"'Mental health' programs, 'intervention' techniques, psychotherapy and so forth are ostensibly designed to benefit individuals, but in practice they usually serve as methods for inducing individuals to think and behave as the system requires."
-- The Unabomber Manifesto; Paragraph 148
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I just watched a news report about how various "concerned" groups want to reduce the amount of underage drinking in the U.S. One self-proclaimed "intervention" group called "TIPS," not satisfied with the success of anti-drinking ads they fought for earlier, now wants a new campaign to "change behavior" among teens. The first thing that came to my mind was the above paragraph from the Unabomber Manifesto.
Like the typical leftist that the Unabomber warns about in his essay, they are not satisfied with the goals they have already achieved. Once a previous goal has been achieved, they adopt and fight for some new goal. Even if TIPS managed to eliminate teen drinking completely, they would immediately adopt a new goal, possibly completely unrelated to alcohol, perhaps seat belts, spitting on the sidewalk, etc. I need only to point to MADD (which I suspect pulls TIPS' strings) as an example of this. MADD has in recent years adopted several non-alcohol platforms, one of which indeed turns out to be implementation of mandatory seat belt laws and strict enforcement of them. Faced with a limit of how much anti-alcohol legislation they can impose on the public, they expand their nosiness far beyond what they originally stood for. In this way they can keep themselves busy correcting "social evils" and make themselves feel righteous about it.