So I found it and finished reading it. I recommend it. But today I'm not here to excerpt from the book, or even to agree with it entirely.

I just want to share some of my own experiences and insights, offering a different sample.

Is Trauma the Essential Form of Life's Existence?

At the end of the book, Liang Hong writes:

Without a complete, ideal concept of family, trauma is the essential form of life's existence.

I don't particularly agree with this point. Admittedly, my own family of origin wasn't perfect either, and I was often beaten as a child. But I've never felt that trauma defined me. I feel that these experiences exist, but they've never been primary.

Perhaps there's a kind of wild vitality in me that allows me to resist everything. The book also mentions "life's resilience." I feel I have an innate tendency to pursue truth—from childhood I've felt I was on a mission. There's a supreme existence in this world, and my mission is to approach truth.

I've always felt this is the authentic existence in my life. As for trauma—though I often feel lonely, unloved, and even struggle to understand happiness—trauma doesn't seem that important.

So is this because I couldn't feel unconditional love in childhood, and my life spontaneously generated a grand sense of mission as self-rescue? Using such hard armor to resist insignificance and meaninglessness?

No. I can be certain it's not like that.

This spiritual experience has basically nothing to do with my parents. In my childhood, my father worked away from home for years and was absent. But looking back now, I'm even grateful for this absence. Because it was precisely my father's absence that allowed my life's will to grow freely without external interference.

Sublimation

I shared my experience with Gemini, and it told me:

In psychology, there's an extremely advanced defense mechanism called "sublimation." When the real world (family, warmth) cannot provide support, an extremely gifted child may explore inward, constructing an indestructible fortress in "thought" and "truth."

I feel this is exactly what I'm doing.

I've met quite a few children who grew up in happy families. They indeed have more security, are more confident in their direction, and have much less internal conflict.

But somehow, I don't really envy people without internal conflict. Perhaps deep down I secretly feel: some of the deepest wisdom can only come from suffering.

The Third Way

I question those who possess life convictions early on—why are they so certain about these convictions? Is this certainty a rational construction, or just a leap of faith?

Much of the certainty we see may stem from two sources:

1. The luck of a good family—never having seen darkness, so seeing only light;
2. Defensive certainty—inner inferiority and conflict, armored with arrogance.

What I want to pursue is whether there's a third way: is there some ultimate good? A transcendent certainty.

One that doesn't require me to be lucky enough to be born into a happy family filled with love—even if born in the gutter, it doesn't prevent me from growing into a great tree.

One that can transcend the oscillation between inferiority and arrogance, that passes rational scrutiny, that doesn't need to bluff and pretend, but is genuinely firm from the heart.

In a word: principled goodness—gentle yet firm. Gentle because of goodness, firm because of principles.

Principled Goodness

Actually, this "principled goodness" is what I most wanted to see in Europe—to see how it's even possible.

During the pandemic, I read Yang Xiaokai's articles. He mentioned that in Western society, he felt for the first time that there was love without reason in the world, unable to find a trace of calculated self-interest.

After reading, my heart yearned for it.

So did I see it in Europe? Gratuitous kindness.

I did see it, indeed more densely than in Chinese society.

But does it match the principled goodness in my heart? Not entirely. More often it's also a product of the growing environment. A relatively good environment has cut off those bottomless evils, allowing people to initiate relationships with kindness with less guard.

And the true principled goodness in my heart—I learned it from books. Kant and Dostoevsky made clear to me how this thing is possible: treating doing good as a duty, doing good first, and then good deeds will naturally generate love for others in your heart. Even if good deeds encounter misunderstanding and cold reception, don't leave this path, but see it as bitter merit.

In short: if I have never seen the sun, then I'll become light myself.

Finally, let's conclude with words from the book:

These are sacred moments, moments in life that have light because of mutual understanding and mutual care. That's where humanity's hope lies.

It wasn't until I read Kant two years ago that I first encountered the concept of duties to others.

Before that, I was rather like Sun Wukong—placing my autonomy and dignity above all else. Stubborn by nature, often at odds with the world, absolutely refusing to give anyone leverage over me or to allow emotional manipulation.

Though deeply sentimental at heart, I rarely expressed it to others, as if it were a weakness or vulnerability. And indeed it was—meeting the wrong people made me an easy target for exploitation. Once, an old friend of ten years swindled me out of some money, and I was so furious I mentally blacklisted everyone from that entire province. The money itself—a few thousand dollars—wasn't much. What hurt more was the betrayal of friendship.

Even so, we should still pursue friendship. The most precious things in life are friends, followed by time. Both friends and time are worth more than money.

1. Perfect Friendship

Perfect friendship seems to exist only in romantic novels—nearly impossible to achieve in reality, relying on chance and rarely reaching perfection. The ship of friendship capsizes easily, and once overturned, can scarcely be righted again.

The difficulty of friendship lies in the tension between love and respect. Friends must have affinity and maintain attraction; yet they also need mutual respect and appropriate distance—a kind of repelling force.

Perfect friendship, then, is merely an ideal—unattainable. Yet we must pursue it nonetheless.

Since friendship is so contingent, my understanding of the methodology is this:

First, uphold all the principles of friendship, fulfill all the duties a friend ought to have, make yourself worthy of friendship, and only then hope to find friends who can understand such friendship.

Four principles of friendship:

1. Even the best of friends should not become overly familiar. Excessive intimacy irreparably undermines respect.

2. Mutual advantage must not be made the end of friendship. Even when friends help each other, this is merely the outward manifestation of inner benevolence, not the end or ground of friendship.

3. Whether helping or being helped, preserve a sense of equality—help one another as peers, not as a benefactor bestowing favors.

4. Do not put friendship to the test.

2. Bitter Merit

Since reading Kant and Dostoevsky these past two years, I've been trying to practice the idea of loving others. But it hasn't gone smoothly.

The biggest problem is: What do we do when our good deeds are met with misunderstanding and indifference?

To be honest, I don't enjoy doing good at all. I know I've never been a good person.

In the past, I most admired Sulla—half lion, half fox—whose motto was: "No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full."

So whenever my goodwill is misunderstood or my kindness repaid with evil, I'm immediately filled with rage and want to retaliate.

I'm a hired servant, I expect my wages at once—that is, praise and the repayment of love with love. Otherwise I'm incapable of loving anyone!

—Madame Khokhlakov, The Brothers Karamazov

For someone as wicked as me to suddenly reform and pursue goodness—you can imagine this entirely unfamiliar path won't be easy.

Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all.¹

But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.¹

—Elder Zosima, The Brothers Karamazov

Yet this is precisely the true path that Kant and Dostoevsky point us toward.

When our good deeds are met with misunderstanding and coldness, though the feeling is bitter, the moral merit is actually greater, because it more purely demonstrates the strength of our virtue.

Even if you cannot attain to happiness, always remember that you are on the right path, and try not to leave it.¹

—Elder Zosima, The Brothers Karamazov

3. Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

Honestly, I still don't understand how one can actually love one's neighbor.

I could never understand how one can love one's neighbors. It's just one's neighbors, to my mind, that one can't love, though one might love those at a distance.²

—Ivan Karamazov, The Brothers Karamazov

But loving your neighbor as yourself doesn't mean first stirring up feelings of love in your heart, then helping others through that impulse. Rather, treat doing good as a duty—do good first, and the doing itself will naturally generate love for others in your heart.

This is practical wisdom.

References

¹ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Elder Zosima's teachings

² Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov's words

1. The supreme dignity of human beings
2. Know yourself
3. Bitter merit
4. Perfect friendship

Today, I’ll explore the first.

The Dignity of Man

Does any nobility really exist? Why can't I see that?

This was a Weibo post I wrote thirteen years ago while working at a state-owned enterprise in Henan.

In a moral wasteland like Henan, it is, of course, exceedingly difficult to witness nobility in daily life.

When European friends ask me what I like about my homeland, after thinking long and hard, the only thing I can come up with is its "smoky, fiery air" (yan huo qi)—the power of life itself, the vitality of "living on, like an animal."

But even ants try to cling to life; this instinct alone grants no special dignity to humanity.

So where does human nobility actually originate?

What makes us human? Are we really just a bundle of desires?

Why do we pursue knowledge? Why do we work so hard? Just to survive like insects?

In this world of sordid, meaningless struggles, what can our lives possibly add?

These questions drove me to abstract philosophy, to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals.

Why do human beings have dignity?

Western political theory offers a ready answer: natural rights. But natural rights are too bound by history. They initially belonged only to white men, expanding gradually over centuries, and remain far from universal today. Does this mean that in countries with poor human rights records, like China, human dignity is somehow diminished? Are some lives simply worth less?

Such a theory cannot convince me. We must dig deeper for something unconditional—foundations that stand firm regardless of circumstance.

Kant’s answer is elegantly simple: human dignity springs from reason and our capacity for autonomy.

By “reason,” he doesn’t mean mere calculation or problem-solving, but our ability to recognize our own existence and distinguish ourselves from everything else. Reason reveals our dual nature: we are both animals driven by desire and rational beings capable of transcending those very desires.

“Autonomy” means more than self-control—it’s the power to create our own laws. While self-discipline often teaches us to constrain ourselves, autonomy can be expansive: we can establish our own principles, choose our beliefs, and pursue them relentlessly, holding fast to what we know is right.

As a Chinese person, I have zero interest in preaching those tired Confucian virtues of gentleness, kindness, and deference. What matters is this expansive autonomy, this radical freedom—the absolute sovereignty of the individual. This is the wellspring of human dignity. It’s not merely a right but an obligation.

I often recall a passage from The Godfather that perfectly captures this autonomy and dignity:

They were those rarities, men who refused to accept the rule of organized society, men who refused the dominion of other men. There was no force, no mortal man who could bend them to their will unless they wished it. They were men who guarded their free will with wiles and murder. Their wills could be subverted only by death. Or the utmost reasonableness.

—Mario Puzo, The Godfather

Setting aside the criminal methods, this iron will embodies exactly what Kant meant by autonomy. If everyone possessed this quality, we’d have Kant’s “kingdom of ends.”

On Dignity, Arrogance, Servility, and Humility

Dignity means recognizing the inherent worth of all people—including yourself—as rational beings. It’s universal, equal, and absolute.

Arrogance places you above others, demanding they diminish themselves while refusing to grant them equal respect. Servility does the opposite—placing yourself beneath others, reducing yourself to their instrument.

Both create hierarchies, which is why they’re often found together. The arrogant are frequently servile, and here’s why: When you call someone “trash,” you’re claiming human worth is conditional. If dignity has conditions, it becomes a commodity, not dignity at all. How you treat others becomes how you treat yourself. By your own logic, your dignity becomes precarious, dependent on circumstances, leaving you terrified of falling.

True dignity isn’t zero-sum. Mine doesn’t diminish yours.

Yet Chinese culture demands perpetual humility—I must lower myself to dust. Asserting my dignity becomes an offense. Why?

Chinese humility is a hierarchical game: I abase myself, you’re obligated to elevate me in return. Fail to play along, and you’re socially inept. Refuse to abase yourself, and you’re arrogant.

But human nature demands something else entirely: to stand tall without groveling or self-deprecation.

This explains my lifelong conflict with Chinese culture. I’ve never understood:To whom, exactly, should I be humble?

My social training was pure coercion—bow to power and status or be crushed. The nail that stands up gets hammered down. Society punishes those who won’t comply. But we never truly believed this garbage. High status doesn’t equal wisdom or virtue. I might bend temporarily under pressure, but I never truly submit.

Real humility bows only to higher principles—the knowledge that we’re always journeying toward, but never reaching, perfect reason and perfect good. This doesn’t mean anyone alive can make me surrender my autonomy.

When external laws—whether social norms, unwritten rules, or hierarchies—are themselves irrational, designed to degrade and instrumentalize people, what should someone pursuing true autonomy do?

I am the answer: Reject them. Find principles that genuinely convince you, then live by them unwaveringly.

That’s why I’ll always side with the rebels—they’re my people. Someone with real dignity helps the servile recognize their worth and forces the arrogant to check themselves.

When Harry asked Dumbledore what he saw in the Mirror of Erised, Dumbledore said he saw himself holding a thick pair of woolen socks.

One can never have enough socks. Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn't get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.

— Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Of course, Dumbledore wasn't really short of socks. For a great wizard, conjuring socks is hardly a problem. Woolen socks stood for family affection.

Just as Dumbledore wanted socks but kept receiving books, I too often have small, genuine needs that go unnoticed or suppressed.

My WeChat profile picture hasn’t changed for six years. I’m not the kind of person who likes taking photos. In the past I was always too reserved, often transparent in group activities. I’d look through all the photos of an event and not find a single one with me in it. So when someone finally managed to take a good picture of me, I kept using it until it wore out. And the person who took that photo happened to be a girl who liked me. Which made me wonder: is it only someone who loves you that can take a good photo of someone who never looks good on camera? After all, who else would bother to focus on you, to find the right angle, and even refine the photo afterward?

