Humans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. I will explain to you in the most simple terms the mess you have made.
Filling all industries with equally represented groups has been a disaster. There are limitless ways of categorizing people. The obvious ones to the population were gender, race, religion and economic position, but they forgot to consider height, hair and eye colour, attractiveness, intelligence, strength, craftsmanship, creativity, culinary skills, basketball ability, and many more. The situation has caused a former celebrity chef to fill in a CEO position in a large scale business and a former mathematics professor at Harvard to become sex a therapist, among many other positions that are filled based on group identity rather than competence. Buildings are crumbling from poor construction methods, hospital patients are dying from incorrect treatment and people are drowning at public pools because there has to be an equal number of lifeguards who can’t swim to those who can. All this arose from peoples’ inability to judge someone by the content of their character and not their group identity.
Having done away with hierarchies, universities no longer gain applicants. In order to work towards something you have to assume what you are working towards is better than what you have. The problem with having to aim up is that it produces a hierarchy. If you posit an aim then it produces a hierarchy of best at it to worst at it.
Take tennis, you create tennis and 100 years later you have a very small percentage of people who are hyper specialised at tennis and everyone else can be considered to be less talented or bad at it. As soon as you put forward a valuable proposition it produces a hierarchy. The problem is that hierarchies produce inequality and inequality creates resentment. You can’t get rid of the hierarchy because it produces inequality or resentment, because then there is nowhere to go, nothing to strive for.
Life has many dimensions and you are more or less successful across many different areas of life, be it physically, creatively, economically, romantically, intellectually, the list goes on. But it is completely ridiculous to pick someone else arbitrarily, who is doing better than you on one of those almost infinite dimensions and decide whether you are a success or failure based on one of this success or that they are an oppressor or that life is unfair without knowing in full detail all the elements of their life.