Success Quote by Craig Bruce

The line skewers a familiar paradox of social change: movements often fight the tools most likely to get them what they want. Grand moral narratives favor purity, clarity, and visible villains, while real solutions are usually technical, incremental, and ideologically awkward. When a policy instrument looks impure or aligns with the wrong tribe, it can become a target even if the evidence says it works.

Climate politics offers a vivid case. Carbon pricing, nuclear power, and dense housing near transit have strong empirical support for reducing emissions at scale, yet they often face fierce opposition from activists who prefer bans, divestment campaigns, or sweeping declarations. The pattern recurs elsewhere. Housing advocates seek affordability but sometimes resist upzoning, which increases supply and lowers prices over time. Labor advocates demand higher incomes but may oppose reforms that expand labor-market entry or allow flexible arrangements that many workers value. The common thread is a discomfort with solutions that spread benefits diffusely, arrive gradually, or draw on markets, technocracy, or compromise.

Why it happens is partly psychological and partly organizational. Movements need identity, urgency, and cohesion. Symbolic battles, absolutist demands, and clear villains mobilize people and maintain coalitions. Boring but effective fixes do not energize donors or crowds. A tool that actually works can also dissolve a movement’s purpose, threatening its funding and status. Media incentives amplify this, rewarding confrontation over policy detail.

The jab is not a blanket dismissal of activism. Many breakthroughs, from civil rights to clean water to safer workplaces, owe everything to sustained public pressure. The point is a caution: if the goal is tangible improvement, tactics must bend toward credible, scalable evidence rather than ideological aesthetics. That often means accepting messy hybrids, trade-offs, and partial wins. Moral energy is powerful; coupled with empiricism and a tolerance for the unglamorous, it is far more likely to deliver the world activists say they want.