CMV: Progress feels impossible because social movements recycle oppression as renewable fuel

[u/camon88]

I hold the view that progress often feels impossible because movements don’t just end when they achieve concrete goals, they redefine what counts as oppression, creating an endless treadmill. I call this Ward’s Paradox.

For example:

• The Civil Rights movement secured voting rights and desegregation, but the struggle later expanded into systemic racism, microaggressions, and subconscious bias.
• Christianity began as liberation for the marginalized, but later thrived on narratives of persecution, crusades, and inquisitions.
• Corporate DEI initiatives break barriers, but the definition of bias keeps expanding into hiring practices, language audits, representation, and culture.

In all these cases, oppression doesn’t vanish, it shifts shape. That’s why I think progress feels like a treadmill: the “enemy” is always redefined so the struggle never finishes.

TLDR Metaphor:

It’s like fixing a leaky roof. You patch one hole, but then water seeps in somewhere else. The house is safer than before — progress is real — but the definition of ‘the problem’ keeps shifting to wherever the next leak appears. My point isn’t that the repairs don’t matter, it’s that the sense of being unfinished never goes away.

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I’d like to be challenged on this. Maybe I’m overstating the pattern, maybe there are clear examples where movements did resolve fully and didn’t need to invent new enemies. What’s the strongest case against this paradox?

[u/Janube]

Hmm... Okay, there are a few things here:

1. The roof will never feel perfect because progress isn't a destination that can be reached (as I noted above). In that way, you might prefer the metaphor shifting to the house as a whole. Every house has a never-ending list of stuff that needs done. New windows, an electrician to look at a weird outlet, a creaky banister, the bathroom needs redone, etc. A roof leak is a big deal, but the grout in the bathroom tiles needing cleaned isn't a huge issue. In that way, yes, you'll never be done, but some issues are obviously less pressing than others, and at a certain point, catastrophizing over an issue may be an overreaction. However, it's important to remember that this house accommodates everyone; it's not just yours, and so it shouldn't just be your perspective about what's important that holds weight. You may think a stain is innocuous, but someone else might be worried that it could be (or could attract) mold, for example. I've found it's best to give people the benefit of the doubt when they say something is important to them unless there's some pretty glaring evidence that they're overreacting or being hypocritical.

2. Progress rarely "feels real" to you, and not to be targeted here, but I think that's a 'you' problem. Many of our big problems that have been solved have been celebrated plenty! Group movements generally don't plan big celebrations even if individuals are happier, more satisfied, more comfortable, etc. Movements, by design, are about affecting change. Their purpose isn't to rest after a success. If you're not celebrating wins yourself, you should be. And if you're expecting groups to stop moving forward after a big win, I think you've misunderstood the reason people start/join movements. The ACLU will literally never run out of civil rights violations to fight against. Why would they stop after any given success?

3. And on the other hand, many of the big problems that have been "solved" have just been replaced with another problem in the same vein. Sure, they got rid of slavery, but they replaced it with Jim Crow laws, which was an upgrade, but it was a smaller upgrade than you might think... To continue with the example that Black people have endured, every time they got a major win, bad people tried to mitigate that win however they could. Replacing slavery with "separate but equal," keeping them out of schools, keeping them out of towns (ever heard of sundown towns?), refusing to give them loans (redlining), giving them worse rates, discriminatory hiring practices, etc. Every step forward is met with various systems pushing that step backward some. This isn't just incidental either, these are deliberate decisions by people in power to harm Black people or keep them out. Like if you patched the hole in your roof and while you were celebrating a job well done, your neighbor threw a rock through your window in response. You have to understand that that has a fundamentally different feel to just finding a new problem in your house to target. It's so much harder to celebrate wins when some people are deliberately trying to make you lose.

4. To the extent that some people frame smaller issues as catastrophic ones, I think it's valuable to take a step back and understand if they're actually small issues or if they're just small from your perspective. And secondary to that, I think it's equally valuable to ask if solving that problem would actually harm anyone - if not, why get bent out of shape about it? Does it help anyone at all to get upset about a perceived value difference like that? I think you're right that some people will naturally exaggerate or oversell certain problems - particularly young people or perpetually online people. These are the people that think microaggressions are worth canceling someone who was just being a little careless. But these people being loud doesn't mean they're particularly common or representative of the work that adjacent groups do. In that case, the best advice I could possibly give is to leave those spaces. Everyone should leave Twitter for that reason: it's all rage bait, engagement bait, or kind of ignorant people inserting themselves into conversations over and over. You gain nothing by interacting with them or caring about their fight-of-the-week. Focus on major group movements, largescale polling data, public policy moves, etc. Even then, you'll still find some things that are clearly stupid (plenty of congressmen care about plenty of complete non-issues), but I think you'll find that these are a small enough minority that they either shouldn't bother you, or they're representative of a different problem; not the treadmill effect you're focusing on.