But this led me to think further: If I clearly have needs, why I am always too ashamed to voice them?

Maybe because I've experienced too many moments where saying it made no difference. Over time I developed this passive emotional mode:

• If you don't say it, but others can still guess and meet the need—that's a huge bonus, affection skyrockets.

• If you express it just lightly, and the other person goes to great lengths to meet your subtle need—that's another bonus.

• If you say it and others ignore it or dismiss it—even after you emphasize it repeatedly—that's a deduction.

• Worst of all, like my father: you tell him, and he mocks you for it.

But this way of thinking is too twisted.

When we were younger, maybe it wasn’t so hard for others to understand. But as we grow in mind and experience, to still expect unspoken understanding is basically waiting for a miracle.

A more mature way is to express your needs bravely and honestly. This not only takes care of your own feelings, but also gives others the chance to understand you.

Back then, I was ashamed to speak up because I misunderstand human relationships. I thought it was a zero-sum game: if others had to go out of their way to meet my needs, it meant I was somehow taking advantage.

But that’s not true.

Existential isolation is a condition every human must face. And the main force that counteracts it is relationship.

Relationships can break through the walls of isolation, building bridges between different selves.

In fulfilling our own needs, we are also giving others the chance to practice loving.

Through encountering another person, we are changed. Our inner world grows richer. Even a brief encounter can become an internal reference.

Just like the Sword of Gryffindor absorbs whatever makes it stronger.

If you doubt it, just look at how many of your habits—picked up unconsciously—might trace back to someone’s example or a stray word in your past.

This is also why, when friends ask me whether they should have children, I usually encourage them to.

It’s not that children need parents—it’s the opposite: parents need children.

Children offers parents the chance to experience need-free love, directed toward another human being.

And it is precisely this process that helps parents fight and dissolve existential isolation.

So, my friend, do you also want a pair of woolen socks?

Reference

Irvin Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy

Though it has fewer than three hundred followers, and each article only gets views in the double digits,
popularity was never the goal.

Looking back at the very first “Prologue,” it actually holds up quite well:
to go beyond mere repetition, to distinguish order from chaos.
And in hindsight, it has largely lived up to that.

I cannot imagine how I would recall the past without these hundreds of pieces.
Many subtle and delicate emotions would have vanished forever,
like a spring dream leaving no trace.
These writings have marked the passage of time.

Along the way, I do feel myself becoming stronger.
As though Achilles’ mother had washed him in the waters of the Styx,

I too have been tempering my own heart,
forging it to grow stronger.

Yet my very idea of strength has changed.
In the past, I thought strength meant a heart of stone—
someone unshaken, untouched, and immune to inner turmoil.
But I no longer think this way.

Now, a line from Vagabond speaks closer to my heart:
“All the strong are gentle.”

Only the truly foolish cling stubbornly to exclusion,
priding themselves on never being “broken.”
It is only the truly strong who can stand firmly on the earth,
embracing everything with vast magnanimity,
understanding the suffering and struggles of others,
and soothing the human heart.

This account is called Zheng Shiqi(正十七), referring to the regular heptadecagon, a name taken from the novel * Yingxiong Zhi.*
It means squaring the circle: the perfect circle belongs to the realm of the divine, while mortals can only transform circle into square, approaching it step by step.

I can see that, in the past, God for me dwelled high above, in the heavens. What I sought then was truth at the very limits of knowledge—the hidden reality behind the world, the sun beyond Plato’s cave.

Back then, what we longed for was God’s omniscience—the ultimate form of human reason, a symbol of mankind’s pursuit of truth.

But now, for me, God dwells among humans, by our side. Even if human reason were pushed to its limits, it could never answer the question: “What ought one to do?”

It is no longer omniscience or omnipotence that I find most unattainable, but God’s omnibenevolence. For once you understand the limits of your ability, the things you long for yet cannot achieve no longer wound you—you have done your best. What truly cuts deep is regret: the remorse for what could have been done but was left undone.

This is the curse of freedom.
And in my eyes, omnibenevolence means the perfect use of this human freedom.

As for what to write in the future,
I’ve wondered whether to shift toward more popular topics.
After all, writing with few readers can indeed feel discouraging at times.

My strength lies in cognition.
Not that I produce endless new insights in any one field,
but that I can sift through the flood of noise and recognize what is truly valuable.

So, if I were to write something of public use,
perhaps the most worthwhile would be popular science—
curating and filtering knowledge.
But I rarely feel like doing it.
I only write such things when I’ve argued with someone
and need to set the record straight.

I write only about what matters to me. But what matters to me is seldom fashionable, so it may never become popular. So be it. I’ll treat it as play, nothing more.

Better to be neither beautiful nor popular than to lose sincerity and originality.

The next guiding thread of my life is this: to conquer fear.

If I fear writing with emotion, then I will write more of it—laying that weakness bare.
If I feel I have never been cool, then I will try to become cooler.
If I am always afraid of rejection, then I will keep facing it until I am desensitized.

Funny how when you’re supposed to be doing real work, even massive tomes become entertainment. To avoid actual work, I could even force myself through a few pages of the Critique of Pure Reason.

I’ve always been hesitant to write about this book. As the culmination of Dostoevsky’s lifetime of thought, I doubt my ability to grasp its full depth.

Even today, I can only approach it from the details, jotting down scattered personal reflections.

What shocked me about The Brothers Karamazov back then was precisely that I was deeply troubled by questions of meaning and nihilism.

Just like Ivan’s declaration in the book that “everything is permitted,” I too believed at the time that good and evil were human constructs.

But the book uses a patricide case to show us the bloody consequences of nihilism, reminding us that morality is not entirely man-made after all—it’s neither relative nor void.

Ivan renounced his God, unable to accept the innocent suffering of children, wanting to return his ticket to eternal harmony.

And I too had shaken my long-held faith in humanity, unable to accept that a position of freedom could stand against everyone else.

Initially, I just wanted to find a framework to resolve questions of right and wrong sparked by the intense conflicts around the Hong Kong events.

That’s when I discovered an entire field of study: ethics, also known as moral philosophy.

My understanding of morality still stems from Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. The ancient Greeks divided science into three categories: logic, which studies pure form without any material substance; physics, which studies natural phenomena; and ethics, which studies the phenomena of freedom.

In other words, all questions about humanity fall into the moral domain.

In my currently muddled brain, moral questions have broad implications: ultimate faith, the meaning of life, universal values, standards of good and evil, the ideal world, the foundation and principles for living, human dignity...

Morality is ultimately not void. Regardless of what it’s rooted in, while it is indeed constructed by humans, the reasons behind it aren’t arbitrary but deeply planted in something more fundamental.

What’s frustrating is that while I believe in the existence of objective moral absolute truth, I can’t articulate what it is at all, always doubting what to stand for. Meanwhile, those who verbally deny these things have bodies more honest than their mouths—each one certain and categorical. The contradiction here is: if there’s no absolute truth in the world, what gives you the right to advocate or insist on anything? Your position against absolute truth itself has nothing absolute about it. I understand many people oppose this from a stance of freedom, as if someone even thinking about these universal questions is trying to set rules for others, an offense to their free will. But isn’t the order implied by this idea that everyone is free and equal itself an absolute truth? This is the second-order abstraction of moral questions, what Kant explores in the metaphysics of morals.

I must honestly admit that I am utterly incapable of solving such complex problems. My mind is a Euclidean, earthly mind, so how can I solve problems that are not of this world?

—Ivan Karamazov

Let’s leave these ultimate answers to those who are capable, though I’m skeptically doubtful they can be solved.

As Ivan’s “Grand Inquisitor” parable reveals, humanity’s existential predicament is that no miracle shows you absolute truth, no one can tell you the ultimate mysteries of this world.

Humans seem like “immature experiments created as a joke,” a bunch of weak traitors. Given freedom, you can’t bear its burden at all, always eager to surrender it to some answer, no matter how superficial. Given reason, but incompletely—as Kant criticized in the Critique of Pure Reason, reason can never cross the boundary to answer questions about the transcendent world.

Dostoevsky said Ivan is profound—not like contemporary atheists whose lack of faith merely demonstrates narrow worldviews and mediocre, dull intellects.

Ivan’s heart isn’t the tranquility and liberation of unbelief; rather, behind rational disbelief, there’s always an interrogation of doubt about that disbelief.

Though I cannot see the sun, I still know there is a sun. And isn't knowing there is a sun the entire meaning of life?

—Dmitri Karamazov

The Karamazov family holds deep symbolic meaning. As I understand it, the father represents human primal desires and bodily instincts; the eldest son represents human emotion and passion; the second son Ivan represents human reason and speculation; the third son represents faith and spirituality; the illegitimate son represents the incarnation of evil when reason breaks free from moral constraints.

I naturally empathize most with Ivan. Elder Zosima’s words of comfort to Ivan once comforted me too. He yearns for life but lacks conviction in living. He has major intellectual problems unresolved—he’s the type who needs to solve intellectual problems rather than needing millions. But once upon a time, I was also a Dmitri (the eldest son). I remember when Liu Han said my greatest strength was passion and explosive force—it makes me lament how things have changed. People always miss childhood and youth because they had no intellectual troubles then; the world was simple and black-and-white. But wisdom should liberate people.

Love life, not life’s meaning; love concrete people, not abstract humanity.

This reminds me of Honey in A Brighter Summer Day, a gang leader who reads * War and Peace*. He says people from ancient times are really like us. Look—two hundred years have passed, and we’re still troubled by similar problems. And predictably, two hundred years from now, there will still be people worrying just like us.

This is why I say the intellectual gap between Dream of the Red Chamber and * The Brothers Karamazov* spans millennia. * Dream* is a portrait of life in clan society. Though three hundred years have passed, I can still empathize—the characters remain vivid as if before my eyes, because I too grew up in a large family and can understand the motives behind every word and action. But where does it have even half of * The Brothers Karamazov*‘s ultimate interrogation, pointing directly at the essence of human existential predicament? When you read the Zen dialogue parts between Jia Baoyu and Xue Baochai/Lin Daiyu in * Dream of the Red Chamber*, the deep feeling is of a bunch of middle school kids parroting responses, with the final answer being to become a monk and be done with it. But * The Brothers Karamazov* has both profound rebels like Ivan pointing directly at the problem’s essence, and genuinely attempts through Elder Zosima to solve these existential questions.

My recent hobby is downloading academic papers from CNKI after finishing a book. Douban reviews always seem shallow; it’s more interesting to read analyses people spent years developing. Of course, quality varies—I’ve read some analyses of The Brothers Karamazov where master’s theses cobbled together by twenty-something young women are simply unreadable, just piling up flowery language without understanding the deeper meaning. I can’t get through even a little bit.

However, one paper, "Dostoevsky's Christian Thought Through 'The Grand Inquisitor,'" contains some lines that resonate with me. I excerpt them here for remembrance of things forgotten:

Where there is guardianship over people, hypocritical concern for their happiness and enjoyment, while simultaneously despising them, not believing in their noble origin and noble mission—there lies the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor.

Where happiness is valued over freedom, the temporary placed above the eternal, loving humanity used to oppose loving God—there lies the spirit of the Grand Inquisitor.

Where it's emphasized that truth is useless for human happiness, that life can be arranged without understanding life's meaning—there it lies.

—from "Dostoevsky's Christian Thought Through 'The Grand Inquisitor'"

Take Watanabe’s rebirth in Ikiru, for instance. But it was just a fleeting question, without concrete evidence.

Until I came across the passage about the little beggar girl in Humiliated and Insulted. Before I’d even finished reading it, I was shouting inside: Isn’t this exactly the prototype for the child prostitute in * Red Beard*?

You can’t even call it homage—it’s wholesale reproduction.

Case closed.

My excitement was beyond words; I had to stop and revel in it for a while.

Look! My favorite film master also loves my favorite intellectual giant.

Actually, it’s not just films. I suspect manga artist Inoue Takehiko is also paying tribute to Dostoevsky in Vagabond—the monk Takuan is practically the incarnation of Elder Zosima from * The Brothers Karamazov*.

No amount of praise could overstate Dostoevsky’s greatness.

But tragically, having read The Brothers Karamazov first—that pinnacle of world literature—everything else seems shallow by comparison.

There’s an interesting comment about this book on Douban: When old Dostoevsky was still young Dostoevsky, he was basically a Maugham.

That was exactly my feeling after finishing The Painted Veil: Maugham is just a budget version of Dostoevsky.

Yesterday on Bilibili, I heard someone comparing Dostoevsky to Lu Xun as China’s equivalent. I was inwardly cursing—what nonsense, they’re not even in the same league. What gives Lu Xun the right?

Thinking back to when Dream of the Red Chamber was my favorite book makes me feel somewhat ashamed. Though * Dream of the Red Chamber* and * The Brothers Karamazov* were written barely a century apart, the gap in their intellectual depth spans millennia—they’re not even in the same weight class.

