5. GOAL VS STRATEGY
A very important aspect of The Big Answer (TBA) that differentiates it from other approaches is that it’s the goal, not the strategy. That requires a little explanation, as we often confuse one for the other.
If you ask someone what their current goal is, they might say that it’s to finish their degree. If you ask them if they’ll be happy once they get the degree, they might say no, the degree is so they can get a good job. So their goal is actually to get a good job? No, because the job is to make money. So the goal is to make money? No, the money is to buy a house. And the house is so they can start a family, and so on.
What this reveals is that many of the things we call “goals” are actually just strategies towards a higher goal. We’ve come up with many such “goals” - happiness, purpose, freedom, enlightenment, health, wealth, service to others, one-upping your neighbours, or making your parents proud, etc., and since time immemorial, people have argued over which goals are better than others. This is because, before The Big Answer, no one had yet uncovered the real, objective, overarching goal that explains all of these.
Let’s explore this using chess as an analogy. Imagine a hundred people who knew nothing about chess were all sat down, each given a laptop, and told to play chess against the computer. They’re each shown how the pieces move, but they’re not told that to win they need to checkmate their opponent’s king. And the game never shows the king being taken; it simply ends once checkmate is achieved, which makes it seem somewhat random.
After playing for a while and sharing their results with each other, they may start to notice that the game lasts longer when they perform certain actions. For example, some players might notice that the game lasts longer when they try to move their pieces to the other side of the board. Others might notice that it lasts longer if they try to take as many of the opponent's pieces as possible, and so on. They might start mistaking these for the actual goal of the game.
They might then start arguing whose goal is best. Some goals may seem to work better in certain situations for some people, while others may work better for different people in other situations. Some people might throw their hands up and assume it’s all just subjective or arbitrary.
When we finally tell them the true goal of the game, they’d suddenly realize that what they thought were goals were merely strategies. It would now make sense exactly why those strategies worked, and under what circumstances one strategy would be better than another.
And since “good” and ”bad” are always in reference to whether something gets you closer to, or farther from meeting a goal, good strategies in chess are the ones that get you closer to checkmating your opponent, while bad ones take you further from that goal.
We find ourselves in a similar situation with the diverse goals people have adopted throughout human history. The lack of a single, overarching goal is why we have so many, and why no one can agree on which ones are the right ones. Some goals seem to work for some people in certain situations, other goals seem to work for other people in other situations, and some people throw their hands up and assume it's all subjective or arbitrary.
TBA finally explains the overarching, objective goal, thus exposing all of the “goals” we’ve put forward throughout history as strategies. The strategies we've developed are “good” when they increase TCQs, and “bad” when they decrease them.
Any other goals you might subjectively adopt can't be pursued once you've “lost the game”. In chess, once you’re checkmated, you don’t get to keep trying to move your pieces to the other side or take your opponent's pieces, etc. In reality, once you no longer exist, you obviously can’t keep pursuing whatever other goals you had. In both cases, it’s simply game over.
But here’s the flip side of that - if we told those hundred people that had never played chess before that the goal was to checkmate their opponent, would they all suddenly be grand masters? Of course not! Similarly, TBA defines the goal of all life, but it doesn’t specify how to achieve that goal. So TBA is not “better” than the strategies we’ve developed, nor does it replace them. It just explains why they work, where they work, and how to judge which might be better than others, as well as putting us in a much better position to formulate new strategies.
One additional thing to note is that the rules and laws we create are also merely strategies to achieve TCQs. When they do this, they’re “good”. When they don’t, TBA explains exactly when, where and why to bend, break, or change the rules.
As we'll see, there are numerous ways to enhance these qualities across various areas of life. There are even many ways to increase the same quality in the same area of life! So, while “strategies” are prescriptive ideologies that attempt to dictate what kinds of things are good, TBA defines what “good” is by explaining the goal of all life. Meaning, purpose, value, success, health, etc., it all boils down to one thing: increasing the TCQs.