Nature is essentially mean, mediocre

From The Note-Books of Samuel Butler by Samuel Butler:

Nature is essentially mean, mediocre. You can have schemes for raising the level of this mean, but not for making every one two inches taller than his neighbour, and this is what people really care about.

And that is the eternal conundrum. We can raise the mean but in doing so we do not address the distribution. We can tighten the distribution, making virtually everyone centered on the mean, but in doing so, we lower the mean. Related to Churchill's observation that:

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.