This really highlights the significance of literary criticism.

That’s why I bristle when people try to teach me to approach books with reverence.

It’s precisely the absence of literary criticism that wastes so much of our time on cultural garbage.

Many books simply aren’t worth reading. After Black Myth: Wukong became popular, many people hyped up * Journey to the West*, but in my view, later adaptations like * A Chinese Odyssey* and * The Monkey King* actually surpass the original.

These classics serve mainly as source material. Their intellectual merit hardly deserves praise. Some even promote seriously twisted values.

But back to this book. It’s one of the author’s early works, less profound than his later ones, with a simple plot about a woman who elopes and then gets abandoned.

But the villain isn’t the one who directly abandons her—it’s the young man’s father, a noble duke who was himself involved in another elopement and abandonment case.

When the duke righteously spouts the most shameless words in the book, I actually found myself amused by this brazen shamelessness. I’ve seen plenty of terrible people, but such frank ones are rare.

Many people I’ve known came to mind—I’ve seen too many of these egoistic types in reality, even ones this thoroughly rotten. Especially those with privilege like the duke.

Conversely, when the book says “There are many, many good people in the world. It’s your misfortune: you haven’t met good people, and when you needed help, you didn’t encounter them,” I have to think long and hard to come up with examples.

But though the villains are villainous, the author spends more ink criticizing the father who won’t forgive his eloped daughter—who clearly loves her deeply yet, out of wounded pride, hardens his heart to disown and even curse her.

So when the old father finally sees the light through the orphan Nelly's tragic plight and chooses to forgive his daughter, his heartfelt hymn to love is especially moving:

Oh, I thank You, God, I thank You for everything, everything, for Your wrath and for Your mercy! And for the sun that shines on us again after the storm has passed!

For this priceless moment, I thank You! Oh! Though we are the insulted, though we are the injured, we are together again, so let those arrogant and mighty ones, let those who have insulted and injured us now triumph! Let them throw stones at us!

Don't be afraid, Natasha... We'll go out hand in hand, and I'll say to them: This is my beloved daughter, this is my precious one, this is my innocent daughter whom you have insulted and injured, but I love her and will bless her forever!

Encounters are all about timing. If I had watched it earlier, I probably wouldn’t have felt much.

But now it feels just right. I was moved to tears multiple times while watching it.

It’s our human duty to enjoy life. The film expresses this idea through the words of a second-rate writer. Greed is rarely a good thing, but craving life is not a flaw.

I’m starting to believe that moral ambiguity and human frailty aren’t shortcomings—they are, in some ways, a form of justice. If there is such a thing as moral truth in this world, it must be something that praises life and promotes cooperation.

We talk about freedom and independence, about boundaries and autonomy, because they enable a better form of cooperation—one that allows life to expand and thrive.

Conversely, suppressing individual will through grand narratives and forcing cooperation in its name is nothing more than diminishing life under the guise of unity.

Selfishness and narrow-mindedness are not inherently bad; they are necessary for civilization to endure. Otherwise, human society might have remained at the level of ants and bees.

Likewise, selflessness and devotion are not always virtuous—beyond a certain point, they become blind obedience and folly.

Social norms are filled with demands from others that disregard individuality. Yet few ever tell you that enjoying life is not just a right but a duty. It is not secondary; it should always be at the very center. A deep longing for life is both beautiful and justified.

Life is brief—we should live it to the fullest.

On Isolation

The film portrays the rift between a father and his son. Though they live under the same roof, they are worlds apart, struggling to communicate.

Whenever the father tries to reach out, his son responds with indifference and misunderstanding. In the end, the father keeps his cancer a secret until the very moment of his death.

This isn’t a story about shallow moral judgments like ingratitude. Human relationships are complex, and even in the film’s brief dialogues, subtle hints emerge. The father’s sacrifices are evident—after losing his wife, he dedicated himself entirely to raising his son, even refused to remarry for his sake. Yet, when his son underwent an appendectomy, he still chose work over staying by his side.

To live in this world and yet remain misunderstood, even by one’s closest family—that is true loneliness.

This reminds me of my relationship with my father. My father is hard to define. I can’t say he has Watanabe’s awareness or great personality. Whenever he speaks, there’s always that dad authority, never learned how to respect others. He wraps selfish thoughts in lies, which only serves as a double insult to both my intellect and my character. And when lying becomes second nature, the consequence is that he won’t believe even when you tell the truth, failing to understand any noble pursuits—only see the world through his own narrow lens. Not to mention the countless little things in life that make it hard to feel any real love. No doubt the love is there—just you have to dig really hard to find it.

When dealing with toxic love, you can’t fully embrace it. I used to simple chose to reject it entirely and distance myself.

The film made me realize how unnecessary this was. There’s no doubt that Watanabe, the protagonist, was a great man. As his colleagues noted, not everyone can face death the way he did. But what I must criticize is that he never told his son—not even at the very end. That was far too cruel.

Lover is never easy. It takes courage to communicate, and the ability to love must be cultivated. But avoiding it just because it’s hard is not the right answer. In fact, we shouldn’t even expect that others will change. Instead just show them a better path and leave the choice to them.

I feel that maturity begins when we learn to appreciate and navigate conditional love. I once discussed this my German friend. It seems that East and West aren’t so different in this regard. Maternal love tends to be closer to unconditional love, while paternal love is often conditional and less absolute. The spiritual patricide is a necessary stage toward personal independence. After moving past that phase, I now believe that we should take on the role of the father ourselves—to forgive, to love, and to show others the right way through our own actions.

Love is patient, love is kind.

On Meaning of Life

A nightlife with the writer did not bring redemption to Watanabe.

Pleasure is not life.

When the patrol officer described how Watanabe was perfectly happy on the swing in the park on the night he died, everyone was surprised.

Why? The man was about to die, the credit for the park he had spent months building was stolen by others. From a material perspective, there was no reason to be happy.

But I’ve been obsessed with this happiness.

Some say that everything we do is to better face death.

I don’t much care for Buddhist notions of emptiness and such. Everything is originally empty, an endless void. And so what? Living is ultimately about building, about creating something out of nothing.

I’ve always been driven by the thirst of knowledge and understanding, to be invincible under the sun (from Vagabond). But taken too far, I find myself becoming the dreamer from Dostoevsky’s writing, “rakes over his old dreams, as though seeking a spark among the embers, to fan them into flame, to warm his chilled heart by the rekindled fire.”(from White Nights)

Life lies in little things. A 20-year-old girl understood better than this 60 years old man. Though she’s making toy rabbits in a factory, she felt she’s becoming friends with every baby in Japan.

My frustrating habit is to constantly question the meaning of the little things I’m doing. But I think that is just a matter of perspective. Take the example of the park project in the film—you could dismiss the significance of building a park, but ultimately you cannot deny the smiling faces of the children playing there at the end of the film.

So when people say this film satirizes Japanese governmental bureaucracy, I think it’s missing the point, because I see reflections of all modern work in it. Office workers easily question the meaning of their jobs, and the key to overcoming this is finding its connection to reality.

When Watanabe finally discovered what he wanted to do and gave himself a purpose, the “Happy Birthday” song from young people in the background seemed to celebrate his rebirth. A stroke of genius.

I’ve always believed emotions were fleeting and ephemeral, unpredictable and chaotic.

My interest lay only in the eternal—I gravitated toward rationality and logic, which seemed more stable and enduring. No matter how much time passes or how many people rework them, they yield the same results.

It seemed that only these most refined aspects of thought represent the essence of human wisdom, that only these make knowledge possible and transmissible.

Emotions, by contrast, exist only in the present moment, like sparks that vanish without a trace, leaving nothing behind but the memory of a fleeting dream.

**Put simply: emotions are useless.**Reason guides us in understanding and transforming the world, while emotions prove utterly worthless against nature’s indifference and society’s brutal competition.

Yet this view is ultimately one-sided.

The domain of reason extends beyond the natural sciences; its object isn’t always the external world—eventually, its gaze must turn toward humanity itself.

The pinnacle of rationality involves encompassing human behavior too—what Kant called “legislating for oneself,” pursuing objective moral truth.

If my first thirty years were spent seeking truth, attempting to understand as much of the world as possible, then after thirty I’ve primarily sought goodness, exploring the true meaning of morality, trying to understand humanity itself.

**Objective moral truth manifests in many forms in this world:**Christian doctrine was once synonymous with truth; there’s also the Buddhist scriptures that Tang Seng sought through eighty-one trials, Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind, even the original aspirations of communism.

Whether objective moral truth exists is enormously controversial: one step forward leads to dogma, one step back to nihilism.

The sophisticated egoism permeating Chinese society is essentially massive nihilism. People don’t believe in anything higher than themselves, so everything becomes permissible.

Meanwhile, my long neglect of subjective emotion in pursuit of objective morality risks sliding to the opposite extreme. A concrete example that recently made me deeply reflect is Viktor from Arcane:

I thought I could end the world’s suffering, but when every equation is solved, all that remains is dreamless solitude. Perfection brought no reward—it only killed the pursuit.

This passage captures how our pursuit of objective moral truth originates from wanting to end the world’s suffering. But suppose that one day objective moral truth is truly discovered, the laws governing nature and society completely decoded, we’ve found the optimal solution for every situation, everyone knows exactly what they should do in any circumstance—the likely result would be the termination of human free will and aspiration, leaving only dreamless solitude.

Even Viktor’s cosmic perspective, observing everything from the universe, and that desolate world where everyone has been formatted—these vividly mirror my recent mental state.

In constantly pursuing the sublime through reason, we’ve unexpectedly converged with the other path, sliding into nihilism, seeing everything as insignificant and worthless—another form of spiritual void.

If objective moral truth exists, it must incorporate human subjectivity.

To act wisely, intelligence alone isn’t enough—something higher is needed.¹

I increasingly cannot understand Chinese society’s obsession with intelligence. Intelligence has brought me nothing but endless self-doubt.

Excessive consciousness is a disease—a genuine, thorough disease.²

If intelligence is only outward-facing, it’s merely instrumental rationality, like those who understand intelligence as a human database or encyclopedia—that’s hardly superior intelligence.

The higher intelligence is self-awareness—this is what Kant meant by reason. Only through this can people break free from external indoctrination, achieve moral transcendence, determine their own purposes rather than becoming tools of some ideology.

But even this isn’t enough. Excessive self-awareness leads to internal contradiction and suffering, paralyzing action.

We need something higher still.

But this absolutely isn’t as simple as the trendy phrase “reject internal friction.”

Honestly, I don’t like how people constantly talk about “internal friction.” How exactly can humans avoid internal friction? By becoming stones?

Or perhaps by taking Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”—but his stage of faith comes after, and above, the aesthetic and ethical stages.

I’m inclined to believe that internal friction and inner conflict are necessary paths to spiritual growth. Prematurely cementing one’s moral system is ultimately shallow and prone to disillusionment. It’s certainly not the higher thing Dostoevsky spoke of.

Speaking of intelligence, I suddenly recalled a line I once wrote:

For many of you from Tsinghua, the gaokao was your life’s peak.

Re-examining this now, I believe I’ve transcended this point. As a thinker, I’ve surpassed this identity. Perhaps not many will visibly acknowledge this, but that doesn’t matter—the heart knows its gains and losses.

I used to deliberately avoid mentioning this, as it easily backfires. Some people enjoy humiliating elite school graduates; others unconsciously project hierarchies of respect. Even when I reflect on elitism’s drawbacks and the limitations of one-dimensional intelligence, some only notice that you consider yourself elite, that you claim high intelligence. I don’t welcome such misunderstanding and alienation. But whether deliberately mentioning or avoiding it, both ultimately show you value it deep down.

But there is something higher.

What exactly is this higher thing? I can’t yet articulate it clearly, only some vague impressions:

The leap of faith, subjectivity as truth, equality and universal love, independent spirit, free thought, character and integrity, passion and love…

References

**1. Dostoevsky, ** Crime and Punishment

**2. Dostoevsky, ** Notes from Underground

Ever since I encountered the term “self-centeredness” in Natsume Sōseki’s My Individualism, the concept of subjectivity has lingered in my mind.

**Subjectivity is the individual’s experience and perception of the world.**Philosophically, subjective experience is the foundation of existence—as Descartes put it, “I think, therefore I am.”

I wouldn’t say I particularly lack subjectivity. I’ve always been unconventional, both in thought and experience. Yet this concept struck me immediately upon first encounter, keeping me up nights recently trying to understand it fully. First, because it perfectly encapsulates the cultural differences I’ve observed between East and West. Second, because it reveals something missing in my own framework—something about inferiority and transcendence.

Inferiority and Transcendence

I’ve always felt a deep sense of unworthiness, as if I don’t deserve the best things this world has to offer.

I remember late-night dorm room conversations in college about girlfriends. Back then, I was deeply anxious about meeting a girl’s parents, as though someone’s daughter raised for eighteen years was somehow being ruined by me.