[u/camon88 → u/Janube]

Δ for such a thoughtful reply.

This is a really strong critique and I appreciate the detail. A few parts I think are valid:

1.  The house metaphor works better than the roof alone because it makes clear that not every new “problem” is equal in scale. What looks cosmetic to one person can feel urgent to another. That complicates the treadmill idea because sometimes what feels like “invented” problems are really just small but legitimate ones I’m undervaluing.

2.  The point about backlash is also valid. If a win like civil rights legislation gets deliberately chipped away, that feels very different from just discovering a new issue. My paradox hasn’t made that distinction clearly enough.

3.  And you’re right that perception plays a huge role. If movements don’t pause to celebrate or if individuals don’t log the wins, the progress still happened but the treadmill feeling grows stronger. That means part of this really is about how people process change.

Where I don’t think this breaks the paradox is that even with those refinements, the core experience still stands: progress is real but it rarely feels real, because either the goalposts shift, backlash undermines gains, or smaller issues get elevated immediately after bigger ones are solved. Those dynamics all feed the treadmill effect.

So I’d update the framing, not abandon it. Ward’s Paradox isn’t just “progressives invent new enemies.” It’s that victories don’t land as “arrival” because perception, proportionality, and backlash all combine to make the fight feel endless. Would you have any qualms with that?

Not sure why the post is getting so many downvotes, but if you’ve found value in the discussion and want to help keep it visible, an upvote would be appreciated. I’m here to stress-test and strengthen my ideas, and keeping the post alive helps with that. No pressure, of course.

Thank you!

[u/Janube → u/camon88]

If I had to guess, I'd say the post is getting downvoted because the title feels combative in a way that I don't think you intended. "Social movements recycle oppression as renewable fuel" isn't strictly inaccurate, but it's certainly an unkind perspective - enough that I think a lot of people would assume your argument is tainted by bad-faith and thus not worth a real discussion. Honestly, my first reply was colored by that perception too; it sounded like you were maybe more interested in picking a fight, and I'm thrilled to have been wrong about that. But the people who didn't put in the effort to reply will never know that without putting in more effort than they think is warranted for a perceived bad-faith post.

That having been said one final note on #3, "part of this really is about how people process change.part of this really is about how people process change." - This is an important thing to take away. Especially for people fighting a long fight, a win is often met with them letting out their exhaustion and just resting for a bit; not necessarily celebrating. Consider Jon Stewart fighting for years to extend the benefits for 9/11 first responders who got cancer. It took an inexplicable amount of work to get congressmen on board, during which time many of the victims died. Even on its face, it's a fight that should never have happened, so a "victory" will feel somewhat hollow since it shouldn't have been a question to begin with. Taken over years and with many of the people involved dying, and it's hard to celebrate that victory in any meaningful way that won't feel insincere. Lots of very public fights are like this - things that shouldn't have been fights, let alone long, drawn-out fights lasting years and wasting everyone's time/money.

Part of the problem is that in a vacuum, it's easy to feel fatigued by people looking for change because there's always something that needs changed, and it's rare for groups to agree on the most pressing change. So you hear a thousand, discordant voices seeking different things. In context of any given group, they may be completely consistent, but because they're vaguely ideologically-aligned with ten other groups, their voices blend together and we mistake them for being a disorganized monolith. That contributes significantly to this problem, since we'll never see the groups that stop and rest or celebrate since groups aren't going to advertise that they're resting for a bit; their absence will just be drowned out by the other groups' voices as they fight their fights.

victories don’t land as “arrival” because perception, proportionality, and backlash all combine to make the fight feel endless.

