How to evaluate failure
You don’t. Not anymore.
What looked like an oddity, a clear sign of dishonesty or a serious behavioral issue, once upon a time, now has become the new normal.
If you teach kids, from an early age, that everybody is a winner, no matter how poor the results, if the ground base of reality is relativized to such an extent that you can’t hold to any criterion which would be universally accepted as valid, if an elementary truth like 2+2 = 4 is subject to unsettling interpretations that border insanity, then failure doesn’t exist.
In the shallow universe we get entangled more and more heavily, no one seems to notice that a world without failures is also a world without successes. Since no one bothers to think two steps ahead, the first assumption is that the absence of failure could be equated to victory. An illusion, certainly, but one good enough if no one wants to challenge primitive narratives and look for facts. Facts are our enemy. As are effort and discipline.
For all the fools populating political and professional positions they don’t deserve there’s an added (desired) bonus: their uninterrupted string of incompetent decisions, blunders and cheats can’t be pointed out as such in the absence of critical spirit.
A perfect world. Where everything is felt, not reasoned, and the feeling itself is similarly shallow, on the same level of trivialized false premises and wrong assumptions no one bothers to ponder upon.
War is peace, slavery is freedom, wrong is right are just consequences of a world where the notion of failure was eradicated. Of course, real failures keep accumulating, but the possibility to prove their existence disappears. Imagine an experiment which conceptually allows no failure. Imagine a scientific method based on such kind of experiments. Worried, huh !? Nah, move on, don’t worry, be happy !
Where I am heading with this train of thoughts…
First you don’t want to, then you simply don’t, because you got used to minimal effort while your critical sense eroded beyond recognition, then you can’t.
Ah, yea, before I forget, the Ukrainian counter-offensive is like, you know, a success.