Years have passed, yet this sense of unworthiness still shadows me.

I used to think my inferiority stemmed from constantly comparing myself to perfection—competing with an omniscient, omnipotent God, a battle naturally doomed to eternal defeat. So we square the circle, gradually approaching perfection. Though we can never reach it, we’re always on the path toward it. This is where my account name “Regular Heptadecagon” (正十七) comes from.

But is this really the case? What we call perfection is just a chimera—a patchwork creature cobbled together from the best qualities we see in others.

From my crude understanding of intelligence: an intelligence just two levels above yours would be unrecognizable and incomprehensible, even if placed right before you—much less something you’d worship and pursue. Similarly, our notion of perfection is nothing but deeply subjective imagination, with ourselves as the center and our understanding as the radius.

Why is our image of perfection a chimera, a polygon of different dimensions, rather than a single mountain peak? Because each dimension of this polygon reflects different expectations others have of us, manifested in our consciousness. So here’s what’s likely happening: though we claim to pursue perfection, what we’re really craving deep down is simply acceptance from others.

At its root, our sense of unworthiness may stem from having lived according to others’ expectations for so long—playing NPC-like supporting roles in their scripts, living the lives others expected of us, without true subjectivity of our own. Unable to declare from the depths of our being:

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.

Shakespeare, Hamlet

The Origins of Unworthiness

So how did this happen? When was this seed of unworthiness planted in me?

Was it my family of origin?

My European friends ask why I never go home for holidays. I tell them I can’t live peacefully with my parents for more than three days. But I don’t really buy theories about “family of origin” or “childhood trauma.” My parents were far from perfect, but looking back, my childhood was free and unstructured. Their laissez-faire, hands-off approach actually gave me freedom to exercise my own agency. Conflicts with my parents mostly emerged after I became an adult, and even those conflicts now seem like necessary catalysts for spiritual independence.

Was it society’s hierarchical culture?

I once read a brilliantly apt summary:

China’s universal value is bullying the weak and fearing the strong; China’s traditional wisdom is identifying who’s weak and who’s strong in the shortest time with the least information.

This can all be explained by survival-first philosophy and jungle society assumptions. But I fundamentally question this survival philosophy. Is such a life really worth living? Why is survival such a luxury for us that people must sacrifice everything else noble to secure it? This is also why I don’t think much of Liu Cixin—his Three-Body Problem is entirely about this survival philosophy. As someone astutely observed: others write space opera; he writes space Yu opera.

Conform or Rebel?

Should people conform to their nature or resist their instincts?

Our self-consciousness is the only proof we’ve lived in this world, and our subjectivity manifests through adventure and resistance.

True freedom is the attitude of pushing yourself back up after you’ve rolled to the bottom.

Some third-rate writer once said: “Life has three stages of growth: discovering you’re not the center of the world, discovering that no matter how hard you try some things remain impossible, and accepting your ordinariness and learning to enjoy it.”

I’d revise that and add one more:

Rediscovering your individual value and reclaiming center stage.

Natsume Sōseki beautifully described this journey from other-centeredness to self-centeredness in My Individualism:

Ah, here lies my path forward! I’ve finally excavated this road! When such an exclamation cries out from the depths of your heart, the weight on your chest will finally lift. For those troubled by fog along the way, I believe that no matter what sacrifices they must make, they should dig until they reach the ore deposit. When they arrive there, they’ll discover this is truly where they belong. I believe this is how one gains lifelong self-confidence and finally settles one’s heart.

Natsume Sōseki, My Individualism

Misunderstanding Individualism

When it comes to individualism, people often confuse it with egoism. Though they appear similar, the difference is vast. Egoism focuses only on maximizing one’s own interests and may harm others for self-benefit. Individualism, however, embodies a universal principle—it emphasizes individual freedom and rights while acknowledging and respecting others’ equal rights. Egoism leads to a war of all against all, a jungle society under dark forest rules; individualism can lead to a state where each person is free and fulfilled, without everyone becoming batteries serving the Matrix.

How to Practice Individualism

A crucial concept is separation of tasks.

All human troubles stem from interpersonal relationships. Wherever we go, we’re surrounded by others, living as social beings within webs of relationships, unable to escape this net of human connections. It seems only by gaining others’ approval can we feel valuable.

**But the path to freedom is one of not being approved.**The pursuit of approval kills freedom. A life spent trying to please everyone is profoundly unfree—and impossible besides.

When we try to please others, we implicitly assume that if we live and act according to their expectations, we deserve reciprocation—their approval and acceptance.

But this assumption secretly degrades others’ subjectivity, as if their wills can be manipulated by our actions, as if their wills are mere extensions of our own. As long as I give unilaterally, others should naturally reciprocate—so goes the logic.

Mutual benefit is certainly healthy in relationships, but it must be agreed upon by both parties. Unilateral giving while expecting return is, to some degree, emotional manipulation. This is common in unequal relationships—parents toward children, superiors toward subordinates.

All interpersonal conflicts arise from interfering in others’ tasks.

Separating tasks is the starting point of healthy relationships. We must begin by asking “whose task is this?” and separate our own tasks from others’. The criterion for distinguishing whose task it is: who will ultimately bear the consequences of the choice?

Regarding your own life, all you can do is choose the path you believe is best. How others evaluate your choices is their task—you simply cannot control it. Trying to interfere with or shoulder others’ tasks makes your life heavy and painful, and often produces backlash.

The Individual as Subject

From my experience, I prefer people with subjectivity. I once talked with a Dutch girl who told me Chinese people have a habit of trying to figure out what others think, then saying what others want to hear. This behavior itself is annoying—more so than honestly expressing yourself and saying the wrong thing—because you’re ignoring my will and guessing what I want based on your own assumptions, trying to decide for me what I should like.

I understand that some people do this out of respect, positioning themselves as subordinate, afraid of touching a nerve like servants attending an emperor. But I increasingly dislike this worldview of ranking people by status.

One problem with befriending someone with an inferiority complex is that they carry hierarchy in their hearts, and as their friend, they’ll drag you down to kneel with them. For example, Teacher Da has a distinction between officials and common people in his mind. When he acts inferior before officials, he drags me—a fellow commoner—down with him. But I don’t respect civil servants one bit. Or when we went to see tulips in the Netherlands and a passerby stopped some Indians from trampling the flower fields, I told my companion, “Let’s do the same if we see it.” He replied, “Too bad you’re not white.” I thought to myself, my heart is white.

This is why I increasingly like people who are fearless—at least you don’t have to worry about being dragged down to kneel.

People exist as powerless beings in this world. We want to escape this powerlessness, which gives rise to the universal desire for what Adler called “striving for superiority.”

Wanting to progress, pursuing an ideal state—these are understandable, even healthy impulses.

But striving for superiority means continuously moving forward yourself, not placing yourself above others.

Healthy feelings of inferiority don’t come from comparing yourself with others, but from continuous self-transcendence—pursuing your ideal self.

References

Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked 1.

Natsume Sōseki, My Individualism 1.

Kanji Izumiya, The Power of Depression(うつの力) 1.

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

When we talk about magical realism, we reflexively think of Latin America. In my view, this is purely the pot calling the kettle black, with zero self-awareness.

The magical reality on Chinese soil is no less absurd than Latin America’s.

Let’s start with Latin America’s hundred years of solitude, and also talk about China’s century of futility.

From a literary perspective, One Hundred Years of Solitude certainly broke new ground. But intellectually, it lacks depth. Of course, this might be my personal bias against anything tainted with communist sympathies, against any writer who sympathizes with communism. Lu Xun is like this, García Márquez is like this. These are all second-rate writers whose words seem brilliant but lack genuine insight, who can sense problems but can’t pinpoint the real disease. Compared to thinkers like Dostoevsky, who fiercely criticized socialist thought from its inception with truly prescient vision that transcended his era, the gap is immeasurable.

Let me give one example. The banana republic in the book is frequently cited by some as evidence of American imperialism or capitalism’s evil deeds in other countries. But if you examine it closely, the direct murderers who shot three thousand workers and dumped their bodies in the sea were the local government. We can certainly argue that capital was the mastermind behind it all, but this actually reveals from another angle that Macondo’s true nature was far from the pure innocence corrupted by capital that the author portrays—its barbarism and disregard for human life were its original cultural DNA. The local government put a cheap price tag on the lives under its jurisdiction, acted as middlemen to profit from the difference, then transnational capital placed the order, resulting in a more cost-effective strike solution—massacre. So tell me, who bears more responsibility here?

You could argue that the shooters were all damned outsiders, Wang Debiao and his hard drives, while all the Macondo folks were good people. But this argument is weak—when the water level of an entire society’s values is there, how can you alone remain untainted? Put Macondo people in other places as soldiers, and they’d shoot to kill just as readily. This is corroborated later when the colonel’s personal guards razed the entire family of a widow who offended him.

What impressed me most in the book was this massacre—three thousand workers slaughtered, loaded onto trains, and dumped at sea. Then when José, the sole surviving ghost, went back to ask people about it, nobody remembered it happening, as if the massacre never occurred. You know what? This magical reality feels incredibly familiar. In early June this year, many internet platforms banned messaging and changing avatars, and young people asked: Is this because of the college entrance exams?

The dead are gone, but the heavy burden remains with the living who cannot forget. So as I age, I increasingly understand and respect Mr. Xiaobo’s life choices after June 4th.

The character I most identify with and reflect upon is naturally the colonel. Beyond our similar INTJ personalities, there are similar political aspirations. The colonel’s initial reason for taking up arms was witnessing the Conservative government’s election fraud and the military authority beating a woman bitten by a rabid dog to death in the street. Driven by this sense of justice to declare war on the Conservative government, after twenty years of war, he ultimately became a cold-blooded tyrant himself.

"You hate those people so much, fought them for so long, and ultimately became just like them. No ideal in this world is worth such degradation as its price."

—García Márquez

So why would I want to be a rebel? On a personal level, it’s my hatred of privilege. On a larger scale, it’s my inability to tolerate this country’s deliberately designed systemic injustice. When I explain China’s dynastic cycles to foreign friends, when a Greek friend asked which was the most recent dynasty, I could only tell him that China is still under dynastic rule. Except for flying the communist banner, the actual logic of rule is no different from any previous dynasty—five hundred families rule China. More than half the country’s wealth is controlled by about two-thousandths of the population, roughly three million people. China has 1.4 billion people, but 80% of medical resources are spent on about eight million retired cadres. Tax burden ranks among the world’s highest, yet without corresponding public responsibility. Smart people enjoy their peaceful years, ordinary people remain ignorant, leaving idealistic fools to worry about the nation.

The colonel fought over thirty battles but left no political legacy, changed nothing. Watching the colonel’s twenty years of futile struggle makes me wonder—perhaps the real battlefield lies outside the military, perhaps the solutions that can truly break us out of historical cycles aren’t found between gun barrels but on paper, in people’s hearts. Some old bastard said political power grows from the barrel of a gun. Countless later idiots took this as gospel. But look at China’s century of achieving nothing, and you’ll know gun barrels changed nothing, didn’t change anything in any good way. Today’s regime is still a continuation of two thousand years of the Qin system. The Communist regime’s stability is even less than monarchy—every succession moment is a time of political turmoil.

The first goal of Chinese revolution is to establish constitutionalism. This must accompany the Communist Party’s split or collapse. When this will happen is completely unpredictable. Like many authoritarian regimes, it might collapse overnight, or it might endure a long winter. I lean toward the latter, because the mutual distrust in our ethnic history and culture, the lack of negotiation, compromise, and promise-keeping, means the game will be zero-sum and deadly.

I can’t help recalling what Professor Yang Xiaokai said—it’s best if China doesn’t have a revolution, a bloodless Glorious Revolution like England’s would be ideal. People always hope for quick success, but the result is haste makes waste. The aftereffects of rushing change are too severe. Like the elderly Sun Yat-sen abandoning the proper Anglo-American path to emulate Soviet Russia, bringing the specter of communism and profound disaster to the nation. The ultimate solution still lies in advancing education, in raising the public’s intellectual water level. Though this approach is slow, measured in long epochs, it’s the most stable path with the fewest aftereffects.

"To absorb European civilization, one must tackle the difficult before the easy—first transform hearts and minds, then change policies, and finally achieve tangible material progress. Following this sequence, though difficult, faces no real obstacles and can smoothly achieve its goals. Reverse the order, and what seems easy becomes impossible."

—Fukuzawa Yukichi

And educational change fundamentally begins with philosophical change. After reading much intellectual history, I now realize that Chinese Confucian culture was left far behind by Greek philosophy from its very inception. The thoughts of Plato and Aristotle still shine brilliantly after two thousand years. While Confucius and Laozi, by comparison, were just somewhat clever but not very clever old men.