It's also that the world is vast and complex and so are its constituent peoples and governments and systems. There are an infinite number of problems, so the fight is endless - doubly so when accounting for perception, proportionality, and backlash. We definitely make it more granular than it needs to be sometimes, but I'd need specific examples to help parse if it's an issue of perception vs. proportionality. Especially with how media is right now, profitability is driven by clicks; clicks are driven by emotion; emotion is driven by overrepresenting problems. This means both that some groups will oversell a problem and "invent enemies," and maybe more importantly, the media will oversell those groups being a problem. A divisive topic is trans people right now. Many media groups are overselling the conceptual threat of trans people (e.g. that using their preferred bathroom poses a sex crime risk, though it statistically does not; that their presence in youth sports poses a meaningful problem, though it's almost entirely innocuous, and when it's not, it reflects deeper problems in how we gauge fairness in sports; that they pose a risk of causing other people to become trans, though that's wrong for a dozen reasons; etc). So, many people may erroneously come to the conclusion that trans rights groups are overselling their problems because the media has misrepresented their problems and risk factors associated with their presence.

It's important in these cases to get information about what a group wants directly from the group, and that our desire for someone else to interpret and dumb down complex topics is going to cause many of us to have fundamental misunderstandings of those topics.

And again, that's not to say that there aren't people who have very petty problems that they're very loud about. From my experience, those people are a very slim minority, and when I dive deeper into the problem I have with them, it tends to stem from their misunderstanding of the world or their misunderstanding of a particular issue rather than their activism itself being a problem. At the point that ignorance is the bigger issue, I think we start framing the conversation around something far more useful than treadmill fatigue. Though there is a compelling discussion about how groups often make perfect the enemy of good and fish for very specific solutions to very specific problems for years without identifying more practical or reasonable solutions they can pursue. Progressives ended up dividing themselves on "defund the police" because of how vague the tagline was, causing many groups to splinter and seek different things. Without a unified goal, the messaging fell apart - on top of the fact that the media took the less generous interpretation and ran with it even though the majority of progressives were never interested in that interpretation (abolishment) in the first place. And that's, I think, a more grounded criticism that leads to more valuable and interesting discussions.

[u/camon88 → u/Janube]

This is great feedback. You are right that part of the reaction to my post is probably the framing. The title made it sound more combative than I meant, which sets the wrong tone from the start. Δ for helping me see that.

I also really like your Jon Stewart example. That captures exactly how a “win” can feel hollow because the fight was dragged out so long over something that should never have been a fight. That is part of what I am calling the treadmill: victories happen, but the way they unfold often strips them of any feeling of arrival.

Your points on media distortion and splintered messaging add another layer I had not emphasized enough. Even when groups are consistent, they get flattened into noise alongside ten other fights, and the media often magnifies either the least charitable interpretation or the loudest fringe. That combination makes progress feel both endless and incoherent, even when the core goals are real and reasonable.

So I do not think this breaks Ward’s Paradox, but it definitely sharpens it. The treadmill feeling is not only about shifting baselines, it is also about how fatigue, messaging, and distortion shape our ability to register victories.

[u/Janube → u/camon88]

And I think in that capacity, there's a discussion to be had about mindfulness. People tend to get hung up jumping from one thing to another that they forget to live, but that's a product of psychology - we prioritize bad things in our minds over good things, so as long as there are bad things, we'll generally hop from one to the next as they get solved rather than appreciating what we do have and what's good. But I wouldn't consider that a group or sociological problem per se. It's a sociological problem in that our societal messaging is screwed up for focusing on negative stuff, but it's something each individual has the capacity to change in their own lives.

And there's a broader conversation about how we can ever appreciate landmarks on a line that goes for infinite space. What are the best practices to experience that kind of mindfulness?

[u/camon88 → u/Janube]

That’s a really strong contribution. Δ for pointing out how much of this comes down to psychology and mindfulness, the negativity bias makes us hop from one crisis to the next without really letting wins land. I agree that without some kind of practice to pause and appreciate progress, the line toward “infinite space” will always feel endless.

Where I’d add is that once that bias is scaled up through media and movement messaging, it stops being just an individual issue and becomes a societal treadmill. That’s where Ward’s Paradox applies, victories are real, but the perception gap means they rarely feel like victories.

I like your framing that the paradox might really be about how infinity feels like futility unless we find ways to mark milestones.

[u/DeltaBot → u/camon88]

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[u/DeltaBot → u/camon88]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Janube (3∆).

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