@mrmhead Said
There must always be winners and losers.
Jung described an old religious idea in his writings that God ruled the world with two hands. A right hand and left hand that were called mercy and justice. He believed, correctly, that society could not survive with just one or the other.
With the right hand alone, mercy, nobody would be prodded on to adopt the trappings and needed responsibility that come with being an adult. You end up in a world where you are forgiven for absolutely everything you do wrong and the right things that you fail to do, and so the human spirit gets imprisoned in a sort of perpetual adolescence. You are thrust into the Freudian nightmare of the Oedipal model. Your failures are all suddenly unimportant and you end up living with mom and dad into adulthood where you squalor and develop fantasies of shooting up schools. Mercy in excess produces pathology.
But the same is true of justice simply because we aren't perfect, and the human animal is destined to fail sometimes. We should be held to account for our failures through justice but it has to be tempered with mercy. Justice provides rules and those who play by them can move upward and win...but the ingredient of mercy has to be there so that we can be forgiven our failures and try again if we lose.
You have to have both in a society because if you don't, the society either becomes stagnant and eventually mired in excess and laziness, or it is doomed to become a dystopia of robotic worker ants.
We need winners and losers, but there must be built into that system a method by which the losers are granted the opportunity to become winners as long as they have tried and are not breaking the rules (basically, as long as they are not criminals).