Especially when reading this passage in intellectual history, I was struck with admiration:

Limited democracy is the best state we can hope for. The state is governed by law, a 'mixed government': democratic in quantity and aristocratic in quality. Politics is based on laws so that everyone can be free, and many citizens can have a say. The middle class should have the most power—neither rich nor poor. Government members are numerous enough for broad representation, yet few enough to ensure transparency. This provides the best balance between public opinion and intelligent administration. Most importantly, this is the most feasible form of government.

—Aristotle, summarized in A History of Western Thought

Two contemporaries—Aristotle’s thought encompassed patterns that two thousand years of global political development haven’t surpassed. Meanwhile, Confucius was still advocating for reviving Zhou rituals, which was already antiquated even then. And China’s two thousand years of culture has just been patching and mending on this foundation that wasn’t very advanced from birth, binding its own feet. This is the deep reason why China’s social organization hasn’t fundamentally changed in two thousand years. As Hegel said, “China has no history, only endless repetition of dynastic collapse and replacement, with the entire nation making no progress in the process.”

Like Latin America, for China to truly change and break out of the fatalistic cycle of one hundred years of solitude, the fundamental requirement is philosophical change. Social revolution is first a revolution of ideas—how people view important questions, what perspective they use to face the world, how they see others, what imagined identity they use to build community. These things may seem abstract, but they’re more real than anything. Meanwhile, what materialists call the material base that determines the superstructure—though visible and tangible, bringing China visible prosperity over twenty years—neither influenced the superstructure nor filled the spiritual void. In the end, it was all for nothing—what was earned by luck was lost through incompetence.

This is a realization I’ve come to recently based on some personal experiences and observations. The purpose of writing this piece is to explore discrimination, superiority, and moral self-transcendence through these experiences.

An Argument in a Group Chat

Recently, I joined an INTJ WeChat group, and some of the female members kept using terms like “males” or “Chinese men”(a derogatory term) in a way that annoyed me. I pointed out that these terms were both racially and gender-discriminatory insults. Then, several women ganged up on me, saying I didn’t understand their context and was overly sensitive about language. Things didn’t end well, and I left the group.

Moral Lowlands and Jungle Law

This is certainly not the first time I’ve faced this kind of baseless discrimination. I was born in a rural village in Henan, a moral lowland and the bottom of the hierarchy of contempt. I’m so used to facing discrimination that it’s practically second nature to me. But this issue goes far beyond just political correctness—it’s been a lifelong moral struggle for me.

The thing I despise most in life is the arrogance of privilege. Some of my classmates, after moving to Beijing (or Shanghai), feel completely justified in enjoying the privileges that come with it. I can’t do that. I can never forget this one thing that’s always been in my heart: the urge to smash that privilege.

What really harms people at the bottom is not the lack of resources, but the lack of morals (or collective wisdom). People seem to live only in the present, with no concern for the future; they only care themselves, with no regard for others. And I can hardly claim to be a pure, untainted soul. For a long time, I too subscribed to the law of the jungle, embracing the morality of a predator. My strategy in a world full of self-interest was to be even more ruthless, to outsmart them at their own game.

But the consequence of this is that you lose the right to criticize those who discriminate against you with their privilege. What makes you different from them? If their arrogance is based on power, status, wealth, or the privileges of education, and yours is based on your intelligence and talent—are these really that different? Aren’t both forms of privilege largely innate and difficult to change through effort alone?

This contradiction has always weighed on my mind, making it impossible for me to fully embrace the “survival of the fittest” mentality or to indulge in cynicism.

Superiority and Inner Worth

By the time I turned thirty, I’d learned to see things differently. When my mother came to visit me in Shanghai and was ignored by a shop assistant in a mall, I might have gotten angry in the past, but at that moment, it suddenly felt pointless. It was just a reflection of their own smallness.

Humans are creatures that seek superiority, and whatever you take pride in reflects the height of your character. If your sense of superiority is based on things that have little to do with your own will or effort—like race, gender, or background—or on shallow items like money, luxury goods, or an expensive lifestyle, it only suggests the shallowness of your inner worth. You’re like a natural object, simply drifting with the flow of life.

What gives human beings moral worth is our defiance of and divergence from natural laws. This is where our free will and capabilities truly shine. Thus, moral judgment is highly individual. You need the full context of a person’s life to form a judgment—it’s not something that can be determined by just one outcome or factor.

For example, imagine a kid from a poor, rural area with limited access to education and an average IQ of 100 who manages to get into a regular college. Now compare that to a second-generation student from a wealthy family in a major city like New York or London, with an IQ of 140, who’s had top-tier education from an early age and gets into an Ivy League school without putting in much effort. Which of these achievements is more impressive and worthy of respect?

You might already sense that it comes down to percentages—how much they’ve achieved relative to what their circumstances would allow. Only then do we establish a shared basis for moral evaluation between people. Otherwise, what’s the point in comparing two individuals with vastly different starting points and conditions? If someone has already maximized their potential and made full use of everything within their control, do the results—whether success or failure—really matter anymore?

Moral Perfection

The previous discussion focused on how we evaluate people based on their achievements and external goals, which is the standard we use to judge greatness. But when we shift our attention to how people interact with others and ask what makes a person “good,” this standard becomes much more complicated and nuanced.

It’s hard to respect those who see themselves as superior to others. The more people try to show off their superiority, the more it often backfires.

For instance, consider the women I mentioned earlier who mock "Chinese men" and boast about no longer dating Asian men. In my mind, though, I can’t help but think: dating men from other races hasn’t taught you how to treat people equally or fairly. You’re no different from those you ridicule.

Or take the time I was chatting on Clubhouse with a group of Indians, and they proudly talked about how India is the world’s largest democracy. But what I was thinking was, democracy doesn’t guarantee you always do the right thing or stand up for justice. When I asked if most Indians supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the conversation became awkwardly silent, and they mumbled something about being "neutral."

Another example is my support for the causes of Hong Kong and Taiwan. But after repeatedly seeing posts on social media where people from these regions mock mainland Chinese, my support remains, but my respect fades.

All these experiences that trigger my disgust seem to hint at a deeper moral truth. This is reflected in the saying I came up with earlier: people who unjustly discriminate against others are often smaller than those they look down on. After all, you’re likely no different from the people you discriminate against, but by showing prejudice, you’ve added an extra layer of arrogance.

If you expand this idea further, you’ll see that everything seems to point toward a perfect circle.

If the standard by which we measure greatness is how high a person can rise—where we admire grand and extraordinary achievements—then in the moral realm, perfection seems to be the opposite. Moral perfection lies in treating everyone fairly, like a perfect circle. Can you imagine if Christ only favored a select group of people and abandoned the rest? Would he still have the same moral authority?

What defines your moral worth and character is not how high you elevate yourself or how strong your sense of superiority is. The true measure lies in your shortcomings. If you view certain people as untouchable or beneath you, it’s as if a part of you has also become worthless. I don’t fully understand the principle behind this yet, but it seems that all of our moral instincts point in this direction.

Reflections on Guilt

Take, for instance, the recent case of the Japanese elementary school student murdered in Shenzhen. Many overseas Chinese on Twitter condemned the killer and even declared they wanted to distance themselves from Chinese people. While this desire to disassociate is understandable, something still feels off.

What exactly feels wrong? It's the fact that this attitude misses the truth. The truth is, when confronting guilt, none of us can fully absolve ourselves, because we all share responsibility for the wrongs of others.

Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.

—Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The world is one great whole, and each individual is like a cell within it. You cannot fully separate yourself from responsibility, even if we all have different roles in this world. This is why any understanding that falls short of this feels morally uncomfortable. You might partially agree with the idea, but you'll always sense that something is missing.

Practicing Equality

Practice the belief that everyone is your equal. No one is inferior, no one is superior.

I know this is difficult. How can I treat those who insult and harm me with the same consistency? And there will always be people I admire and others I despise—how can I pretend they are all the same and erase these differences in character?

I don’t have a clear answer either. What I propose is a "15% Rule": no matter how great the differences may seem, all people share at least 85% in common. Those striking differences we see between people really only account for 15%. No matter how much you dislike or disregard someone, preserve at least 85% of your respect for them, if only for the 85% you share with them as fellow human beings.

Note:

Where does the 15% figure come from? It's based on a rule of thumb I've developed after reflecting on several big issues lately. For example: How much free will do people really have? Are we primarily shaped by our environment? Can people change, and if so, how much? What percentage of people are truly able to break free from stereotypes? In my experience, the answer is much lower than we might assume. In many ways, people are largely determined by external factors—about 85%—including genetics, culture, education, and life experiences. Meanwhile, the influence of personal free will and choice makes up only about 15%.

Beyond this work, his other writings are also filled with insights. For instance, Perpetual Peace profoundly shaped my views on geopolitics and the future of the world, making it seem as if the last two centuries of history were simply a commentary on his vision. Similarly, ideas from Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime frequently come to mind, whether in discussions of aesthetics or gender dynamics.

In a world saturated with picturesque social media posts, it is easy to feel a sense of emptiness. I believe that exploring the peaks of thought is as essential as experiencing the wonders of the physical world.

Kant is an inescapable presence on this intellectual journey. He represents a pivotal turning point in the history of thought, initiating a Copernican revolution in philosophy that redefined how we understand knowledge and existence. His influence has shaped and inspired generations of philosophers who followed in his footsteps. Without engaging with Kant's ideas, one remains merely on the threshold of philosophy, never truly entering its depths.

It's no surprise that many young people today, whether in China or Europe, dismiss philosophy with a touch of cynicism. They often lack the life experience needed to grasp its deeper meaning. Philosophy—especially moral philosophy—is not just an abstract exercise; it forms the bedrock of society and infuses life with meaning. If you don’t perceive its impact, it is only because its principles are so deeply embedded in our thinking that they seem self-evident, beyond question.

Reading Kant is not easy. Honestly, I could not have imagined understanding his work a decade ago. Before Kant, philosophical texts might have been a casual read, but engaging with his ideas demands true effort. Is it worth the struggle? In my experience, the answer is a resounding yes. Investing time in these classics far surpasses the fleeting value of reading a thousand popular books. The effort pays off—it elevates your thinking, broadens your perspective, and brings you closer to the nature of things.

My recommended reading order begins with Kant’s political writings, followed by the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and then the three Critiques. Next on my list is the Critique of Pure Reason, which I hope to complete within the year.

Then this morning, articles started popping up saying Luo Xiang had “overturned” (gotten himself canceled). I wondered what had happened—was I being targeted by algorithms? Upon checking, I found that Professor Luo was being attacked again for a new video on Bilibili criticizing nationalism. What a coincidence.

Among all Chinese speakers who have spoken publicly, whether at home or abroad, Luo Xiang is one of the few who meets my standards. The rest are largely mediocre and not worth mentioning.

As for those who style themselves as literati and celebrities—the likes of Gao Xiaosong and Xu Zhiyuan—I generally have little regard for them. They may have read many books, but their intellectual depth is shallow. As intellectuals who don’t pursue truth and genuine knowledge as their goal, they’re like pirates in the world of One Piece who don’t aspire to become the Pirate King—what’s the difference between them and salted fish? China’s three thousand years of intellectual and cultural achievements, compared to today’s global intellectual peaks, is roughly the distance from ankle to crown. Those who still worship traditional Chinese learning or the literati ideal might as well be called foot fetishists. That’s why I have zero interest in Confucian classics, scholar ideals, or literati romance. It’s somewhat excusable for twenty-somethings to appreciate such things, but for people in their forties or fifties to remain at this level is simply unacceptable. As for public figures with journalism backgrounds, in a word: poor thinking ability, as evidenced by jokes like Cui Yongyuan’s anti-GMO campaign or Chai Jing’s interview with Ding Zhongli. And overseas democracy activists? A mixed bag. To sum them up with my assessment of Ai Weiwei from last year: “Who gives a fuck.” The older generation of democracy activists generally lacks competence—many make noise, but few have genuine insight. They’re just remnants blessed by historical circumstance. Those with both ability and character are even rarer.

Back to the incident itself. Why is nationalism wrong?

Moral questions are never simple. Moral philosophy is a profound discipline.

Is nationalism good? In some sense, yes—if it helps strengthen mutual trust and aid within your group, it has positive significance. But is it the ultimate standard for judging everything? Obviously not. Just shift your perspective slightly: imagine you’re from one of the small nations historically destroyed by China. Would you still support Han nationalism? Using Country X’s sword to claim land for Country X’s plow—isn’t that Nazi Germany? From another nation’s perspective, it becomes a moving anthem of resistance against invasion.

Morality and justice have levels and magnitudes. Sacrificing for a lover, taking a knife for a friend, bringing glory to the family name, giving one’s life for country and people, protecting world peace, dedicating one’s life without complaint to strangers on distant continents... Which of these do you think is most just and glorious?

Do you think I want you to choose the last one? Because it shows the greatest love, the most selfless altruism?

Wrong! If a moral requirement strays so far from human nature that only saints can achieve it, then it has no universal significance. You can practice it yourself, but you can’t demand it of others. What morality has universal significance? For example, don’t kill people randomly, otherwise we’ll all be gone eventually. These are also generally called laws.

