“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” – Eric Hoffer
Yup. That has certainly been my experience over my lifetime. Consider civil rights. It was wrong on many levels for the government to force its citizens to discriminate on the basis of skin color. Most of the ills of that were solved when the laws were passed prohibiting Jim Crow laws. After a generation or two, the problem should be solved. Yet a whole industry arose exploiting the business opportunities offered by civil rights legislation, and today “community organizing” is a racket.
Or another example — driving while intoxicated. Back in the 1960s, drunk driving was no biggie. How lax were the drunk driving laws? Despite being stopped for driving while intoxicated in the 1970s, George W. Bush was not arrested. He was issued a traffic ticket, something on the order of what you would receive for running a red light or a stop sign. It was not taken seriously, and it created a real problem. Then Mothers Against Drunk Driving came along. By the 1990s their efforts had fixed most of the problem. DWI (or DUI) had become a serious crime, and societal attitudes had shifted too — to the point that by 2000 most people had forgotten how casually it had been treated 24 years earlier.
But, having had their cause triumph did MADD declare victory and go away? Nope. They kept doubling down, trying to drive down the definition of intoxication to the point where someone drinking a milkshake flavored with vanilla extract at lunch could be found to be “intoxicated” at one place I worked between 2002 and 2011. The whole anti-intoxication cause had devolved to a racket.
Eventually, all causes, if successful, become rackets — even the ones you favor. Tennyson said it best in Morte d’Arthur:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Note the word good.
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