Exceptions Become the Rule

Every time we pretend individual cases exist in isolation, we quietly reshape reality—and then act surprised when the outcomes spiral.

Man is a social animal, and each of us lives inside systems that are larger than we are.

Those systems depend on individuals in the aggregate, but they are not dependent on any specific, particular individual. The system we call the United States of America has existed continuously since 1776, long before any of us arrived. At any given moment, you can say America is made up of its current citizens, but that only tells part of the story. The country also has a continuity and identity that exists independent of any one generation.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post I called The Lie of Small Numbers about men pretending to be women so they can invade the spaces reserved for biological women, namely in sports, and how some downplay or dismiss the issue because “it is just a small few” who participate. I proposed that it isn’t not the handful of “transgender” athletes that matter—it’s the wholesale rewriting of reality required to include them.

Many years ago, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal wrote that the cognitive error made by the “it’s only a few” crowd is their refusal to grapple with unintended consequences. They narrow their focus down to the individual case and stop there, as if isolated decisions occur in a vacuum. They don’t.

What they miss, consistently, is the “knock-on” systemic effect, and that is a pretty big miss because the exceptions for the few become the rule for all.

There is an inordinate focus on the individual and a stubborn unwillingness to consider how repeated individual choices aggregate into cultural norms and structural outcomes. You see this pattern on the left and, in a different form, on the libertarian right.

I see the same tactics in the “transgenders in sports” debate as we saw in both the abortion and same sex union issues.

For decades, the left defended abortion not merely as a tragic necessity, but by reframing the fetus as a kind of illness, something akin to a medical condition for which “treatment” was required. From that perspective, denying abortion “to a small number” became cruelty. What they refused to consider was the broader systemic effect.

When you detach sex from its natural consequence, reproduction, combined with dehumanizing a fetus, you don’t just resolve individual cases, you reshape behavior. You create incentives, subtle at first and then pervasive, that recast sex as purely recreational and the potential outcome a simple medical problem, once that shift takes hold, the demand for abortion on demand doesn’t diminish, it expands.

The same argument of “it is a small minority” from people looking for the state to sanction the institution of marriage to include same-sex unions did redefine marriage for every couple, even opening the door to all sorts of unions. One could also make the argument that marriage lost a degree of legitimacy in the process.

The data also supports programs like Aid For Dependent Children (AFDC), designed to help support for children of poor mothers, increase births in the communities least capable of financially supporting a child because every child is a funding stream.

It is clear the same errors exist in everything from immigration policy to welfare benefits. Caveats in programs like the ridiculous use of a phone app to file for asylum or unaudited provisions to help autistic children in Minnesota had disastrous aftereffects. We can argue whether these were intentional or oversights, but they were sold as being beneficial and only worsened the problems they were alleged to fix.

The mistake is simply this: confusing individual solutions with systemic outcomes almost always ends in the opposite of what was intended. What works in a single case does not necessarily scale without consequence and when you ignore that reality, you don’t eliminate problems, you often multiply them.