Politics, politicians, academicians, thinkers, economists, businessmen, merchants, etc. are the ones who we should thank for living a life very different from the life of the middle ages.
The are the ones who invented, changed and improved things. Without them we would still have to till the land with our hands, and do physical work for 20 hours a day, eat rubbish, live maximum of 35 years, enjoy oppression and arbitrary rule of the authorities. But the things are different nowadays, and this is only in virtue of the activities of the initiative people.
Political apathy and indifference only hindered progress and acquisition of freedom. You have only two ways of arguments to prove me wrong: a) state that the way we live nowadays is the same to or worse than how we lived say 400 years ago or b) that it was not the people and the currents I mentioned who changed the situation but some one else was responsible for that (apolitical people, extraterrestrials or forest spirits for instance). None of the two options are plausible.
Where would we be today without the people like Voltaire, Bentham, Adam Smith, John Mill, Lincoln, Churchill, Martin Luther King, Reagan, Thatcher, etc.?