Danny ChenCompetition harms the systemic solution. Really?
System thinking is irrelevant to competition or cooperation. When people start the system thinking, we look into a topic with holistic views and their interdependencies. Competition is one of the situations where we observe in our society with the capital market mechanism.
As average people, we are unable to compete in everything, anytime, forever in our lives. In fact, it is unnecessary since the things others pursue may not be your current and future focus. However, fair competition in our system encourages meritocracy, which allocates limited resources efficiently and effectively.
Most people have already enjoyed the benefits of meritocracy within our capital market system. However, the problem of meritocracy is seldom discussed. Recently, I’ve watched the interview of Ho Kwon Ping, who talks about the problem. No society is totally meritocratic. For those societies that there’s no perverse intentional influence, people who succeed think they really deserve it, and they don’t.
To succeed in your area with a dynamically complex open system, you need hard work, networking, market opportunities, resource accessibilities, luck, and many more. A professional sportswoman does not succeed on her own; she succeeds because of all the supporting systems behind her that maximize her chance of winning.
The worst part of the meritocracy is those who don’t succeed actually think they deserve it because the system is fair, if you didn’t make it, it’s due to you. So, the insidiousness of meritocracy is that both sides think they deserve it, which is utter rubbish. Both sides can be attributed some degree of praise and/or blame with self-efficacy, but should never be considered as their own success or failure. No matter how hard people work, we always have the majority of losers in any competition. People fail all the time in their lives, but not everyone has a second time.
The downside of meritocracy to our society is creating several future generations that people who succeed are arrogant, whereas people who fail lack self-confidence. The loss of confidence compels people to do nothing with a passive self-blamed society. It is all my fault since everything I did not achieve, I actually deserve it. A sense of having no purpose in life, is passivity. A passive society seems harmonious on the surface, but fragile and mediocre in the essence. Accordingly, our human society needs diverse definitions of success and lifestyle. Diversity is the fundamental imperative of dynamic meritocracy, which strengthens our system's resilience and stability.
And that’s why advocating 1 universal compulsory lifestyle to 8 billion people is dangerous, no matter the initial intention is good or not. At Optivide, we do not encourage 1 individual climate lifestyle. Instead, encouraging stakeholders to take climate actions based on their own preferences, limitations, and circumstances.
