their basic needs first or get past the first level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs first.