Movements

I’ve recently been thinking about movements. Joining (or starting) a movement can be a half decent answer to the ‘what difference can one person make in the world?’ question. If you’re part of something bigger, hopefully you can have a big effect. But I’ve seen a couple of issues with movements:

• When a group of people do things in an organised way, there’s a tendency for people’s consciences to evaporate. If you’re part of a crowd, you don’t feel as responsible anymore. It’s someone else’s job to decide whether something is right or wrong. Diffusion of Responsibility.
• Organisations can be incredibly inefficent. Sometimes they can be efficent, but the big ones often suffer a lot of inefficency due to bureaucracy, maintaining the group. Inefficency.
• In a movement or organisation there is often pressure to maintain the status quo. You do things because that’s how things are done, and whatever you do, you don’t directly go against the grain. Rebels are quickly dealt with. Group pressure.
• Despite this pressure, its inevitable that a movement will diverge from it’s original goal, and eventually turn into something else. Small changes happen, and accumulate, such that eventually the group is going in a tangent to the original direction.
  Unfortunately, the small changes in direction aren’t going to follow what is good, or ethical, in fact, it isn’t going to be random. Instead, it’s going to follow the laws of evolution. The characteristics of a movement - the memes - that survive are going to be the ones that make the movement more likely to survive and spread (which explains group pressure). And this has a tendency towards the manipulitive, and the deceptive (for example, pyramid schemes and cults). Group Mutation and Evolution.

So.
This leaves me thinking. If I started a movement that was dedicated to only the most pure and noble goals, it would only be a matter of time before the group diverged from it’s original purpose, before entropy consumed it. So would there be any point in starting something?

Also.
If I were to join a movement, chances are it’s not actually fulfilling it’s original purpose (and let’s face it, the original purpose is not always good), and the movement is probably wasting a lot of the energy that’s put into it, surely I’d be better off on my own?

Your thoughts?