Every time a great crisis impends — whether the War on Terror, Climate Change — whatever it may be, it provides an opportunity to ask for a blank check from society to pursue its goals. In a bureaucracy people are always on the lookout for sources of legitimacy to augment their power.

It often pays to be stingy when granting new charters of power. If Robert Mugabe, for example, had ridden into the sunset a dozen years ago, history might have remembered him more kindly. But things are often like that: an impulse which may have been rooted in idealism often ends being about money. And while I don’t doubt that there are legitimate reasons to be concerned over pollution, deforestation, etc. before the end we may find environmentalism as discredited as Communism because its adherents can’t keep grasping for ever more power. Communism was advertised as a project to end the exploitation of man by man and turned out to be just the opposite, as Ronald Reagan once observed. Very, very soon after it began Bolshevism started to be about itself. By the end, the old aristocracy returned as the nomenklatura.

You’ll observe that nearly all guerilla movements begin with near-religious messianism and finish up as criminal syndicates. Take almost any group you like. The NPA, Abu Sayyaf, IRA, FARC. They come to the same end. Maybe the reason that both physical and social organisms have life cycles is to purge bad information. Great enterprises based on eternal bureaucracies almost always equal grief.