‘Selective focus’ is a technique used by skillful photographers to grab the attention of the viewer by opening the lens at its widest and focusing it on the most interesting part of the picture. This way everything else is left ‘out of focus’ and more or less blurry so the viewer concentrates his attention on the clear part it. Nowadays, when most pictures are taken using smartphones or pocket cameras this is no longer possible because the lenses in those cameras are too short for this technique to work. There are computer that can mimic this but it’s not the same thing.

The point is that if we are not really careful our attention can be grabbed by glitzy but insignificant aspects of the reality while the more mundane but infinitely more important ones remain hidden in full view.

Here for instance.

Frankly I don’t care about how they live, that doesn’t concern me. Not in the least.
The problem is that by being so few they induce a lot of fragility in society.
Empires and other totalitarian regimes fail inevitably because they are run by very few people while more democratic countries survive/thrive for longer periods of time because they make better use of whatever human potential they have.
By allowing more people to have their say democracies have a way bigger pool of potential solutions for the problems they have to face while totalitarian regimes have to make do with only the very few solutions envisaged by those who happen to be at the top when a particular problem has to be dealt with.