What matters is how we each make the lifestyle choices to keep our lives sane, happy, productive and relatively safe. There is no guaranteed safety, job, investment, trend or society. There are only millions of individual choices people make to try to make sense out of their lives. That is the nature of an honest search for knowledge. And, as uncomfortable as this conclusion might be to some, the essence of science is uncertainty.
Some people get what they want by cheating or manipulating others.
I don't like it when others do this to me, but it is my responsibility to detect this, confront it and if necessary, to do something about it. So it's up to each of us to make choices we think will make our lives better. Our individual choices of which associations to belong to are a fundamental part of this. We make decisions based on which of these associations we feel will help us meet our goals. Few of us agree on the value and usefulness of any particular association.