It’s probably dangerous to think this is just any one thing. For the vast majority of people it’s likely just a form of normalization. If you’ve been involved with anarchism (or other radical politics) for a while it can be hard to remember just how normalized state repression or even state violence is. Similar to “capitalist realism” people just aren’t used to imagining that things could be differently. Addressing that would involve both arguing that certain things (such as police defaulting to violence) shouldn’t be considered as normal, while also presenting viable alternatives that we could be doing right now. For that last part I think the concept of prefigurative politics plays a big role.
I’d perhaps cautiously suggest that some sort of “learned helplessness” or a variation thereof could also be at play. When you lack agency and bad outcomes seem to happen regardless of what you do, many people will just passively accept the bad outcomes. Here I think people should be shown that through community and agency you can create positive outcomes. Getting people even tangentially involved in any form of direct action has been (in my experience) a good way to make that happen. It is, however, rather challenging to get people to take that step. Telling them about (successful) forms of direct action will be necessary here. Someone I know recently had the realization that direct action can have a much bigger impact than they thought after watching the documentary “To Kill A War Machine.”
Most people also just don’t have the necessary handholds to think about all of this. The necessity of a government or the continued existence of capitalism is taken as a given, the same as gravity or magnetism. A lot of effort gets put into making sure this is the case and most people don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to look into it much deeper.
I should probably take some time to think why my instagram feed is full of non-binary people, shouldn’t I?