The danger of involution

The word involution has become increasingly popular in China according to this article (via Tanner Greer). But what does it mean? From the article:

Involution can be understood as the opposite of evolution. The Chinese word, neijuan, is made up of the characters for ‘inside’ and ‘rolling,’ and is more intuitively understood as something that spirals in on itself, a process that traps participants who know they won’t benefit from it.

Everyone in China has the same goals: Earn more money, buy a home of more than 100 square meters, own a car, start a family, and so on. This route is very well marked, and everyone is highly integrated. People are all fighting for the same things within this market.

This kind of monoculture is inimical to the spirit of Metasophism, where we would want people and groups to pursue different paths in order to maximise the probability that we find at least one path towards realising the Imperative.

But involution also results in excessive consumption of resources as competition is focussed on the material. Inducing people to compete on producing poetry or music (not that these are realistic options for most) could be less stressful to the planet’s resources. This is possible, as the article hints:

Subsistence refers to hunting and farming, in which people usually cooperate rather than compete so that everyone can be fed. However, competition still exists in this kind of society — usually between leaders and heads of tribes or families. They’re typically male, and they have competitive relationships with leaders in other villages. What are they competing for? Prestige. So, competition exists when it comes to prestige.

Unfortunately, in the example given, leaders gained prestige by redistributing resources — which is still material. But another way of reducing the degree of imitative competition is to modify the structure of power dynamics:

We used to think that competition arises because of resource scarcity, because of what people call an imbalance of supply and demand. But if I was a village head and invented a way that put everyone in competition with each other, with the highest reward being my approval, wouldn’t I be very comfortable as the village head? So-called shortages are human-made. What constitutes a “good life”? What kind of things are “honorable”? Aren’t these all human-made?

Reducing the role of top-down approval, and the ability for those at the top of the hierarchy to set the rules of the game, could pave the way for creativity and diversity — facilitating evolution rather than involution.