This is a very popular article on Huawei's internal forum.
The concept of involution is rich in connotation and is closely related to our lives. In order to popularize and disseminate knowledge, I refer to relevant information and dedicate my personal superficial understanding to my friends.
Involution, which corresponds to evolution, i.e., evolution. Intuitively speaking, involution is "inward evolution, or going around in circles".
More broadly, all insubstantial consumption can be called involution. There are a lot of low-level repetitive work in life, it seems that we are striving for excellence, everyone is doing it step by step, working hard, and never getting tired, but only in a limited internal range, not expanding outward, and the direction of work is inwardly convergent, rather than outwardly diverging, which is called involution.
Let me illustrate this with seven familiar examples.
1. Meaningless excellence is involution. For example, the thousands of teacups on the table in the City Hall are all lined up horizontally, vertically, and sideways, which is spectacular! That's what a lot of staff spend a lot of time tossing and turning with rope one by one. Compared with the content of the meeting and its significance, this kind of strict and precise arrangement does not play a role, which is called involution.
2. Complicating simple problems is involution. For example, in order to implement the projects decided by the leaders at higher levels, some units want to make the entire decision-making process look scientific in a high-sounding manner, so as to cope with audits and inspections. These huge and busy tasks are costly, time-consuming, and laborious, and make simple problems very complicated, and the purpose is only to make up the procedures and draw the circle of the so-called scientific decision-making, which is a kind of involution.
3. In order to avoid liability, passive coping work is also involution. In the days leading up to major holidays or sensitive periods, lower-level agencies must respond to the call of their superiors and organize large-scale inspections of production safety (or stability maintenance). Everyone understands that most leaders may not even have the qualification certificate for safety production, and these inspections may not have any practical effect, but they still have to use a lot of manpower and material resources to complete this fixed action, in order to be exempted from responsibility in case of an accident, which is also a kind of involution.
4. Work that deviates seriously from the expected goal is also involution. There are many creation evaluations in society that are involutions. Because these competitions consume a lot of manpower and material resources, they cannot use these competitions to promote their expected work, and they cannot achieve their original intentions, and there are more show elements than substantive effects.
For example, the Entrepreneurship Star Competition, or the Science and Technology Innovation Pioneer Competition jointly organized by several departments in a certain province, etc., in fact, individuals will not start a business because of the competition, and science and technology enterprises will not engage in scientific and technological innovation because of the competition. The original intention of the competition is to promote individual entrepreneurship and scientific and technological innovation, but the actual effect is minimal.
5. Low-level imitation and replication are typical involution. Micro-carving and micro-engraving are only formal arts, and their creative content will only be less than the normal size of artworks, especially in terms of coloring, micro-carving and micro-engraving are fatally limited, and the artistic connotation of micro-engraving and micro-engraving cannot surpass normal artistic creation.
This deliberate refinement is a kind of involution. It's a kind of self-competition, a kind of self-inflicted hardship that takes a lot of time and exhausts willpower, not only does it not create new content, but it also has to take a magnifying glass to look at it, which is exhausting.
6. The internal competition that restricts creativity is institutional involution. For example, the rigid examination system severely restricts the freedom of students to learn and grow. Students are forced to work hard within the syllabus in order to get high grades, restricting students' free spirituality and stifling students' creativity.
At the same time, in order to compare, the questioner had to make the exam questions bizarre, such as who fired the first shot, who fired the second shot, who fired the third shot, and so on in the uprising, which is extremely boring exam questions, which is involution.
7. Endless excavation and research on the same problem is involution. The Chinese's research on many historical masterpieces is staggering, just a few books, countless scholars have been digging endlessly for one or two hundred years, what else can you come up with? But the research is still deep, and the refinement can be more refined, endlessly.
Researchers go one after another, but the content is constantly repeated and hyped, the papers are copied back and forth, and the original works are constantly distorted and far-fetched evidence to stand out from the crowd, which is actually a pile of rotten meat in the pot, which is a typical involution.
There are many causes of involution, and we don't have to dig into it, nor do we have to exhaustively enumerate, otherwise we may also fall into involution. Let's take a look at the two dimensions of system and culture.
Why do people find themselves in the predicament of involution?
This is well explained by the prisoner's dilemma theory. According to the prisoner's dilemma game model, under the pressure of the system, people are like being imprisoned in a predicament, and for their own interests, the vast majority of people will choose the plan of "cooperation", and very few people will choose to confront the system.
Therefore, people are happy to play a zero-sum or even negative-sum game with a small range of relevant personnel, Hakka proverbs call this phenomenon "boxing in the crotch", everyone fights back and forth, tired and tired, no matter how hard you work and how much you pay, the total amount of benefits will not increase, or so little. From this point of view, institutionalized internal competition is the first cause of involution.
From the perspective of cultural genes, the imperial culture and eunuch culture of more than 2,000 years have domesticated countless "obedient people". The core of imperial culture is to fool the people in order to facilitate their rule, and the biggest feature of eunuch culture is to pat on the back and curry favor with the master, in order to obtain the master's gifts.
Therefore, since childhood, Chinese have demanded obedience, required to sit and behave in a proper manner, and are accustomed to seeking their own place in narrow interpersonal relationships, and the cultural genes determine that Chinese are accustomed to internal competition and lack the courage to open up and innovate outward. Just look at the brutal infighting in the real officialdom workplace, and it is understandable.
From another perspective of culture, after the traditional culture reaches a certain stage and cannot adapt to the new situation, it is easy to go astray and walk into a dead end.
Many rules, exquisiteness, and taboos accumulated in China over thousands of years are involution. Feudal superstition has brought the involution to the extreme. Human nature is not idle, if there is no new ideas to produce, there is no new things to look forward to, it is inevitable to figure out some things to toss, such as various customs and habits, such as miniature carving, micro-carving and calligraphy, etc., in order to increase a little bit of life patterns. This is also one of the causes of involution.
Involution is a silent sadness. It slowly consumes our ingenuity and youth, and smooths out the sharpness of individuals. After falling into involution, for individuals, it is a silent and unconscious waste; For society or institutions, a large number of people silently do useless work, waste resources, reduce overall efficiency, and weaken external competitiveness.
The mainland has the largest number of doctors, professors and researchers in the world, but our competitiveness in scientific and technological innovation is very disproportionate, which is more or less related to the design of our education system and scientific research system.
The involution tells us that the fineness, complexity, and exquisiteness on the surface are not equal to the advanced, let alone advanced, but only a kind of self-deception, a kind of ignorant consumption in the dark, and a sad spiritual sustenance. Only by jumping out of the circle and standing at a higher level of continuous breakthrough, innovation and creation can we not let the exquisite, complex, and seemingly dedicated involution state plague us, and can we return to the new normal of upward erection.
If you understand the meaning of involution, you can consciously avoid falling into involution and reduce the waste and damage caused by involution.
Whether you are a decision-maker or an executor, you must judge before doing things and avoid involution as much as possible. Society should encourage and promote an open and free competitive environment, and the goal of institutional reform should be to encourage invention and creativity and establish a free mechanism with minimal constraints.
Author: Qiu Xiaohai
Source: Huawei internal forum