A Recipe for Success)

Whenever people decide to push a social, political, or spiritual movement, they justify the changes that they seek by making certain truth claims. They try to get the world to accept that their core premises are true, or better yet get people to realize that they already agree with those premises. And then, if the premises are true, then the logical response must be to make the proposed social changes.

Every movement, whether its premises are true or not, depends on convincing people of them. Thus, the successful movements are the ones that identify what core premises most immediately lead to their desired outcomes and communicate them in a concise, memorable, and convincing way. When a movement is successful, the premise that was taught then becomes part of the societal fabric. It is now an assumed truth, an axiom for ethical and correct behavior, and future generations will be raised to trust it implicitly.

Unintended Consequences)

But that’s where these movements can start to unravel. The original evangelists of the movement may have only wanted to effect one, specific change, but the rising generations will always take things to their full logical conclusion. They will look at the premise and say, “well if this is true, and it justifies this first step, then surely it justifies the second and the third as well.” And so, they push the matter further than the original evangelists ever intended. Indeed, it is not uncommon for earlier-wave members of a movement to express shock and dismay at what their cause has become in the hands of the later generations. Some of them even express regret for having started the movement at all.

This is a pattern that should give us all pause as we consider the changes that we would wish to see in the world and the methods by which we would achieve them. Every one of us ought to give special consideration to the premises that precede those changes, and what their full potential effect could be, and whether they are even true to begin with.

Tomorrow we’ll look at a specific example of one movement that has gone off the rails, the premise that was indoctrinated in society to make it a success, and why that premise logically led to the unintended consequences we see today.