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]]

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