Quality by Quantity

Yes, we all know what quality is, it's something better, something that lasts longer. OK, accepting that we know what quality is, and how important it is, why then do we ignore it and pursue quantity instead? Is it because we measure winners in terms of quantity as an indirect measure of quality, and is quality a fixed thing anyway?

If a new sport was created, and the original best time for one circuit was twenty minutes, does this remain a quality time if within a few years the best time drops to eighteen minutes? If you achieve twenty minutes now, are you as good as the original people were? Assuming that the techniques used by everyone had remained essentially the same and only training had improved, then yes, your time is of the same quality, just the sport lacks that feeling of edginess for your time because it has long been improved upon and you are too late to be recognised. If you are unable to improve despite making your greatest effort then you are operating at your point of maximised quality, and you should be happy because your mind and body can do no more for you.

From this we can see that there are two types of quality - the quality of the individual and the quality of the individual society. There are many possible ways of dividing up humanity, such as by nation, by era, by sport etc, and each individual may easily be compared with the society that they exist within, but to compare one individual with another individual, or one society with another society, then we must be aware of the differences in each individual or society that makes them what they are. If we enter a race we are choosing to compare our quality with that of other others prepared to undergo the same event, we have in common a desire to race and this makes us similar. All our racing qualities become comparable because we decide to train for that event, or at least we should train if we wish our quality to be comparable, and our racing qualities no longer becomes comparable with others who are not training - for they are not attempting to maximise their quality in that field. Our bed-ridden granny's racing quality is not challenged by our racing quality, because we each inhabit different societies.

However, if the same bed-ridden granny managed to overcome her disability, hopped out of bed and beat us in the race, her personal quality must be much higher than ours, and our ego may suffer because we still perceive her as inhabiting another society, that of the old for instance. Individuals from what we understand to be poor quality classes should not beat us, or so our ego may believe, but this is a problem that would not have occurred if we had simply put her in our class, the racing class, and left it at that.

We often fail to understand quality because we allow invalid classes to cloud our judgement, or fail to understand that no classification system can ever be perfect. 'You are woman, your job is to create new life' is a common religious theme, forcing women to be perceived as being best quality only when used as baby machines. Whether any individual woman has the ability to produce children is a question that is generally avoided (perhaps because words are cheap while intelligent actions are much more difficult). What is happening is that any class of objects or people has a perceived quality, and the 'baby machine' quality is forced onto each woman under the 'Rule of Should'. Why should I? Because you should! Imagine that a woman is born without ovaries, or they are damaged due to no fault of the woman - what mental pressure does the Rule of Should Make Babies put on that woman? What effort does the society make to deal with the individuals problems? Should it? I say of course, because by not dealing with it the overall quality of the society drops.

The Rule of Should is a symptom of the controlling faction being more interested in quantity over quality, and the more that quality and quantity appears to diverge then the more that the Rule of Should may be applied in an attempt to control the problem, but which instead creates more divergence until more violent measures of control may be considered in order to sweep the issue more firmly under the carpet. This is what is often happening when you meet religious or political extremism, a part of the population is unable to define quality of people as all they see is the quantity of people in what they perceive is their and other groups, and how much money, power or success their or another group has.

If the Rule of Should creates divergence between quality and quantity, does this mean there is any relationship between the two? Well, imagine that you have no cats: your quantity of cats is zero, therefore the quality of your cats must also be zero since quality exists only in possession, in the same way that having no cats also means you have no pink cats. Imagine also that you liked cats and I gave you one cat: how much would you get to know that one cat, and that cat to know you? Imagine instead that I gave you two cats: how much would you get to know those two cats by observing how they relate to you and to each other? Imagine now that I gave you two thousand cats.

No cats means you have no quality relationship with cats, while one or two cats means you have a high quality relationships with them. However, the average quality of relationship with each of the two thousand cats would be low. If we plotted the average cat-relationship quality for zero, one, two... two thousand cats we would see the quality curve would rise rapidly from zero cats to one cat, rise some more between one cat and two cats, but beyond that point the the average cat relationship quality would start to fall as we become unable to spend enough time with each cat to bond well with it. Eventually we might bond with a few cats, but mostly we would see the cats as things to be fed that we might or might not recognise. We might not even notice if we lost a few or gained a few strays.

By finding someone to buy and prepare all the food our cats needed should allow us more time to bond with a larger number of cats, although attempting to maximise quality over a larger quantity of cats results in us having to sacrifice something else in our lives as we simply do not have enough waking hours every day to do everything. Attempting to maximise too many qualities results in having to abandon other qualities, and eventually this might have an impact on our health, our circle of friends or, in the case of cats, the patience of our neighbours.

To maximise satisfaction in our lives it might be better if we chose fewer interests, and invested the freed up time in the chosen interests. Even so, we must be careful how much time and effort goes into these remaining interests because we are surrounded by people who care about us and they need our attention too.

Finally, mention must be made of one special quantity, that of duty. For most people their home life is very important, and yet they will impede success here by either avoiding duties or by allowing duties to take over. Duties can be seen as a set of tasks that need to be done to achieve a certain level of quality, but the pursuit of too many or taking some too far will again reduce quality because we must sacrifice other things, such as time spent talking with other family members. Work can also form a duty, as can being part of a social organisation, but all these duties need to be examined in terms of the needs of each group member, rather than having the results of duty or the lack of them being impressed on the individuals. By avoiding examining the feelings we have tied up in our need for fulfilling duties we apply pressure to the rest of the group, often leading inadvertently to a struggle for control of the group.

Every few months I reassess how many computer related tasks I have, and seek to slim down any areas that begin to dominate my time to the detriment of my home life or of the life tasks that would give me more pleasure by completing them. Trying to decide which elements of one's life one should pursue and which to drop is generally best done with someone else's help, someone who cares enough to observe the effect on your total life.