Local vs. ecological optimization names one of the load-bearing distinctions in the whole model. A single organization optimizes a narrow objective, and doing so can be entirely rational: a firm may cut an unproductive employee, prefer people who think alike because coordination is easier, or release a disabled worker whose accommodation costs more than the output it can see. None of that is irrational at the firm’s scale.
Why the scales must not be fused
The error is extending one organization’s objective function to the whole society. A firm can validly say this participant is no longer useful to this organization; it cannot follow that this participant has no ecological value — the larger field still holds relationships, knowledge, care, future development, and dormant capacities the firm’s accounting never sees. An ecology can even be weakened when every organization optimizes locally at once: it loses redundancy, dissent, and variation it will need when conditions change. So the model never argues never remove anyone from anything — it argues do not confuse failure to fit one local objective with the loss of a participant’s standing in the larger ecology. The employee can be fired; their jurisdiction in that firm ends, their standing does not. See Selection Without Annihilation.