Judging a cause by its supporters

We should be able to judge the quality of a cause, regardless who is supporting it. In fact, the best way to discredit a good cause is to find one dodgy guy/company supporting it. There's a whole PR tactic centered around it.

The thing is like this: we live in a world of corporations and governments and other forces we may not be aware of, ruling covertly and influencing the events. They have interests. Their interests are theirs, and that is what they will be following.

As already pointed out in this post, despite what they say, governments are not really preoccupied with your well-being. They are preoccupied with getting re-elected and maintaining an equilibrium with the corporations and rich people that sponsor them. Those corporations and rich people also have their own interests that are not yours.

The public image of a company/public figure is a PR thing - when the public image is bad it means the PR did a bad job. The fact that the public image is good does not necessarily mean that the person/company is guided by positive interests. It simply means they didn't get caught while being selfish, that's all. Ethics is a grey territory and you can be sure that people and companies that work with a lot of money/power will always be sketchy around the details about how they came to do that.

Some are fairer and better than others. But there's one thing they all have in common: they all follow their own interests.Not yours. And that includes your government and elected officials.

When you have an interest - say, a new education law that would allow poorer kids access into better schools - there will be forces that support it and forces that go against it. Each of them will do it for their own reasons, good or bad. What you have to do is study the situation, establish which side suits you better and pick it. In both cases you will have a (more or less obvious) devil on your side. Pay attention to it, make sure you don't get screwed, but don't reject a cause that suits your interests because of it.

You can be absolutely sure that the other side has a devil in its corner too. It just may be better at covering its tracks, but it's still there. You're the only one who knows and always follows your interest. The rest are just temporary allies/enemies, depending on the case.