So which of the above is most just? I think they’re all equal, with no hierarchy, and can perfectly coexist. You sacrifice selflessly for your lover, I take a knife for my friend, they serve country and people with distinction—we all have bright futures. When they conflict, that’s the trolley problem—there’s no definitive answer, but the common practice is still to save more people.

What’s most immoral, what I see as pure evil, is actually people’s desire to force their will upon others. Viewing others purely as tools to implement your own will, rather than seeing them as people with free will like yourself.

Narrow nationalism and racism share the same spiritual core. Both view people as tools and mechanical products, attempting to use someone’s origin to deny their free will and impose your beliefs upon them.

So-called “traitor” or “sellout” aren’t necessarily insults. By this logic, Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during WWII, would be a genuine German traitor. Similarly, if a Chinese person upholds their beliefs and fights their compatriots without hesitation when China invades another country, I couldn’t call them a traitor—I’d have to respect them as having real backbone.

So nation, race, and origin don’t constitute ultimate standards for moral judgment. The ultimate standard for moral judgment is the good will behind people’s choices.

And this is often known only to heaven. “Duke of Zhou feared rumors in his day; Wang Mang was humble before usurping.” So don’t judge individuals lightly unless they’re important to you. Focus your magnifying glass on matters that concern everyone.

What I particularly admire about Luo Xiang is that he continues to shine bit by bit, illuminating more people even in China’s current high-pressure environment. In this so-called “controversy,” despite countless people cursing him, he’s also won support from many. Things aren’t as monolithic as they were a few years ago. Through his actions, he proves that humanity and reason can dispel darkness, which I find very heartening.

Morality is extremely difficult to change. In a sense, morality is a type of emotion—once these neural pathways are established, changing them is incredibly hard. Imagine the difficulty of persuading elderly relatives to change their views. That classmate who memorized Mao’s poetry with us in our high school dorm is still a “patriot” with the five-starred red flag as their avatar, like many of my high school classmates—their patriotic sentiment hasn’t changed much over the years. I don’t criticize this simple emotion; I just wish for a bit more brain power. Before blocking your top-student classmate who’s been abroad for years, couldn’t you consider them as someone with reason and conscience like yourself? Maybe they have better reasons than you? That said, isn’t my own character—disdaining authority, refusing blind obedience, stubbornly insisting on principles—also a kind of moral conviction that hasn’t changed one bit over the years? So when I heard Dashu still using my high school reputation of being “extreme,” it felt both familiar and strange.

Looking at the many places I’ve been, my hometown probably counts as a moral lowland. I used to say Nanyang was relatively good within Henan, but after the music festival incident, I can’t say that anymore. What was then called “extreme” now seems like resistance after being bullied by lowland morality without being able to articulate why. Like when history or politics textbooks force you to believe nonsensical theories, like my argument “everyone is selfish therefore no one can be selfish” resisting collectivism, like the tyranny of forcing humility on you regardless of your actual situation and punishing you if you resist. What feels strange is that after all these years, as times change and circumstances shift, I gradually understand various causes and effects. Even if my current views don’t align with the mainstream, I have more reasons to believe I stand on the side of reason. Those on the opposite side seem more driven by (moral) emotions, more “extreme.”

Of course, if you say I won the debate but lost at life, I have no comeback. Whose life isn’t a failure that eventually arrives? Life is vast as the sea, mountain after mountain and river after river, nothing more than this. Living life in the way you prefer—that’s the morality of life.

The usual distractions offered only temporary relief, ultimately hollow. Better to read something—something difficult.

I recalled a Reddit thread where someone asked for book recommendations, and I had replied with The Brothers Karamazov. Someone commented underneath suggesting * The Idiot*.

Though Dostoevsky is my favorite writer, I’ve actually only read a few of his works. So that was it—time for The Idiot.

I spent two full days reading through all 500,000 characters of The Idiot.

My mind raced with thoughts throughout, and the impact lingered even more powerfully afterward. Though there are a thousand things I want to say, I can only articulate two or three. I’m writing this down now while the feeling is still fresh in my memory.

When I read about the Prince’s kindness toward the orphaned girl Marie, I was moved to tears by the Christ-like love he embodied. Perhaps it’s age—I’ve come to better understand what’s truly rare and precious in this world.

The world is full of toxic masculinity that refuses to shed tears, full of survival philosophies that never show weakness, full of hot tempers that demand tenfold revenge for every slight. What’s scarce is a gentle, forgiving heart. And even within this scarcity, fleeting moments of compassion are relatively common—what’s truly rare is a consistent, principled commitment to benevolence and forgiveness.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky teaches us: love concrete people, not abstract humanity.

But loving concrete people is so difficult. It always brings misunderstanding, rejection, hurt, and pain. There are thick walls between human beings, and everyone carries their own excessive pride.

How strong must one’s inner world be to dissolve all resentment and love people the way Christ did?

And what good does all that effort even do?

In the novel, the Prince—despite his perfect character—ends up a complete idiot anyway, unable to save anyone.

There’s no benefit. No worldly advantage whatsoever.

It’s purely a matter of beauty. Moral beauty.

Let me use a small example I saw on Reddit: someone asked how to respond when a woman says “I have a boyfriend.”

The situation may be trivial, but it reflects a universal phenomenon about interpersonal rejection. Especially when you had no such intentions to begin with—then there’s the added sting of being misunderstood.

Do you beat her up like those Tangshan thugs? Or do you snap back with sarcasm, making her realize “I’m not interested in you,” putting her in her place?

After scrolling through the replies, I found the best response was still: “Of course, should’ve known”—and then stepping back.

Tit for tat, sharp confrontation—naturally that would feel satisfying. But when you truly understand the source of someone else’s predicament and pain, anger might not be your first reaction. Because that defensive response has been trained into her by who knows how many terrible experiences.

This is what makes the Prince extraordinary. When others see the heroine Nastasya, they’re simply stunned by her devastating beauty. But what he sees is the spiritual torment she bears.

When you’re young, how could you possibly grasp the profundity of Christ’s spirit? Someone strikes your left cheek, and you offer the right one too—it seems utterly absurd.

Yet it’s Christ’s spirit that has prevailed through to our age. Perhaps, deep in the human heart, there’s a longing for this kind of unconditional, selfless love.

I’ve spent a long time studying moral philosophy, questioning the standards of good and evil, interrogating the meaning of human existence. So far, only Kant’s moral theory has convinced me. And what lurks in the shadows cast by Kant’s moral system is the spirit of Christ.

Where do human moral sentiments come from? What’s the benefit of being a noble person?

If knowing how to read the room, being flexible and expedient, climbing the social ladder, pursuing power, and indulging in pleasure—if this is the proper way of the world, then why can’t I muster even a shred of respect for such people?

Some people in high positions hold grudges to an extreme degree (I’m talking about Fa Zheng)—someone insults them once and they hand down an eighteen-year sentence. They can mobilize all the world’s resources to heal their childhood wounds, impose their will at any cost, make their word into law.

Shouldn’t such a person represent the ultimate expression of this “proper path”? But is there anything worthy of respect in that? Is there any beauty?

You can’t explain the nobility and wretchedness of character from a utilitarian standpoint.

The beauty of morality lies precisely in going against the current.

Why is Christ’s spirit precious?

Our society is flooded with moral judgments blind to others’ struggles. Most of these are selfish and hypocritical—lacking any universal significance, they’re essentially a form of privileged arrogance, people passing comfortable judgment from positions of advantage.

What about those who fall outside these countless circles, large and small? Do they forfeit their right to be human? If saying they’ve “lost their qualification as human beings” is too extreme—only applicable to the most extreme cases—then feeling morally bound and inferior is probably the normal condition of ordinary people.

What makes Christ-like love precious is that it offers a safety net for those who suffer. Ordinary people’s love is conditional, because their circles of moral judgment have boundaries—some so narrow they barely encompass themselves.

But Christ-like love is unconditional, capable of embracing more people (I originally wanted to write “all people,” but then I thought: can it embrace the devil? That’s a question. So I changed it to a comparative—just a bit more than ordinary people is good enough).

Even if you’re alone in the world with no one to rely on, there’s still someone who loves you unconditionally, expecting nothing in return.

You might say, “I’m not that wretched yet.” Then you probably don’t understand existential loneliness. Those who aren’t lonely rarely possess religiosity.

I’ve never thought much of my university’s motto: “Virtue sustains all things.”

When you hear “virtue sustains all things,” can you picture a concrete example? Is it like Liu Bei or Song Jiang? Fake benevolence and phony righteousness. Mouths full of morality and virtue, hearts full of calculated self-interest.

But Prince Myshkin in The Idiot suddenly brought this phrase to life for me, giving me a living example.

What “sustaining all things” really means is bearing others’ suffering. Put more simply: because you’ve been drenched by rain, you want to hold an umbrella for others. It’s the same idea. Drawing on our own rich experience of suffering, we offer spiritual support to other lost souls—so that at least they’re not alone on the path of pain.

Selfless love isn’t without its rewards.

We become richer, feel fulfilled, grow less lonely.

By helping others, we help ourselves.

By caring for others, we ourselves are cared for.

Redemption.

I was recently moved by a video from Luo Xiang: “Should we persist in integrity or choose worldly sophistication?”

He recounted Wang Yangming’s death: “On January 9, 1529, Wang Yangming died in Dayu County, Jiangxi, at only 57 years old. On his deathbed, his disciples asked if he had any last words. He replied: ‘This heart is luminous; what more is there to say?’ After his death, Emperor Jiajing not only refused to honor his achievements but condemned him, calling his teachings improper and accusing him of inciting chaos. The emperor stripped him of his title and banned the School of Mind. The empirical world offers nothing but repeated disappointments. Only by transcending experience and stepping out of Plato’s cave can we achieve inner coherence.”

The more I’ve experienced, the more I’ve come to see that materialism is fundamentally mistaken. Searching for truth and meaning in the empirical world is a fool’s errand—like trying to catch fish by climbing a tree.

Reality is nothing but endless conflict and contradiction. This is what existentialists mean by the absurd nature of existence. The notion that we should “follow natural law” is pure fallacy. External nature is cold, indifferent existence; it’s human consciousness that mediates and interprets the experiential world. The world itself has no color—our senses and consciousness paint it.

There’s a line from an online novel I read in college, Blasphemy: “All things in the world, with their myriad colors, are merely the veiled human heart.” Back then I found it striking without quite understanding why. Now I recognize it as an expression of Kantian philosophy, the same insight Van Gogh captured in his paintings.

Luo Xiang continued: “Later, when Wang Yangming served as an official and offended the powerful eunuch Liu Jin, he came to grasp the true meaning of gewu(investigation of things). The essence of * gewu* isn’t to understand heavenly principles by studying the external world, but to explore the Way of Heaven by examining one’s own heart.”

Home and Freedom

These reflections resonated with me because I’ve been living abroad, recently adrift and purposeless.

Mountains are hard to cross—who grieves for the lost traveler? Meeting by chance, we are all strangers in a foreign land.

Why do we spend our lives wandering?

I remember a conversation with Qin Ju at Zijing Cafeteria as graduation approached, talking about what we’d do after college. I said I wanted to throw a backpack on and wander until I found somewhere I liked, then settle down. It was just talk, of course—the day after graduation I reported for duty at a state-owned enterprise back home.

But looking back over the past decade, I’ve somehow been living out that throwaway remark. A prophecy I never meant to make.

The pursuit of freedom. The longing for home.

Freedom drives us to flee places that cannot contain us, to drift and wander. The longing for home kindles hope again and again, propelling us forward.

I recently read Existential Psychotherapy, which captured it well: finding a home, a sense of belonging with others in this world, freedom, resistance to oppression, enlightenment, self-realization.

Cultures of Love and Hatred

Have I found belonging in Europe? I’d say things are somewhat better.

A rough theory has been forming in my mind: cultures fall broadly into two types—those that cultivate goodwill and those that breed hatred. I’m not entirely certain of this, since purely antagonistic civilizations probably self-destructed long ago. Those that endure must contain some measure of mutual aid; they differ only in degree and scope. The broader the scope, the more civilized the culture. One metric, as economist Yang Xiaokai noted, is unprovoked kindness toward strangers.

I recently saw a question making the rounds on Twitter: If there’s a fire, would you save your eight-year-old cat or an eight-year-old child you don’t know? I tracked down the original post on Xiaohongshu—80% chose the cat, and the comments were nearly unanimous. The coldness, the faint malice toward human life—it was genuinely shocking. I posed the same question to European friends. Some would save the cat, naturally, but most said they’d save the child. This aligns with my experience: in Europe, I occasionally encounter unprovoked kindness from strangers. Looking back on thirty-plus years in China, I struggle to recall even a single instance of such kindness, yet I can easily summon numerous memories of unprovoked hostility.

