The Explanatory Power of Sustenesis Theory: Goodness and Success as an Example

The explanatory power of Sustenesis Theory can be observed through a specific and very ordinary question.

Why Goodness and Success Rarely Stay Aligned examines a subject that people often debate: what exactly is the relationship between goodness and success?

Original article

善良与成功为什么很难持续一致

That article is about goodness and success. Here, however, the particular topic is not the main concern. It is being used as an example through which to observe how Sustenesis Theory handles a question that has remained contentious for a long time, and why some questions that repeatedly become trapped in argument within conventional discussion can receive a relatively concise explanation once they enter the framework of Sustenesis Theory.

People readily form two apparently opposed judgments about goodness and success. One is the belief that good deeds will ultimately be rewarded and that goodness will eventually produce a good result. The other begins from practical experience and holds that once success, especially wealth and power, reaches a certain level, it often becomes difficult to remain good. Reality supplies abundant examples for either side, so the argument can continue indefinitely.

The first thing Sustenesis Theory does here is not to choose one of these views. It changes the structure of the question.

Conventional discussion usually treats “goodness” and “success” as two relatively static attributes. It then asks whether good people are more likely to succeed, whether successful people are more likely to lose their goodness, or whether goodness will ultimately receive some kind of reward. This framing already presupposes that goodness and success belong to an evaluative system in which they can be compared directly. It may even assume that some stable relationship ought to exist between them.

Sustenesis Theory begins by separating concepts that language has placed together.

Goodness and success are two different evaluative systems. They may intersect or overlap, but they are not inherently aligned. More importantly, neither is a static state. Each is a relatively stable pattern formed through long-term maintenance under a different set of constraints.

From this perspective, goodness can be understood as a person's continuing maintenance of respect, restraint and responsibility towards others as relationships of interest keep changing. A single good act is not enough to make someone a “good person” in the ordinary sense. What we call goodness already contains a continuity formed across changes in time, environment and interest.

The same applies to success. An accidental profit or a short-lived advantage does not constitute success in the usual sense. Success means repeatedly obtaining and maintaining resources, influence, competitive advantage or some form of social recognition within markets, organisations and social rules until a relatively stable state takes shape.

The original question has now changed.

The main question is no longer “Can a good person succeed?” It becomes: what constraints act on these two different sustenetic processes, what is each process continuing to maintain, and under what conditions can both be sustained at the same time?

The constraints surrounding success commonly include resources, competition, efficiency, power, opportunity and organisational rules. The constraints surrounding goodness include consideration for the interests of others, self-limitation, responsibility and restraint amid conflicts of interest. Some conditions can satisfy both sets of constraints. Honesty, for example, can build long-term credibility. Cooperation can create stable relationships. Sound institutions may also allow good conduct to produce lasting benefits. Goodness and success can therefore overlap under certain conditions.

Such an overlap, however, does not mean that an inevitable alignment exists between them.

As competition intensifies, resources expand, power increases or relationships of interest become more complex, the constraints that must be satisfied to maintain success may change. At the same time, the self-limitation required to maintain goodness may become more demanding. Two processes that could previously be sustained together may then come under strain. The real question is therefore not whether goodness and success can coexist at a particular moment, but whether two sustenetic processes governed by different constraints can remain aligned over time.

At this point, the real significance of the example has come into view.

Sustenesis Theory does not offer a third position on whether goodness causes success. It identifies that the original question has placed two different sustenetic processes inside a single relational framework. Once the question is separated again, a substantial part of the dispute loses its original basis.

The saying that good deeds are rewarded, for example, directly connects the sustenetic process of morality with the sustenetic processes of wealth, happiness or social reward, as though the former naturally constituted a condition of the latter. The claim that wealth makes people heartless moves in the other direction, using an outcome within systems of wealth and success to infer a person's moral state.

The two claims appear opposed, but their structures are very similar. Both attempt to use the state of one sustenetic system to explain another system governed by different constraints.

There is therefore no need to prove that goodness necessarily leads to success, nor that success necessarily damages goodness. The two sustenetic processes may overlap, reinforce each other or come into conflict. The result depends on the particular constraints each process faces and on whether those constraints can form a lasting alignment.

Even when the question moves from the individual to the institutional level, the basic method of analysis does not need to change.

A better society need not promise that goodness will always be rewarded. What institutions can actually change are the constraints. They can reduce the cost of remaining good over time while increasing the cost of acquiring and maintaining success through deception, harm or the exploitation of others. A question that originally appears to concern personal character can thereby move naturally into market relations, institutional design and social structure, while the basic analytical framework of “difference–constraint–sustained alignment” remains intact.

This is what makes the example worth noticing.

It shows that the explanatory power of Sustenesis Theory does not primarily come from adding a new answer to an existing question. It comes from identifying anew the structures that constitute the question. Faced with a problem, it first distinguishes the different sustenetic structures involved, what each one maintains, what constraints act upon it, and whether the relationships among them are nested, intersecting, dependent or conflicting. Only then does it ask whether these structures can form a sustained alignment.

Many long-running disputes contain a similar possibility.

Freedom and determinism, the individual and society, self and other, consciousness and matter, the meaning of life, the knowing subject and the soul are often framed as “Is A the same as B?”, “Can A cause B?” or “Which is more fundamental, A or B?” These ways of asking can easily compress structures formed at different levels, within different boundaries and under different constraints into a single linguistic relation.

Sustenesis Theory does not begin by answering these questions immediately. It first establishes what kinds of sustenetic structures A and B actually are, which differences they depend upon, through which constraints they form, and what each continues to maintain. After this transformation, what appeared to be an ontological conflict, a conflict of values or a causal problem may become a question about the relationship between different sustenetic structures and the conditions under which they are compatible.

Why Goodness and Success Rarely Stay Aligned is therefore better treated here as an analytical sample than as the final object of discussion.

What the sample reveals is a basic methodological feature of Sustenesis Theory. It does not simply enter an existing dispute and select one of the available answers. It returns to the differences, constraints and continuing processes that constitute the problem, and examines whether the problem itself has been correctly established in the first place.

Some long-running disputes may appear extraordinarily complex not because their objects are inherently beyond understanding, but because language has compressed different structures into a single concept or evaluative system. Once those structures are distinguished again, and their conditions of formation, constraints and directions of continuation are made clear, some contradictions that once seemed insoluble may cease to be contradictions at all.

This is the explanatory power of Sustenesis Theory demonstrated by this example.