Social Fitness
Psychosocial Darwinism
Darwin's «survival of the fittest» never referred to getting benefits from strength, dominance or other individual attribute. It was an ecological attribute referring to the species' "fit" with its environment conceived as physical in nature but including other species. Nature is ruthless and economical: each species requires its own unique niche and the "competitive exclusion principle" states that only one species can survive in a particular ecological niche.
In psychosocial reality, there is a similar demand for «fitness». But the issue is not so much uniqueness as acceptability. A person is part of one or more groups as part of the need for association and the sharing of a common reality. Beyond that membership criterion, each person must be acceptable to the group in relation to situations that group members or the group as a whole faces.
If a person perceives and handles a situation in a way that the relevant group finds unacceptable, then there is no fitness. Survival as a group member becomes impossible.
Membership of a group is often optional, in which case the person can move on. But in some cases group membership is at the heart of the person's identity providing meaning and the possibility of remunerated work. Rejection then can be unbearable and even life-threatening.
From Clarity to Fitness
The modes of clarification provide a person with clarity about situations. That clarity then enables choices. If the choices are challenged then the explanation will be found in the way the situation was clarified. The choice may or may not be controversial and will be usually judged on performance criteria, but the clarification is always potentially controversial because the criterion is acceptability not its correctness or whether it is beneficial.
Every time there is a clarification, the shared reality of the group is the context within which acceptability is judged. Anything that undermines potentially weakens the and is therefore experienced as a threat.
Clarifications that fit the shared reality reveal fitness. They have the Darwinian right to survive and thrive. Clarifications that do not fit face social resistance and lead the group to exclude or aggressively turn against the individual.
The therefore form that can be developed as a hierarchy. Even without going around the Spiral, the essence of any Stage can be brought to bear at any point on the current clarification of a particular situation.
Originally posted: 10-May-2025.