These seem like trivial observations. But when you grow weary of everything and begin questioning life’s meaning, these small things suddenly loom large. What’s the point of living in a jungle among beasts, even if you’re the jungle’s king?

The True Homeland

So we drift and wander, moving from place to place, sampling the world’s different customs and cultures.

But perhaps the ideal state is ultimately impossible to find on earth. Our true homeland may lie in heaven.

Everyone’s ideal world is different. I think of a South African friend—born into a wealthy white family, yet a fervent Maoist. The more concrete our visions become, the more they clash. Those unquestionable moral truths probably exist only at the metaphysical level, like the logic behind “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” A perfect world capacious enough to contain us all can probably exist only in the transcendent realm outside Plato’s cave.

As Luo Xiang quoted: “The individual’s inner self is an experiential thing, mixed with good and evil. We must await a kind of miracle—moving from experience to transcendence, leaping from inside the cave to outside, transcending individual experience. In the experiential world, we cannot draw a perfect circle. But outside the cave, the perfect circle exists.”

My Problem

What strikes me most about Europe is that the world finally feels normal—there aren’t so many absurdities violating my will. Away from those troublesome people and situations, the world has grown quieter.

Now the problem is mine alone. In the past, external disturbances drew my attention outward. But now I must face my isolation directly, confront the desolation rising from within, beyond all the noise.

My problem is a severe emotional blockage. I seem to have lost the capacity to feel and desire. I can barely appreciate simple pleasures.

Then there’s my ability to love. As someone who learned to treat life as a survival game, I’m not afraid of hostility—I’m accustomed to malice, even expect it. But what truly disarms me is unprovoked kindness and joy. These are foreign to me. They leave me at a loss.

I can’t help lamenting that the life lessons I absorbed in my first thirty years were all wrong. The cultural difference between love and hatred I described earlier is rooted in assumptions about human nature. To assume everyone else is bad while making yourself the sole exception—this is philosophical cowardice. The complexity of human consciousness lies in how our assumptions about others are projections of our own self-conception. As the saying goes: “How others see you doesn’t represent who you are, but how you see others does.” Take that survival-first mentality: assuming others are bad doesn’t mean you’re bad, but it does reveal that your vision of others is a projection of the dog-eat-dog worldview you yourself have internalized.

Perhaps this is the cure for my emotional blockage: presenting myself honestly, practicing unconditional love. Choosing sincerity and integrity after weathering life’s storms—not because “suffering loss brings blessings,” not even out of some utilitarian hope for reciprocity, but from self-respect. To give others the greatest respect is to respect yourself, to respect the projection of your own consciousness.

The existential psychotherapy emphasizes a conflict that flows from the individual's confrontation with the givens of existence---certain ultimate concerns, certain intrinsic properties that are a part, and an inescapable part, of the human being's existence in the world.

Specifically, four basic issues: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.

Death: We live now, but one day we will die, there is no escape. One day all my life's endeavors will come to an abrupt end, everything will be over, and my existence will be a passing smoke, and I will soon be forgotten by everyone. Realizing this, how am I supposed to live?

Freedom: The human being does not enter (and leave) a well structured universe that has an inherent design. Family, nation, society, history, freedom, justice...if people did not artificially construct and give meaning to the world, then the universe ifself would actually have no meaning and purpose, and would be nothing more than longly cold existence.

Isolation: No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone. The existential conflict is thus the tension between our awareness of our absolute isolation and our wish for contact, for protection, our wish to be part of a larger whole.

Meaninglessness: The human being, a meaning-seeking creature, is thrown into a universe that has no meaning. Why are we alive? What is the meaning of life? If there is no pre-ordained design for us, then each of us must construct our own meanings in life. Yet can a meaning of one's own creation be sturdy enough to bear one's life?

There are only two ways to deal with the brutal existential facts of life---anxious truth or denial---and either is unpalatable. Which would you have, wise madness or foolish sanity?

An existential therapeutic postition rejects this dilemma. Wisdom does not lead to madness, nor denial to sanity: the confrontation with the givens of existence is painful but ultimately healing.

If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

Death

The biological life-death boundary is relatively precise; but, psychologically, life and death merge into one another. Death is a fact of life; a moment's reflection tells us that death is not simply the last moment of life. "Even in birth we die; the end is there from the start."

Although the physicality of death destroys man, the idea of death saves him. The idea of death may save man, and arrived at the important insight that the awareness of our personal death acts as a spur to shift us from one mode of existence to a higher one.

Heidegger believed that there are two fundamental modes of existing in the world: (1) a state of forgetfulness of being or (2) a state of mindfulness of being.

Ordinarily one lives in the first state. Forgetfulness of being is the everyday mode of existence, in which one is unaware of one's authorship of one's life and world, in which one "flees", "falls", and is tranquilized, in which one avoids choices by being "carried along by the nobody". When however, one enters the second mode of being (mindfulness of being), one exists authentically (hence, the frequent modern use of the term "authenticity" in psychology). In this state, one becomes fully self-aware---aware of oneself as a transcendental (constituting) ego as well as an empirical (constituted) ego; one embraces one's possibilities and limits; one faces absolute freedom and nothingness.

Death is the condition that makes it possible for us to live life in an authentic fashion.

Defenses against Death

There are tow fundamental defenses against death: one is the pursuit of specialness, and the other is the faith of an ultimate rescuer.

The human being either fuses or separates, embeds or emerges. He affirms his autonomy by "standing out from nature", or seeks safety by merging with another force. Either he becomes his own father or he remains the ternal son.

Overall the ultimate rescuer defense is less effective than the belief in personal specialness. Not only is it more likely to break down but it is intrinsically restrictive to the person.

It is dangerous to venture. And why? Because one may lose. Not to venture is shrewd. And yet, by not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in evey the most venturesome venture,...one's self. For if I have ventured amiss---very well, then life helps my by its punishment. But if I have not ventured at all---who then helps me? And moreover, if by not venturing at all in the highest sense (and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of oneself) I have gained all earthly advantages...and lose myself. What of that?

Kierkegaard

Death Anxiety

Death is a primary source of anxiety.

Though we hopes to alleviate crippling levels of anxiety, we do not hope to eliminate anxiety.

Life cannot be lived nor can death be faced without anxiety. Anxiety is guide as well as enemy and can point the way to authentic existence.

The task is to reduce anxiety to comfortable levels and then to use this existing anxiety to increase one's awareness and vitality.

It is a matter of no small importance that one be able to explain and order the events in our lives into some coherent and predictable pattern. To name something, to locate its place in a casual sequence, is to begin to experience it as under our control. No longer, then, is our internal experience or behavior frightening, alien or out of control; instead, we behave (or have a particular inner experience) because of something we can name or identify. The because offers one mastery (or a sense of mastery that phenomenologically is tantamount to mastery). I believe that the sense of potency that flows from understanding occurs even in the matter of our basic existential situation: each of us feels less futile, less helpless, and less alone, even when, ironically, what we come to understand is the fact that each of us is basically helpless and alone in the face of cosmic indifference.

Freedom

To the philosopher, "freedom" has broad personal, social, moral, and political implications and consequently encompasses a wide terrain. Moreover, the issue is intensely controversial: the philosophical debate concerning freedom and causality has not ceased for two thousand years.

Throughout history free will has always managed to offend the prevailing world view. Though the controversy regarding free will has continued without cessation, the opponents of the concept have changed over the centuries. The Greek philosophers had no term for "free will"; the very concept was incompatible with the prevailing belief in eternal recurrence. The Stoic fatalists, who believed that whatever is or will be "was to be", rejected the idea of a freely willing agency in man. Christian theology could not reconcile the belief in divine providence, in an omniscient, omnipotent god, with the claims of free will. Later, free will clashed with scientific positivism, with Isaac Newton's and Pierre Laplace's belief in an explicable and predictable universe. Still later, the Hegelian idea of history as a necessary progress of the world spirit clashed with a free-will ideology that, by its very nature, rejects necessity and holds that all that was or is done could, as well, not have been done. Lastly, free will is opposed by all deterministic systems whether they be based on economic, behavioristic, or psychoanalytic principles.

The relationship between environment and personal freedom is extraordinarily complex. Do individuals carve their own destinies, or are they entirely determined by environmental contingencies.

Generally in a debate between a determinist and a libertarian (one who believed in freedom of the will) logic and reality seem to be on the side of the determinist; the libertarian is "softer" and appeals to unmeasurable, emotional argument.

Not even the most fanatical determinist can contend that we are determined by our environment to alter our environment; such a position obviously leads to an infinite regress. If we manipulate our environment, then we are no longer environmentally determined; on the contrary, the environment is determined.

A vast body of empirical research supports the position of reciprocal determinism.

The phrase that creates vast problems for the libertarian is that the behavior of people immersed in water will be "remarkably similar". The issue, of course, is "behavior". How was it determined that behavior should be the criterion by which choice or freedom is measured?

One's attitude towards one's situation is the very crux of being human, and conclusions about human nature based solely on measurable behavior are distortions of that nature. It cannot be denied that environment, genetics, or chance plays a role in one's life. The limiting circumstances are obvious: Sartre speaks of a "coefficient of adversity". All of us face natural adversities that influence our lives. But that does not mean that we have no responsibility (or choice) in the situation. We are responsible still for what we make out of our handicaps; for our attitudes toward them; for the bitterness, anger, or depression that act synergistically with the original "coefficient of adversity" to ensure that a handicap will defeat the individual.

When all else fails, when the coefficient of adversity is formidable, still one is responsible for the attitude one adopts toward the adversity---whether to live a life of bitter regret or to find a way to transcend the handicap and to fashion a meaningful life despite it.

Responsibility

The world acquiresd significance only through the way it is constituted by the human being.

The heart of Kant's revolution in philosophy was his position that it is human consciousness, the nature of the human being's mental structures, that provides the external form of reality. Space itself is not something objective and real but something subjective and ideal; it is, as it were, a schema issuing by a constant law from the nature of the mind for the coordinating of all outer sensa whatever.

The human being is not only free but is doomed to freedom. Both to constitute (to be responsible for) oneself and one's world and to be aware of one's responsibility is a deeply frightening insight. Nothing in the world has significance except by virtue of one's own creation. There are no rules, no ethical systems, no values, there is no external referent whatsoever; there is no grand design in the universe. In Sartre's view, the individual alone is the creator (this is what he means by "man is the being whose project is to be god".

To experience existence in this manner is a dizzying sensation. Nothing is as it seemed. The very ground beneath one seems to open up. Indeed, groundlessness is a commonly used term for a subjective experience of responsibility awareness. Many existential philosophers have described the anxiety of groundlessness as "ur-anxiety"---the most fundamental anxiety, an anxiety that cuts deeper even than the anxiety associated with death.

One avoids situations (for example, making decisions, isolation, autonomous action) that, if deeply considered, would make one aware of one's fundamental groundlessness. Thus one seeks structure, authority, grand designs, magic, something that is bigger than oneself.

To be taken in by any of these devices that allow us to flee from our freedom is to live "inauthentically" or in "bad faith".

Willing

The guileless expectation that an individual will change as a result of this approach stems directly from the moral philosophical belief that if one truly knows the good, one will act accordingly.

However, "will power" constitutes only the first layer, and a thin layer at that, of "willing".

When I look back at the three or four choices in my life which have been decisive, I find that, at the time I made them, I had very little sense of the seriousness of what I was doing and only later did I discover what had seemed an unimportant brook was, in fact, a Rubicon.

W. H. Auden

The important choices that one makes in life are not consciously experienced as choices. In fact, only after the fact is one able to deduce that one has actually made a choice. This realm of will maybe thought of as a subterranean life current that has direction but not discrete objects or goals. It provides propulsion to the individual but eludes immediate and direct scrutiny.

The second realm of will is the conscious component: it is experienced during the event. The second realm of will presses toward some specific object and is utilitarian in character.

The second realm of will is approached through exhortations and appeals to will power, effort, and determination. The first realm is impervious to these enjoinders and must be approached obliquely.

Wish, the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occuring, is the first step of the process of willing.

"Wish" gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the child's play, the freshness, and the richness to "will". "Will" gives the self-direction, the maturity, to "wish". Without "wish", "will" loses its life-blood, it's viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only "will" and no "wish", you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan man. If you have only "wish" and no "will", you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot man.

Wishing requires feeling

The wish-blocked individuals has enormous social difficulties. They have no opinions, no inclinations, no desires of their own.

One's capacity to wish is automatically facilitated if one is helped to feel. Wishing requires feeling. If one's wishes are based on something other than feelings---for exmaple, on rational deliberation or moral imperatives---then they are no longer wishes but "shoulds" or "oughts", and one is blocked from communicating with one's real self.

Choices and decisions

Some peoples can proceed untroubled by proceeding blindly, believing they have traveled the main highway and that all intersections have been with byways. But to proceed with awareness and imagination is to be affected by the memory of crossroads, taking neither path because they cannot take both, cherishing the illusion that if they sit there long enough the two ways will resolve themselves into one and hence both be possible. A large part of maturity and courage is the ability to make such renunciations, and a large part of wisdom is the ability to find ways which will enable one to renounce as little as possible.

