Social impact and progress through survival of the fittest is a core idea at the heart of our Western societies. We are told it is a natural law of nature that we must follow or escape from. Whereas cooperation and collaboration is portrayed as a sign of weakness and failure. Is this view of social impact accurate? Should we just empower the strong to change society?
Table of Contents:
Survival Of the Fittest And Social Impact
Survival of the Fittest as the Path to Social Impact
School teaches us that evolution is nature’s way of making progress. Survival of the fittest is the fundamental law of progress in nature. The idea that the best survive and flourish is embedded deeply into the very soul of our education, economic and social systems. Competition is good. Weed out the weakest and empower the best. Our test results are ranked, our performance is graded, and people view our social status as determined by our job title. (In most new social situations the first question asked is “What do you do?”)
We are told that this is the way of nature, competition is needed to make people perform. We are racing for the top, to be number 1, to be the best, to be the alpha. This is alongside the implicit fear that we are not the victims. Failure is weakness. Being ‘average’ is not ok. Our politicians, senior bureaucrats and business leaders claim the right to shape and change our societies by right of their position. They know what’s best because they are at the top.
Survival of the Leadership
This is also manifested in the seemingly insatiable demand for leadership. Everywhere you look people are selling new approaches to leadership. People don’t want to be led. They want to lead. So that they can win the battle for survival. They’re rarely if ever any focus on the sellers of leaderism on what it is that is being led. Where are the courses for followship? Or how to be a great team member? Surely being someone who people love to work with has its own power. Social projects are often collaborative rather than ordered.
Social impact cannot be simply achieved by putting ourselves in charge of making others do things and ignoring the context entirely. Our societies have seduced us into believing in the idea of survival of the fittest, is the only way to progress. Surely if the goal is to achieve outcomes, we need to focus on the thing to be achieved, the situation and the people doing the work. Not some mythical instruction manual for the leader telling people the ‘right’ way to do things.
Social Impact Through Individualism
“…who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first”
Margaret Thatcher
Common in this survival of the fittest approach is a focus on individuals, as being the route of success and problems. Those who believe in survival of the fittest don’t believe in social impact, as they don’t believe there is a society to change. We are told it is in our nature to just be individuals, our selfish genes demand that we compete and accumulate status and resources and be top dog.
If people haven’t succeeded in life, it is because they have underperformed. Not because of their social environment. But because of their weakness in rising above it. This approach lays the success and failure of organisations and projects, as being down to individual variance. Social impact fails because people don’t follow. Individual variance we are told is the enemy of success. We just need to cut the underperformers.
A Winning Approach
This brutal reality manifested itself in Jack Welshes ‘Winning’ approach at General Electric (GE):
“In “Winning,” Welch introduced the “20–70–10” rule in managing his people. According to the great leader, this system helped him maintain a high standard of performance in GE.”
In this system, colleagues are forced to compete with each other. The winning 20% get ‘outrageous rewards.’ 70% are given the training to perform better. 10% are simply fired. Every year. In his first 10 years, he fired more than 170,000 people. According to McKinsey, what resulted was a company that overvalued its assets and focused on short-term income. In 2020 by the time the leadership great died GEwas worth just one fifth of the value on the New York Stock Exchange that it enjoyed in 1999. Surely after many years of survival of the fittest, the organisation should have been super fit for many years to come.
The Science of Survival of the Fittest
Survival of the Fittest & Science
We have been taught to believe survival of the fittest is the science, the natural order of things. We can’t help it, it’s in our nature. Survival of the fittest is ultimately the science of growth and progress. The only scientific way to achieve social impact must be through implementing competition. The problem is that evidence is becoming increasingly clear that it isn’t. Especially as far as human society is concerned.
With advances in genetics, we are now able to measure which species have been around for the longest through DNA. Something Darwin could never have known. Lions, the poster species of survival of the fittest, have been around for 30 thousand years. Which is pretty great. Except for their prey, the decidedly uncompetitive zebra, have been living in the same environment for 2 million years. A whacking great 66 times longer.
Hammerhead sharks evolved 20 million years ago. But their prey the bluefin tuna have been around for around 50 million years.
Then there is the problem of the dinosaurs; they were around for 165million years. Far longer than any of the species above. The problem is they didn’t survive. Birds, however, have been descended from them have survived 40 million years, and are still around. So what is the fittest, the dinosaurs or the birds? Did that mean the dinosaurs were always unfit? Or only unfit after they died. If after 165 million years of being ‘red in tooth and claw’ the dinosaurs were still unfit, how much time do we need?
