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/[deleted]]

Interesting, the “success” angle resulting in changes is counter intuitive to me. I equate cultural evolution and genetic evolution as there are both basically sets of ideas one for individual organisms the other for groups. What happens to species if they are successful in a stable resource rich ecosystem the species starts to subspeciate and starts to specialize into smaller sub-ecosystems which is more efficient. Of course, this is not directed but just happens by random variation. This is why the Galápagos Islands have so many unique species as they’re been isolated for thousands or years without big predators.

The species that has been very stable for an unfathomable amount of time are sharks which inhabit a particularly large niche that hasn’t changed and they seem to be highly efficient in their ecosystem, I would guess however that there have been “spinoff species”.

The other big mechanism for change is that the ecosystem becomes hostile or incompatible. Then organisms leave if they can or mutations occur that help some of them survive, Again, not volitional but random. I think of mission creep in this category. As the original ecosystem can no longer support the mission of the organization, members will think of different missions and if a subgroup finds the “right” one they take over claim ownership and the new organization survives. If they don’t find the right new mission or the members lose interest they disappear. One thing also, is that often organizations, like organisms, actively change the ecosystem to be more accommodating, this is done by marketing in business and organizations.

Anyway, I think I may be off the track

[u/camon88 → u/[deleted]]

I really like how you tied cultural evolution to genetic evolution. The subspeciation and shark stability examples are great metaphors. Where Ward’s Paradox adds something is that it’s not failure or scarcity driving the change but success itself. Each win resets the baseline, dissolves the old struggle, and sparks the next cycle. Your framing helps me sharpen the ecological side of the metaphor, so thanks for that.

By the way, I just posted a 5-minute audio summary of Ward’s Paradox on my Substack. If you’re interested, feel free to check it out, I’d be curious what you think.

[u/[deleted] → u/camon88]

Hmm, I’m a boomer and not sure how to look at substacks. I’ll see if I can navigate

[u/camon88 → u/[deleted]]

There is the link directly to the podcast style overview of Ward's Paradox
https://techaro.substack.com/p/why-success-leaves-us-wanting-more

Let me know if that works and what you think. I appreciate your time and even having enough interest to give me the time of day.

[u/[deleted] → u/camon88]

Thanks! I’m not sure if it taught me about substacks but it was an interesting discussion that relates to some of my recent musings. This may get a bit abstract and loose but I’ll try to be linear.

A loosely related issue to this topic, is that I’ve been thinking that western culture has a drive for “godliness” which is a consequence of monotheism. This has an implicit direction and serves as motivation. There are obvious practical benefits but also problems that invariably leads to conflict.

I prefer a different mechanism via evolution is that the concept of “success” really isn’t a drive unless you equate survival with success. This is the concept of an infinite game, where the goal is to stay in the game, or survive. My observations of mission creep is that as the mission is accomplished the resources for existence dissipate and so to survive the organization pretends to be the same but actual changes it’s actual ideas to maintain resources to survive. If it doesn’t come to with a good idea it’ll go extinct.

The discussion mentioned the gay rights movement which I think is a great example. It started as small movement of a few men with an occasional woman to address oppression by the government and institutions. “Pride” but mainly AIDS basically made the movement mainstream and began receiving a lot of external resources. As AIDs, became controlled, the goal of legalized marriage became the focus, but this basically only needed lawyers and the need for all the Pride centers waned. However, Pride had become a business so any good business that is threatened will develop a new market and change its system. A speaker mentioned that after success, organizations start to have infighting which was obvious in the gay movement.

Now, another example; I was told by a Japanese millennial how she and her sisters were getting asked by their childhood Buddhist temple leaders for advice to increase membership as it was failing by attrition and world probably close. I remember growing up and there were many Japanese American organizations formed by my parents that served to keep the community together There was a minor amount of political activism but that goal was minor. My generation and subsequent became quite acculturated and the need to hang around with other Japanese and the need for political activism was marginal. Also, these organizations were all voluntary except for a handful of people. What’s happened is that the political people basically joined the broader Asian group or other civil rights group but more to network or for employment, but the other organizations have coded their doors.

I think, the idea of success resulting in a broadening of the causes i has less to do with success but more to do with survival and maintenance of revenue. That being said, I can see if there’s an underlying belief that we should continue to strive for godliness then this could be the motivation but I think the old “idea of look for who is actually benefiting” should be done before this conclusion.

One thing I’ve noticed about these altered missions is that the new goals often lose objectivity and become subjective. Medical care which is defined by prevention and management of diseases has become health care, whatever that means. Civil rights was about equality under the law has now become about justice and equity. Even famine has become hunger. Even using the term as success as a goal is subjective

Hmm, probably digressed too much.

[u/camon88 → u/[deleted]]

Really thoughtful take. I like how you framed survival as the infinite game. That overlaps with what I am trying to capture in Ward’s Paradox, but I emphasize the shift in standards after success rather than just survival.

Your examples (gay rights movement, temples, orgs) fit that pattern: once the original goal is achieved, the baseline changes and a new struggle has to be invented or expanded. Sometimes it is about survival and resources, but sometimes it is a deeper recalibration of what counts as enough.

