Why Progress Feels Impossible: Ward’s Paradox | 1 of 2
Progress recycles its own enemies
People love to say “progress is inevitable.” But if that were true, why do we keep circling back to the same fights in shinier packaging? Civil rights, climate, healthcare, censorship — we patch, we march, we legislate. Then five years later, we’re back in the ditch with a fresh slogan slapped on the wall.
History isn’t a ladder. It’s a treadmill.
And here’s the paradox: the very movements built to fix oppression often end up powered by oppression. Not by eliminating it, but by redefining it so there’s always more to fight. I call this Ward’s Paradox: progress feels impossible because abstract oppression becomes renewable fuel.
Quick note before the torches come out: this isn’t saying the struggles are fake, or that people should “stop complaining.” Real injustices exist. What I’m pointing out is the structural twist: even as specific wrongs are reduced, the concept of wrong grows wider. That’s how movements sustain themselves.
Civil Rights vs. Systemic Racism
Civil rights secured voting rights and desegregation. Landmark victories. But six decades later, the focus isn’t just on laws; it’s on systemic bias, microaggressions, subconscious prejudice. Oppression didn’t vanish. The definition expanded.
This doesn’t mean nothing improved. It means the framework for what counts as injustice shifted from the concrete to the abstract, and once that shift happens, the “work” can never be done.
Religion
Early Christianity promised liberation for the marginalized in Rome. Centuries later it was the engine of crusades and inquisitions. Today, many churches claim persecution while sitting in majority culture.
Oppression shifts shape, but never disappears. It becomes the sustaining narrative.
This isn’t hypocrisy so much as survival logic. A religion that stops feeling embattled eventually stops feeling alive.
DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)
Corporate DEI exists to dismantle barriers. But the logic of the system depends on the problem never being “solved.” The definitions of bias keep expanding: hiring practices, language audits, cultural representation. Each layer feeds the sense of ongoing lack.
Critics call this a grift. Defenders call it vigilance. Either way, the cycle keeps turning.
Progress feels impossible not because nothing changes, but because change itself fuels the cycle.
Ward’s Paradox: abstract oppression is a renewable fuel.
The treadmill isn’t proof that struggles are fake. It is proof that the way we frame struggles ensures they never finish. Movements need enemies to survive, so they make the definition of the enemy endlessly expandable.
Which raises the bigger question: if oppression keeps getting recycled, what is the machine that keeps us running in circles?
That is where Part 2 comes in.