Social Survival
What many of the longer-lived species have in common, is that they typically live in groups, herds, or flocks. They help one another. One of the most commonly used justifications for the survival of the fittest is that it culls the weakest in the herd. Completely ignoring the fact, there is a herd and those that are part of the herd are the ones that survive. This is also true for predators. Even lion’s success rate strongly depends on the number of lions involved in the hunt: A single lion hunting in daylight has a success rate of 17–19%, but this increases for those hunting as a group to 30%.
Good Breeding for the Future?
This is not to argue against Darwinism being a powerful force in nature. It is just far more complex than the survival of the fittest. This is particularly the case for human society as the assumptions for evolution over many generations of animals aren’t true for our social systems. We are not breeding humans based on the ability to ‘survive’. Companies do not pass on genes. How then can survival of the fittest be a thing if it can’t propagate?
There is also an assumption that financial success is based on natural inherited ability. There are simply no known genes of success to pass on. Survival of the fittest is a total myth as a path to sustained success. We cannot achieve social impact through better breeding.
One of the biggest weaknesses of survival of the fittest is that it does not predict the future. What was successful in the past and what is successful right now may not be the best fit for the future. This might explain why only 12% of companies on the Fortune 500 market have survived since 1955. The average lifespan of a company is now under 20 years (maybe not coincidentally close to the length between human generations).
If the intention of survival of the fittest is to build company survival then it is measurably an abject failure. There is nothing inherent about the survival of the fittest that is predictive. It is purely in the now. What worked yesterday and today may be extinct tomorrow. This is why the whole ecosystem of the dinosaurs collapsed. They could not cope with change.
Evolving Our Social Impact
Learning New Ways for Social Impact
Survival of the fittest does not learn. But people do. We have evolved to spend most of the first two decades of our life learning from our parents for good reason. Our whole society has evolved by capturing and building on the learning of past generations. Humans are so successful in outcompeting nature, not through breeding, but through learning the skills to survive and adapt better than any other species on earth.
We have progressed by sharing information with each other and working together. This is how we have always achieved social impact. Human society as a whole is adapting to its environment. The superpower of human beings is cooperation in complex environments. We have the capability to adapt to almost any environment and change along with it. We can face any threat and pass our learning across endless distances and generations. Our societal structures and communities are not the enemy of progress, as portrayed by free market capitalists. They are the embodiment of our progress and learning that we have made as society.
Lord of the Pies
Free market economists defend their belief in survival of the fittest. They tell us the solution to societies problems is “growth, growth, growth” the magic that will fix our societies problems. We need to increase the size of the pie so everyone has a bigger slice. We all should each individually fight to compete for a bigger pie, so we will all be richer.
We need to look beyond the trap of survival of the fittest and look at Darwinism in a different way. Rather than compete, in the natural world it is usually much more effective to find a different niche when competing. That is how we end up with different species. With each species finding its niche that complements one another as part of a wider system. We need not look at nature, as ongoing battle to fight each other to death, but much more or as an interacting complementary ecosystem. An ecosystem that is adapted to best fit across the environment and maximises the potential for a wide variety of life in a wide variety of niches.
We are Evolving Together to Create Social Impact
Rather than look at society as a collection of individuals competing for a race to clamber on top of one another in a desperate attempt to survive. We need to look at evolution as how humans fit into their environment as a collective whole. We are not individuals, we are part of something much bigger. Our social systems are also us. We are our society. Yes, we should try and better ourselves to learn and adapt. But we should do that in the context of others. Helping people around us to be successful and supporting them in their times of need, that is evolution. To learn adapt and grow together. If we do that we will all be much richer in our lives. As well as being able to adapt to the challenges that confront us and make sure our humanity is fit to survive beyond us.
Conclusion.
The idea of survival of the fittest is one of the biggest shapers of our social systems. The evidence, however, tells us that is not a good fit for helping humans survive our future.
We must challenge the old preconceptions of the past that hierarchy and dominance are the way to achieve social impact. Then we can open ourselves up to a whole new world of opportunity and possibility. We can bring the best out of each other and empower one another to learn, grow and adapt in a society that serves us all and enables all life to flourish.
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Question:
Do you agree? Should survival of the fittest continue to inform our social structures?
If we are to look beyond survival of the fittest, what should replace it?
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