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SforSingularity comments on Reason as memetic immune disorder - Less Wrong
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Many people enjoy reading books and watching films where the lead characters form a small group, pitted against all the odds to try to save the world. Many people - secular people - pay lip-service to the idea that every person in the world is equally important, and that we should value the life of an African peasant farmer as equal to our own.
It seems, however, that most people don't actually take these notions seriously, because their actions seem to have little to do with such beliefs.
One day, a bunch of nerds got together and started a project called the Singularity Institute, and they actually took seriously the notion that they should try to save the world if it really was threatened, and that the lives of others should be assigned equal weigh to their own. Almost everyone else though they were really weird when they started to try to act on these beliefs.
See, e.g. Eliezer writing in 2000:
"There is no abused child, no oppressed peasant, no starving beggar, no crack-addicted infant, nocancer patient, literally no one that I cannot look squarely in the eye. I'm working to save everybody, heal the planet, solve all the problems of the world."