The Vicious Dance of Effort and Emptiness
How unrelenting competition sustains civilisation, deepens inequality, and keeps us chasing a mirage we dare not question.
The Chinese have a superb word called neijuan (内卷) that absolutely needs more airplay. It refers to intense competition — typically over a finite resource — that leaves all the participants worse off.
Competition is an innate condition of human existence because we are wringing out finite needs and infinite wants from the fixed rock that is an immutable eighteen hours of daily activity.
Energy is the currency we exchange for all production. That includes the production of energy! However, human beings are rarely solitary creatures. We range in packs, and children and the elderly are central to our tribes. Their unavoidable presence accelerates our competitive drive. Both produce little to nothing, yet consume as much energy as working adults. Consequently, adults must work harder, despite time staying fixed.
That innate deficit defines all humanity. It also explains the callous treatment of children and the elderly in more resource-constrained societies. Fortunately, human ingenuity consistently engineers higher productivity per second. However, that victory is fleeting. Sustaining a growing network of complex production methods requires expending ever-higher levels of energy, and increased production also fuels population growth. By expanding the number of children and the elderly, this growth further intensifies the competitive drive for even higher production.
What I've described is the process of human civilisation: a journey that inevitably creates winners and losers. In this context, losers expend energy equivalent to — or even greater than — winners, yet receive fewer energy tokens (money) in return.
Losers operate on a spectrum. Slaves are losers on the far end of the malignity spectrum. They’re whipped to generate a surplus that keeps the dowager and crown prince wrapped in purple silks. 180 degrees in the other direction, of extreme benevolence, we’ve got an athletic meet — say track and field. Ten sprinters make the finals. They’ve all put in the same effort; they’re all equally hungry for success. They are the 0.0000001% in their field. The gun goes bang; ten seconds later, first place gets a million bucks, cameras and a place in history. Tenth place gets a handshake and eternal anonymity. And that is as fair as humanity can get.
Most losers of human civilisation fall within those extreme examples. Yet, they all share the same label: the poor. This means they receive less money than their effort demands. The poor serve as the measuring stick against which success is stacked; without them, what would being rich even mean?
Poverty is the predator on our tail, driving us to burn more energy and push ever further to avoid its maw. The fear of poverty breeds a selfishness that incentivises crime and innovation in equal measure. Successfully avoiding a reckoning with poverty also fosters a sense of self-satisfaction and indulgence in our capabilities. This attitude makes it all too easy to consider the poor inferior — an attitude society is all too keen to encourage.
The paradox is this: as the rich few push the frontier of wealth farther from the poorer majority, they begin to bear more of the burden of managing finite time. That unstable construct eventually collapses in on itself, restarting the process of wealth (i.e. energy tokens) accumulation and compounding.
Thanks to the technology of writing, we can read how this process has played out over and over and over again — across multiple human societies. We know that expending the energy to ensure broad wealth distribution across society trumps the alternative. Yet, we have not quite figured out a foolproof way to do that which we all know to be good. It is Saint Paul’s lament to the Roman church writ large — I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
The fantasy of a secret war might prove more desirable than a reality betraying our lack of agency over competitive impulses. The race against time makes it more rational for the rich to expend energy on extraplanetary expansion, life extension, infinite labour — or all three at once — than on improving conditions for society's losers. Since losers are inevitable, it is simply common sense to invest your resources in trying not to be one. Surely that is better than trying to fix the unfixable?
Rather than active malice, I see indifference on one end and literal powerlessness on the other. The rich can’t afford to be wrong, and the poor have about the same odds of tilting things in their favour as ants defending their nest from human intruders.
The best thing the poor can do is get richer. The advice seems foul when the odds of success are so low especially since the active participation of all upholds the system. However, the one alternative is death. And few want that so long as the mirage of wealth, success and social approbation looms tantalisingly over the horizon. We will scream; we will rage; we will run the race. Neijuan be damned!