Day Five: the Development Loop Theory

Another talk, always connected to the theme of resilience, left me with quite a lot to think about – this time regarding uncertainty, priorities, and decisions. Contextualizing these concepts into the above mentioned situation I’m facing, dealing with human relations, I would say that on the front of uncertainty I’ve always been quite able to cooperate with it and, in a certain way – given my peculiar empathy toward people, to predict it. Priorities instead, on the other hand, represent a big issue: most of the times I am not able to give the right value to people, often putting too much effort in growing the others instead of myself. I really do like helping the others, it gives me a satisfaction that I could find nowhere else, but even if I never ask for something in return (except for particular matters), sometimes it is frustrating to see that in moments of need you do not receive back the care you have given… What I think I should do is to strive for a better balance between ‘others’ and ‘self’ – and especially, when I take a decision to solve the problem (either I like it or not), I should give it time to see where it leads before always going back to my old steps.

About the red cross game, apart from the fact that I have really enjoyed it and found it a good way to interact with the others while learning by playing, I think it perfectly showed the two faces of reality: on one side the egoism between countries and on the other the cooperation that sometimes is possible to build at least at a local level. Most of the time, the mentality that still dominates over international politics’ relations is the one of ‘if it does not concern/affect me, it is none of my business’ and this has been shown by the difficulty in finding an agreement about the insurance between a group of just 40 people… but when it comes to regions of a same nation – having the common goal of avoiding sufferings at a national level – let’s say that, concerning my group at least, it had been easier to organize ourselves into a nice strategy that allowed on one hand the blue region to grow at a fairly high rate and on the other the survival and still the development of the other three regions.

Following the pattern of the game I also had the chance to rethink about a weird theory I formulated years ago without ever having the possibility to prove it – actually it probably exists already but when I

tried to google it I couldn’t find anything… It is about a development loop: who is already better, keeps getting better and better. Take the example of the group that during the game sacrificed the red region to allow all the others to develop at the maximum potential – the same happens with already developed countries: if you have the financial tools to grow and adapt to the current needs and trends it means that you will develop faster than those who do not have the same financial possibilities as you. But faster development also means more earnings to spend on further development and here the loop starts… Of course, for a developed country it is easier to do so when all the not-so-developed components are cut off from the game – and this would also partly explain the reason behind so much egoism… Growing regions or countries, on their side, are eventually able to improve but they will never reach the same level of the first ones (given due exceptions).

Essentially, the real issue of today’s world – from my perspective – is the proper allocation of resources, not the lack of resources per se. What we need is to develop efficient win-win strategies that allow both parties to grow: if the holders of resources do not gain any profit from helping the disadvantaged ones, they will arguable feel less willing to do so and vice versa.