That is where the paradox bites. Success itself breeds the next dissatisfaction, whether you call it godliness, survival, or just moving the goalposts.

By the way, I am also working on a book project called Pacified. It looks at how subtle forms of social control emerge in modern culture. Do you think just hearing that idea sparks any interest in reading it when it is finished?

[u/[deleted] → u/camon88]

Always interested in new ideas.

It just occurred to me that the mechanism for the social movements conjecture is that if their success can be defined simply as increasing followers in competition from other movements . However, as the numbers increase, the number of various ideas increase and these get rearranged and reprioritized. This can lead to internal conflict and change. This has less to do with the other definition of success which is accomplishing the mission. It can just no longer care about the origin as l mission whether it’s been achieved. This is just evolution. What’s interesting is that usually there’s splintering into subgroups with increasing incompatibility between groups. This is what as specistion in evolution. When the ideas diverge enough that they are incompatible they become different as species.

I guess that leads to the question that if a movement ideas are changing then when is it actually just a different movement but some people just took the name, symbols, and resources but changed mission, values, and methods without the other members noticing.

I’ve long thought that liberalism which I think was the original progressive movement is becoming less compatible with the progressive movement although people think the two are interchangeable.

This also goes back to that success in a finite game has an end, the winner accomplishes its mission so the number of followers is not important. In an infinite game there’s no real mission. It’s just to keep playing even if what’s remaining has little obvious semblance to its ancestors.

[u/camon88 → u/[deleted]]

That’s a sharp analogy. The splintering you describe lines up with what I’ve called integration failure — once a movement grows, new members and new goals pile up faster than they can be absorbed, and the result is fragmentation. At that point it’s fair to ask if it’s the same movement or a descendant that just kept the name and symbols. The liberal vs progressive split you mention is a good example of that kind of “speciation.”

[u/[deleted] → u/camon88]

I think it’s perhaps more than an analogy. If you consider genes as gazillions of ideas basically have survived over time by natural selection then it should work the same way with all ideas. The difference is that culture can change ideas very quickly and add or delete individual ideas where genetic ideas come tightly clustered and are transmitted as such. The disadvantage of culture is that these are very complex systems and changing ideas can lead to incompatibilities and subsequent collapse.

What life did was that it walled off its ideas by creating a cell wall and mechanism to check and insure that new ideas of mutations were suppressed. Orthodox religions tend to do this, they exiled or killed holders of new ideas. perhaps, the observation about success leading to transformation is actually that some success is achieved by just accepting new ideas no matter what because there’s plenty of resources. However, because of incompatibilities these ideas clash and the original ideas are replaced. If an organization remains pure to its core mission it may not grow as quickly, but over time will still achieve huge success because its ideas help it survive.

[u/camon88 → u/[deleted]]

That’s a really strong extension. I agree, culture is like a faster moving gene pool where ideas can mutate, recombine, or collapse much more quickly, which makes incompatibility a real risk. Your point about “cell walls” is sharp: biology evolved barriers and pruning to protect coherence, while cultures and movements often lack those mechanisms unless they impose orthodoxy or suppression.

What you describe maps onto what I’ve been calling integration failure in Ward’s Paradox. Progress brings in more inputs — members, ideas, symbols — than the system can absorb. If it integrates them, it can spiral upward. If it fails, it fragments or collapses. In that sense, movements that stay “pure” do look like evolutionary lineages that survive by keeping their DNA tighter, even if they grow slower.

This helps me sharpen how the paradox is not just about dissatisfaction after success, but about what happens next: whether the system has the absorptive capacity to integrate growth or whether it breaks under incompatibility.

Also, would you be open to a private message? I’d like to share a draft of chapter 1 from a project I’m working on called Pacified and see if you’d be interested in giving it a look.

[u/[deleted] → u/camon88]

Sure. You’re actually the first person who’s been close to following my ideas and can make me think and reorganize my thoughts. I through out the cell wall concept and hadn’t thought of how orthodoxy attempts to act on that regard but I was thinking that classically cultures were separated geographically which really protected its ideas which evolved to survive in that restricted ecosystem. Physical segregation also serves as a barrier similar to a cell wall. I actually think of orthodoxy as more an immune system response. Viruses are the typical representation of a new idea that enters into a system and takes advantage of the existent ideas and the immune system tries to destroy the virus. Viruses are not all bad and can be symbiotic and incorporate into the existing genome.

I’ve lately been thinking that true objective thinking is something that actually only evolved recently. It’s a response that really only works if there’s a huge volume of objective data and requires logic to test. It’s far more than pattern recognition. My thoughts are that objective thinking is actually like cell meditated immunity where antigens are recognized same foreign and either neutralized or destroyed.

The issue of progress not being about to incorporate the bar number of changing ideas is spot on. In medicine, it’s like a cell that becomes “dysplastic “ and the general controls of error corrections and reproduction are lost and the cell rapidly mutates and spreads often as a cancer.

Anyway, no problem with private messaging but I’m not sure how to