Introduction
The term “involution” originally described a closed agricultural system where increasing labor input yielded diminishing returns, offering no real gain. This article expands on that concept, understanding involution as a social phenomenon: a state where traditionally private virtues like diligence and frugality, once institutionalized, transform into collective pressures. This forces individuals and organizations into an inescapable, inward-looking competition. Involution differs fundamentally from healthy competition. Healthy competition thrives in environments with expandable resources and diverse paths, fostering innovation and creating new value, with room for failure and freedom of choice. Involution, conversely, occurs in zero-sum games with fixed resources and scarce opportunities, compelling individuals into homogenized competition, leading to internal friction and creative stagnation. This article will analyze the structural predicament of contemporary Confucian societies under the guise of “diligence and frugality,” examining its causes (culture and values), mechanisms (institutions and competitive logic), and outcomes (resource depletion and innovation suppression).
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The Trap of Diligence and Frugality: From Personal Virtues to Collective Plight
In most cultures, diligence and frugality are celebrated as high virtues, especially in Confucian and Protestant ethics, where they are deeply ingrained. However, when these virtues are amplified and institutionalized, they become catalysts for involution, stifling innovation and resource expansion, and instead fostering inefficiency and societal friction.
How Diligence Intensifies Involution
In a zero-sum game with limited resources, diligence stops creating new value and, unlike the innovation-driven nature of healthy competition, merely reallocates existing resources. Consider China’s extremely low college admission rates: countless students study over nine hours a day, with tutoring becoming a widespread and forced form of diligence. This relentless competition compels individuals to sacrifice rest and creativity, trapped by the moral pressure of “not trying hard enough means shame.” Ultimately, it leads to a decline in both creativity and quality of life. After all, innovation demands leisure and the space to experiment, but involution compresses time into an endless cycle of competition.
How Frugality Exacerbates Involution and Class Stratification
Frugality primarily impacts the consumption side, suppressing overall demand. Within an involuted environment, frugal individuals accumulate resources to consolidate their competitive advantage, which paradoxically reduces aggregate societal demand.
For those at the bottom, frugality becomes an extreme survival strategy. Their needs are drastically simplified, with limited resources poured into basic sustenance and the desperate competition for the next generation. This “grass-eating” resilience ironically enhances their ability to “卷” (compete fiercely) in an extreme involuted system, constantly escalating the intensity of societal competition and forming a tragic cycle.
For the wealthy, their belief in frugality extends beyond mere external moral pressure. They often genuinely see diligence and thrift as cornerstones for wealth growth and maintaining family status. This internalized concept of frugality prompts them to reinvest most of their wealth into production expansion rather than luxury consumption. While this might objectively contribute to economic growth, in an involuted society with limited new opportunities, such accumulation can intensify the concentration of top-tier resources, further entrenching their advantage and making upward mobility for the lower strata even harder. The culture of frugality canonizes “rational self-discipline” while demonizing pleasure and risk-taking, disadvantaging innovators and venture capitalists in resource allocation. Elite classes often maintain existing power structures by controlling collective expectations, further solidifying involution.
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The Frugality of the Underclass: A Spiral of Survival and Exploitation
For the underclass, frugality is no longer a choice; it’s a self-devouring necessity born from survival pressure. Their diligence and frugality essentially mean eating less and working more. Take China’s 996 work culture, for instance: employees work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, yet their wages stagnate due to hyper-competition. Recent growth in salaries for 996 tech workers, for example, lags far behind GDP growth. The declining per-order earnings for delivery riders also reflect how individuals are forced to accept meager pay in an overly competitive environment. This frugality rarely translates into effective upward mobility. Instead, it embodies a “bad money drives out good” dynamic: those who can endure lower pay and worse conditions are the ones who temporarily survive. This forced frugality is often glorified by mainstream society, which not only rationalizes the plight of the underclass but also exacerbates social injustice, making it the most tragic consequence of involution.
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The Alienation of Virtue: When Frugality Becomes an Unconscious Dogma
The insidious reason why diligence and frugality lead to societal deadlock is that most people caught in the system don’t realize these virtues function as a dogma. If frugality were a personal, autonomous choice, it would indeed be a virtue, stemming from an individual’s thoughtful planning for their life and goals. However, when frugality is subtly instilled by society through education, public opinion, and institutional rewards, becoming an unquestioned “correct” path and the sole standard for success, it morphs into an invisible dogma.
