Unintended consequences (defined here pedantically as “results of an action or decision that were not part of the actor or decider’s intended effect”) are a constant in life; mostly due to the inability of human beings to see things from God’s perspective (really, we need to get on His level). And also something something butterflies, but mostly the first thing.
A related but not identical phenomenon can be called “unintended” consequences.
The intended consequence of Fidel Castro’s decision to put Che Guevara in charge of economic development in Cuba was to ensure the Cuban economy was remade in the Communist image. It didn’t have any positive consequences for the population – one decision he made I remember reading about was demolishing a million dollar fruit orchard in order to build a public soccer park, which ultimately saw almost no use at all. However, when you understand that Communists really don’t want any centers of wealth that aren’t under their exclusive control (regardless of how many people starve as a result), that consequences of that decision don’t seem so “unintentional”.
Closer to home, allowing illegal aliens to obtain driver’s and professional licenses is loudly proclaimed to be entirely about social justice – treating these nice ‘undocumented’ people as if their lawbreaking status didn’t matter (you’ll notice a common pattern with regards to the treatment of criminals) because obviously they’re uniformly wonderful people who came here to escape the unfortunate circumstances of the shitho- I mean the wonderful country they came from that has been negatively affected by American imperialism. Of course, it has a transparent ‘unintended’ purpose: increasing the social and political costs to deport them. “Oh, you can’t deport this strong, independent transperson – xir is a pillar of the local economy!” States cannot be allowed to aid in the enforcement of immigration policy in any way – as Az. governor Jan Brewer discovered in 2010 – but they can help tip the balance in favor of amnesty in any number of ways, and New Jersey is only the most recent example.
What about gun control? Well, common gun control proposals include registration requirements, increasing fees for transfer and licenses, and (a perennial favorite) massive insurance policies. Obviously no one could disagree that the intended purpose of all this is to reduce the appalling homicide rate in the US. I mean, did you know that just 13%… sorry, my editor is telling me I cannot finish that sentence without getting cancelled. Let’s try again: the ‘unintended’ consequence is ensuring that firearm ownership is financially out of reach for the unidentified demographic Mike Bloomberg told us he wanted to disarm in February of 2015.
Side note: While I appreciate Bloomberg’s honesty – genuinely, it was the thing I liked most about his abortive candidacy for President – I’m not impressed by the argument that a Constitutionally-protected right should be curtailed because some people abuse it.
See Also : Deep Thoughts with KITDAFBS
A journalist asking the owner of a local pizzeria in Indiana whether they’d cater a gay wedding the day after the Obergfell ruling – and running the story nationally? Obviously the journalist didn’t have the intent of rousing a mob to enforce the new social paradigm against these people. Obviously there wasn’t an intent to cow opponents of gay marriage with threats of mob violence. It was just a public interest story – don’t ask why anyone would ever contract a pizzeria to cater a wedding, gay or not – and that journalist was totally blindsided by the family getting death and arson threats.
And let’s not get started on bakers in Colorado.
If you haven’t guessed by now, what we’re talking about here, at least at the political level, is consequences that are quite deliberately intended, even if the individuals seeking them deny it. Not quite “bait and switch”, not quite “preference falsification” – hell, not quite “dog whistle” – we all know this phenomenon, even if we don’t always recognize it.
Most teenagers will learn this one early on: really don’t like doing a particular chore? Do a consistently bad job at it and their parents will (all going well) get so exasperated with their poor performance that they stop asking them to do it.
However…
It’s been said many times that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Every advance creates an opening, every victory sows the seeds of a future defeat. Try to catch two rabbits at the same time and you’ll end up with neither. Ultimately what this means is that you cannot actually pursue the overt goals of your actions and your covert goals at the same time – even if they aren’t actively fighting each other – if there is any kind of opposition.
At the small scale, clever parents who see what their child is doing can retaliate in kind – “Oh, you need that shirt/dress clean by tomorrow? Sorry, I don’t have time to do laundry tonight; maybe you can figure out how to use the washing machine properly”.
Politically, the most obvious example is the 2016 election. The “unintended” effect of the prevailing narrative, pushed by basically every media outlet ad nauseam, of Hillary’s impending victory was supposed to be demoralizing Trump supporters into staying home. Obviously Hillary was going to win, so it was on the opposition to just learn how to accept that. Almost everything Hillary’s campaign engaged in for the final weeks of the campaign was intended to do just that, in fact.
I myself went to bed on November 8th 2016 expecting that I’d wake up to find she’d won. Imagine my shock the next morning, seeing the gleeful text message from my uncle that read “We’re making America great again!”
They discovered, to their horror, the truth of Sun Tzu’s lesson that knowing neither yourself – there were deep, systemic problems in Hillary’s candidacy that consistently went unaddressed and unacknowledged by her campaign and the media, not the least which were her own character flaws – nor the enemy – there were deep, systemic strengths to Trump’s candidacy that also were consistently unaccounted for, which ironically included things they saw as his character flaws – means you will succumb in every battle.
And finally, to address the elephant in the political arena, sometimes the overt goal is the real goal and the alleged covert goal is only projection.
That’s the Voter ID issue in a nutshell. The “Republicans are trying to suppress the black vote!” requires a certain… ironic corollary.
