Self-satisfaction may result in failure to cope with problems of various kinds. People who are in a fortunate position tend to attribute virtue to what makes them content. So complacency reinforces social attitudes against change, and may justify social inequalities and injustice by moralism or cynicism. It aggravates social conflict and may encourage violence as an only recourse.
Prime Minister Chamberlain's satisfaction after the Munich Accords with Chancellor Hitler was a notable example of one form of complacency. Victorian attitudes in the UK towards the British Empire were also complacent. There was complacency after the founding of the United Nations Organization, as there had been after that of the League of Nations; and there is complacency among the industrialized nations that they are doing all they can for development in the Third World.
Collective complacency has become rarer in an increasingly turbulent world, where governments and organizations of all kinds are faced with problems of a nature and scale never before known.