  We stress that the lack of direct evidence for supersymmetry forces the soft
mass parameters to lie very close to the critical line separating the broken
and unbroken phases of the electroweak gauge symmetry. We argue that the level
of criticality, or fine-tuning, that is needed to escape the present collider
bounds can be quantitatively accounted for by assuming that the overall scale
of the soft terms is an environmental quantity. Under fairly general
assumptions, vacuum-selection considerations force a little hierarchy in the
ratio between m_Z^2 and the supersymmetric particle square masses, with a most
probable value equal to a one-loop factor.