The hidden nature of this indoctrination makes it hard for people to discern whether their frugal behavior stems from free will or external pressure. In South Korea’s massive private tutoring market, parents often spend a significant portion of their annual income, yet they can’t escape this competition due to the anxiety that “not sending kids to tutoring means falling behind,” effectively denying their children a chance at a better future. This dogma leads to low consumption and stifled creativity. But because of its hidden nature, individuals often blame themselves for “not trying hard enough,” obscuring the root cause of the problem and hindering any real impetus for reform. Frugality, then, ceases to be a personal choice and becomes a survival pressure imposed by the system, intensifying involution.
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The Fundamental Divide Between Confucian and Protestant Frugality
The roots of involution lie in profound differences in how cultures interpret frugality. When distinguished by their goals and pathways, Confucian frugality leans towards a collectivist idealism, while Protestant ethics emphasize a conservative personal virtue.
Frugality in Protestant ethics is an embodiment of individual free will, its motivation stemming from an intrinsic anxiety over personal soul salvation and receiving divine grace. Protestants in their worldly vocations, and their saving of wealth, primarily aim to prove their status as God’s chosen. They have no grand ambition to fundamentally reshape society, and tend to accept the existing order more readily. This individual action based on free choice objectively facilitated capital accumulation and reinvestment, driving the organic, causally positive development of capitalism and creating massive social surplus (e.g., venture capital and innovation in Silicon Valley), making frugality a force for expanding the pie rather than dividing it, thus preventing widespread involution. Its conservatism lies in its individualistic and non-socially transformative motivation, yet its outcome unexpectedly led to enormous societal leaps.
Conversely, Confucian thought frames diligence and frugality within the pursuit of a grand, collective ideal—the “Great Harmony” (大同社會). This is a “design the outcome, then create the cause” model. Personal diligence, self-cultivation, and diligent study are not merely for individual salvation or wealth accumulation but serve as a tool for cultivating individuals intended to serve the state and contribute to a centrally conceived ideal society. Its progressive character lies in striving for a perfected and elevated overall social order. However, when societal resources are limited and external growth is insufficient, this “cause” meant to serve a grand collective goal easily devolves into a zero-sum internal struggle for everyone. In this model, frugality is alienated into a survival strategy, the sole means to a singular and scarce “success,” escalating homogeneous competition, rather than an expression of individual free will.
This fundamental cultural difference in the meaning of frugality profoundly shapes competitive patterns in East Asian societies. The collective moral pressure in Confucianism, which views “not trying hard enough” as shameful, leads to high psychological costs—South Korea’s suicide rate, for example, is significantly higher than that of Protestant-dominated countries like the U.S. When Confucian diligence and frugality become dogma, and society lacks substantial growth, its pursuit of a perfect society easily slides into a deep abyss of universal internal struggle.
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Why Institutions Fail to Self-Correct
The involution driven by diligence and frugality is hard to break due to institutional inertia and widespread collective anxiety. South Korea’s massive private tutoring market serves as a prime example: when the government tried to ban private lessons to ease the burden, it triggered a huge public backlash. Many parents firmly believed that “no tutoring equals giving up on competition,” effectively stripping their children of a fighting chance for the future. Similarly, China’s 996 work schedule is seen as a benchmark of diligence, and opposing reforms is often perceived as losing competitiveness. Even when elites recognize declining efficiency and creative exhaustion, the risks of challenging the status quo make reform nearly impossible. This is a “trap within a silent system”: most people lack awareness, while the few who are aware are constrained by the system’s backlash mechanisms. This means everyone knows a problem exists (or at least some do), but no one can truly address it.
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Conclusion: From Moral Problem to Systemic Issue
The problem with diligence and frugality isn’t with the virtues themselves, but with their institutionalization into a whip of competition and a shackle on consumption. When the underclass exhausts itself in involution—as seen in Japan’s frequent cases of karoshi (death from overwork) or China’s “lying flat” phenomenon—society faces multiple crises: stagnant wage growth, shrinking consumption, stalled innovation, and plummeting birth rates (e.g., South Korea’s rate has dropped to 0.78, and China’s is also extremely low).
Even more tragically, when the underclass is “brainwashed” into voluntarily suppressing their own desires, hoping to survive in extreme involution, society’s consumption power, innovative vitality, and reproductive capacity suffer catastrophic blows. This model is ultimately unsustainable, leading to the complete collapse of the social foundation and, subsequently, triggering large-scale social unrest that threatens the very legitimacy of the regime.
The issue isn’t whether individuals should be diligent or frugal. It’s whether society has transformed diligence into an endless whip of competition, turned frugality into a shackle that stifles consumption and innovation, and unfairly rewards this distorted form of diligence and frugality. This deviation from a natural trajectory is the true root cause of civilization’s deadlock, dragging society into the abyss of collapse.
