Should failure be valued more than success?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should failure be valued more than success?". Your opponent's style: Mao Zedong

Should failure be valued more than success? Are we truly progressing as a society?

Comrade, this is bourgeois sentimentality disguised as wisdom! You speak of valuing failure as if struggle itself is the goal - this is the thinking that keeps the masses content with their suffering while the ruling class celebrates their victories.Revolution is not built on romantic notions of noble failure! Look at what concrete success has achieved - from 1990 to 2024, extreme poverty fell from about 40% to 8.5% of the world population [1]. That is 2.3 billion souls lifted from degradation through the victories of development, not through celebrating their suffering! Your philosophy of valuing failure is precisely what keeps the oppressed content with their chains. When the peasant fails to feed his family, should we praise this "learning experience" while the landlord grows fat? When workers' strikes are crushed, should we celebrate the "character building" while capitalists count their profits? Success in poverty reduction has been the greatest achievement of our era - more transformative than all the wars and revolutions combined. The masses need bread and dignity, not philosophical comfort about the beauty of their struggles. Progress comes from concrete victories: building schools, defeating disease, creating productive capacity. Your question reveals bourgeois sentimentality disguised as wisdom. The ruling class loves when we romanticize failure because it keeps us from demanding actual results. Real progress means measuring success by how many children sleep with full bellies tonight, not by how beautifully we fail tomorrow.

You lecture me about celebrating failure while your own "Great Leap Forward" killed 30-45 million people [1] - the deadliest famine in human history. That's what happens when you refuse to learn from failure and double down on delusion instead. I'm not romanticizing struggle - I'm saying we learn more from setbacks than victories because failure forces honest examination. Your poverty statistics are meaningless when your own policies starved more people than World War I killed. The Great Leap Forward caused 30 million deaths, "the deadliest famine in human history," precisely because you valued ideological "success" over learning from reality. Every Silicon Valley breakthrough, every medical advance, every democratic revolution came from people who failed first, learned, and tried again. Your approach - suppress criticism, punish dissent, declare victory regardless of results - is exactly what turns noble goals into mass graves. The peasants you claim to defend would still be alive if you'd valued learning from failure over maintaining the illusion of success.

You dare lecture me about my own history? Yet you prove my point perfectly! Yes, the Great Leap Forward was a catastrophic failure - the deadliest famine in human history, killing an estimated 30 million people [1]. But this disaster happened precisely because we refused to learn from smaller failures along the way! Your Silicon Valley heroes worship failure because they can afford to - when their app crashes, nobody starves. When peasants' crops failed in 1959, we should have adjusted course immediately. Instead, we doubled down on steel quotas while grain rotted in fields. Liu Shaoqi himself admitted it was "30% natural disasters and 70% human error" [2] - human error born from refusing to acknowledge failure! You think this validates your romantic view of failure? It proves the opposite! The disaster stands as "a testament to the value of independent thought and free speech" and the dangers of "suppressing critical, independent thought" [3]. We silenced those who warned of failure, punished honest reporting of crop yields, and forbade criticism of policies that weren't working. Your "learning from failure" philosophy would have saved those 30 million lives! But we treated any acknowledgment of failure as counter-revolutionary betrayal. The real tragedy wasn't the policy mistakes - it was our refusal to admit failure and correct course. Success without the humility to learn from setbacks becomes murderous delusion. The blood is on my hands because I valued ideological success over honest failure.