What is involution? There is a metaphor on the Internet

There is a metaphor on the Internet. There is a Sunflower Book in the world, and everyone wants to get it. Because after getting it, you can be invincible in the world, but if one day the Sunflower Book is made public, everyone will have the opportunity to practice it. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

This would be a disaster. Because when a person has it, whether he practices it or not is up to him. Everyone has it, and it’s not up to you to decide whether you want to practice it or not.

For example, if you have an enemy, if you don’t practice, your enemy will practice and kill you later, so you are forced to practice. Eventually, everyone in the world will practice the Sunflower Book.

If you practice the magic book, you can be invincible, but because everyone has practiced it, everyone is invincible, so there is no such thing as invincibility, and if you want to practice magical skills, you must first go to the palace. Therefore, all the people in the world have become eunuchs. This is a lose-lose outcome, with no one benefiting from their extra efforts.

Word origin:

"Involution" is originally an academic term and is often used as "involution" in academic literature. Economist Wesson believes that the concept of "involution" was first used by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his book "Critique of Judgment".

It was two anthropologists who developed the concept of involution. One was Alexander Alexander Gordon Weiser. After he reached a certain final form of a type of cultural model, The phenomenon that there is no way to stabilize or transform into a new form, but can only continue to become more complex internally, is called "involution."

The other is Clifford Geertz, who proposed in his book "Agricultural Involution: Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia". During his investigation in Indonesia, he found that Java lacked capital, limited land, and administrative obstacles, making it impossible to expand agriculture outwards.

As a result, the increased labor force continues to fill the limited rice production, and agriculture becomes more sophisticated and complex, forming "growth without development." Geertz used the term “agricultural involution” to summarize this process.

Reference for the above content: Baidu Encyclopedia-Internal Volume