Isolation

It is the knowledge of “my death” that makes one fully realize that no one can die with one or for one.

The longliness of being one's own parent. To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.

Responsibility implies authorship; to be aware of one's authorship means to foresake the belief that there is another who creates and guards one.

Deep loneliness is inherent in tha act of self-creation, a lonely dread that is a wind blowing from one's own desert place---the nothing that is at the core of being.

Right Path

The major buttress against the terror of existential isolation is thus relational in nature.

Yet aloneness can be shared in such a way that love compensates for the pain of isolation. A great relationship breaches the barriers of a lofty solitude, subdues its stict law, and throws a bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread of the universe.

On the one hand, one must learn to relate to another without giving way to the desire to slip out of isolation by becoming part of that other. But one must also learn to relate to another without reducing the other to a tool, a defense against isolation. But, it is the facing of aloneness that ultimately allows one to engage another deeply and meaningfully.

If we are able to acknowledge our isolated situation in existence and to confront them with resoluteness, we will be albe to turn lovingly toward others. If, on the other hand, we are overcome with dread before the abyss of loneliness, we will not reach out toward others but instead will flail at them in order not to drown in the sea of existence.

Need-free love

A relationship, at its best, involves individuals who relate to one another in a need-free fashion.

One lets go of self-consciousness and self-awareness. One must relate with one's whole being: if part of oneself is elsewhere---for example, studying the effect that the relationship will have upon some third person---then to that extent one has failed to relate.

To care for another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible. If one relates selflessly, one is free to experience all parts of the other rather than the part that serves some utilitarian purpose. One extends oneself into the other, recognizing the other as a sentient being who has also constituted a world about himself or herself.

With one's full knowledge, gleaned from genuine listening, one endeavors to help the other become fully alive in the moment of encounter.

Mature caring is not without its rewards. One is altered, one is enriched, one is fulfilled, one's existential loneliness is attenuated. Through caring one is cared for. Yet these rewards flow from genuine caring; they do not instigate it. The rewards ensue but cannot be pursued.

Wrong Paths

Dependency

The human being's "universal conflict" is that one strives to be an individual, and yet being an individual requires that one endure a frightening isolation.

Individuals whose major orientation is toward fusion are generally labeled "dependent".

One may also shed one's isolating sense of self by fusing, not with another individual, but with a "thing"---a group, a cause, a country, a project. There is something enromously compelling in merging with a larger group.

One knows only that one cannot be alone, that one desperately wants from others something that one is never able to obtain and that, try as one might, something always goes wrong with one's relationship.

Yet another solution lies in the direction of sacrificing selfhood: one gains relief from isolation anxiety through immersion in some other individual, cause or pursuit. Thus, individuals are, as Kierkegaard said, twice in despair: to begin with, in a fundamental existential despair, and then further in despair because, having sacrificed self-awareness, they do not even know they are in despair.

Sex

Sex may be used in the service of repression of death anxiety. If we make love to a woman without relating to her spirit we are fetishists, even if in the physical act we use the proper body orifice.

One is in love with passion, one collects excitement and trophies, one warms oneself "at the blaze at the what has fallen to his lot"---but what one does not do is to relate authentically to oneself or to another.

A full caring relationship is a relationship to another, not to any extraneous figure from the past or the present. Transference, parataxic distortions, ulterior motives and goals---all must be swept away before an authentic relation with another can prevail.

Meaninglessness

What is the meaning of life? Why do we live?

The human being seems to require meaning. To live without meaning, goals, values, or ideals seems to provoke considerable distress. In severe form it may laed to the decision to end one's life. Individuals facing death are able to live "better" lives, live with fullness and zest, if they are possessed of a sense of purpose. We apparently need absolutes---firm ideals to which we can aspire and guidelines by which to steer our lives.

Yet the existential concept of freedom posits that the only true absolute is that there are no absolutes. An existential position holds that the world is contingent---that is, everything that is could as well have been otherwise; that human beings constitute themselves, their world, and their situation within that world; that there exists no "meaning", no grand design in the universe, no guidelines for living other than those the individual creates.

How does a being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

Camus stated that we are moral creatures who demand that the world supply a basis for moral judgment---that is, a meaning system in which is implicit a blue-print of values.

Camus started from a position of nihilism---a position in which he despaired at the lack of meaning (and, thus, lack of purpose and values) in the world---and soon generated, gratuitously, a system of personal meaning---a system that encompasses several clear values and guidelines for conduct: courage, prideful rebellion, fraternal solidarity, love, secular saintliness.

Sartre arrived at a position in his fiction that clearly values the search for meaning and even suggests paths to take in that search. These include finding a "home" and comradeship in the world, action, freedom, rebellion against oppression, service to others, enlightment, self-realization, and engagement---always and above all, engagement.

Engagement

On this one point most Western theological and atheistic existential systems agree: it is good and right to immerse oneself in the stream of life.

The more we explicitly search for pleasure, the more it eludes us. Pleasure is a by-product of meaning, and that one's search should be directed toward the discovery of meaning.

Meaning, like pleasure, must be pursued obliquely. The more we rationally seek it, the less we find it; the questions that one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers. A sense of meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement.

The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

Engagement is the therapeutic answer to meaninglessness regardless of the latter's source. Wholehearted engagement in any of the infinite array of life's activities not only disarms the galactic view but enhances the possibility to one's completing the patterning of the events of one's life in some coherent fashion.

To find a home, to care about other individuals, about ideas or projects, to search, to create, to build---these, and all other forms of engagement, are twice rewarding: they are intrinsically enriching, and they alleviate the dysphoria that stems from being bombarded with the unassembled brute data of existence.

My mind is always occupied with grand, far-reaching thoughts, yet my own happiness never seems to be a concern. This shouldn't be the case.

Looking back, moments of happiness appear to be few and far between. I've spent my life in pursuit of truth, as if I never truly understood what happiness is.

I've decided to make myself happier in 2024.

But I don't have much to go on. General guides to happiness don't really apply to me, mainly because they don't address my specific needs. For example, I can't find any joy in small talk, which makes me wonder if I don't understand the chemistry between people.

This changed when I searched YouTube for videos about INTJs and happiness, and I was immediately struck. Here are some excerpts that resonate with me:

1. Number one thing INTJs need in order to be happy is independence. When it comes to their passion, intuitive thinkers are not afraid to silently distance themselves from the pack in order to follow their dreams.

2. Number two things INTJs need in order to be happy is meaningful relationships.

Small conversation and phony friends are two of the things that INTJs despise the most in the entire universe.

You will need to be intelligent, able to participate in meaningful conversations, and trustworthy.

INTJs have an easy time establishing trust with those they consider friends, and they value those relationships tremendously. The joy that they receive from genuine friendships and solid ties is immeasurable. They are unsatisfied with their relationships with acquaintances. You won’t be able to make them happy if they don’t trust you.

1. Number three thing INTJs need in order to be happy is space.

This is the best method they recharging their batteries and discovering happiness within themselves. They are unable to do so when they are surrounded by a large number of people who are distracting them.

1. Number four thing INTJs need in order to be happy is high self-confidence.

People with the INTJ personality type are naturally self-assured and assertive. The company of confident people makes them joyful, as opposed to the company of persons who are uneasy and act fictitiously.

1. Number five things INTJs need to be happy is pursuing their passions.

They find happiness in following their hearts or their principles, rather than following the crowd.

Individuals with INTJ personality are fueled and pushed by their passions in all elements of their lives.

1. Number six thing INTJs need to be happy is to be understood.

When INTJ the architect is misunderstood, it is the most annoying thing that can happen to them.

Unfortunately, for INTJs, their activities are frequently misconstrued by the majority of the population. For example, the INTJ DEATH STARE may be misconstrued as anti-social behavior.

As a matter of fact, when they realize that someone understands the true meaning behind their actions, they experience a great sense of relief in their analytical minds.

1. Number seven thing INTJs need to be happy is to make plans for the future.

2. Number eight thing INTJs need to be is honesty. People are real and truthful are more valuable to INTJs than those who pretend to be nice in front of others for their own selfish reasons. People who aren’t afraid to call a spade a spade are the types of people that INTJs enjoy conversing with and learning from.

This is due to the fact that INTJs despise liars.

1. Number nine thing INTJs need to be happy is creativity. INTJ the mastermind personality types are well-known for being extremely inventive and creative in their thoughts.

They are also pleased with themselves when they are able to make things.

1. Number ten thing INTJs need to be happy is a well-organized environment.

Numbers 1, 3, 5, 9 are what I'm currently doing. I'm a natural scholar, and seeking truth is my passion. Thinking and writing are my work, and I enjoy a life of contemplation. Numbers 7 and 10 are part of my daily routine. Numbers 2, 4, 6, and 8 are about intimate relationships, about friends and lovers. This is a significant shortcoming in my life, long neglected but crucial to happiness.

So why have I neglected it for so long? Maybe because it's too hard. I've always seen these relationships as things that come if they come, so I've been passive.

Looking at point 2, it's not easy to be a friend of an INTJ; you need to be smart and honest. And having both these qualities is especially hard for Chinese people. The smart ones often have flexible morals, adept at the rules of the jungle, and selfish, making it hard for them to be honest and upright. The honest ones are usually upright but often have rigid worldviews and are intolerant.

Because it's rare, friendship is even more precious. That's why a fallout with a friend is especially painful for me. I suddenly realized that most of my painful experiences in life have been caused by people from Henan. The Henan colleague who borrowed money and didn't return it, the Nanyang classmate who blocked me over political views. Many charming young men have turned into rogues, and talented individuals have fallen victim to propaganda. It's a sad reflection of how environment shapes people.

As for MBTI, it's a pretty accurate framework. I'm not sure if it's the most scientific personality theory, but it's more than just a Barnum effect or akin to horoscopes. These summaries are specific and not just general statements applicable to anyone. You'll find that the characters in movies, literature, and philosophers you like are often the same type as you. For instance, I like Tywin Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire and Ivan Karamazov for The Brothers Karamazov; philosophers like Nietzsche and Kant. If you visit the INTJ group on Douband or the INTJ sub on Reddit, you'll find many people whose thoughts align with yours.

Realizing that you're rare but not unique is important. It means that suitable friends do exist; just we have to find them. In the past, I didn't pay much attention to my feelings, deliberately ignoring my need for friends, and underestimated my own agency. In the future, I hope to make myself happier and more actively seek happiness.

Specifically, this means:

1. Worry less about trivial matters. I've said almost everything I need to. I have no relation to China anymore. I don't want to care about the society and politics there, nor do I want to be disgusted by the discourse in Chinese. Less WeChat, less Twitter, for a more peaceful life.

2. Actively make friends. Europeans are friendly, but those meaningless shallow conversations bore me to death. I've been trying to imitate Europeans for months, but it's tiring and unfulfilling. From now on, I'll change my strategy. And the criteria are well summarized above: honesty is fundamental, a deal-breaker. Life is too short to waste on insincere people. Also, being misunderstood often made me introspect about what I did wrong. Now I think, forget it. Constant misunderstandings indicate a significant gap, making close friendship unlikely, so there's no need for regret. What I lack is the ability to give direct and honest feedback when misunderstood, instead of internalizing the confusion or resorting to passive-aggressive tactics.

3. Try more happiness-enhancing activities. For INTJs, this includes classes, art, nature, reading, philosophy. I'll make a list of activities that bring happiness, experiment with them, and record my experiences, especially trying new things.

And above all, above everything else—do not lie. Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

When I first read this passage two years ago, I didn't find it particularly profound, dismissing it as trite. Now, revisiting it, every word strikes me as insightful.

Perhaps two years ago, I hadn't encountered Kant's metaphysics of morals. Dostoevsky, through the character of Elder Zosima, simply provides the answer, while Kant systematically proves it in "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals." Ultimately, I am convinced by rationality rather than moved by emotion.

Not lying is our complete duty to others in Kant's moral system. A complete duty is an unconditional obligation that must be fulfilled without compromise, regardless of circumstances.

My disappointment in China stems from their pervasive lies in all matters. This is particularly true in Henan, where I was born and raised. A classic Henanese survival tip concerns weight conversion: how many ounces are in a pound? It varies—sometimes eight, sometimes twelve. People always make up stories for the smallest advantage, never telling the truth, even to family. This deception disgusts me. I sometimes wonder: after decades of knowing each other, who doesn't see through whom? Yan Fu perfectly encapsulated the flaw in Chinese culture: starting with deceit, ending in shamelessness.

Meanwhile, I also dislike the attitudes of some "city folks." During a recent incident at the Nanyang Music Festival, some advocated for strict measures in chaotic times. I'm not suggesting we tolerate such disorder, but the elitist mindset it reveals repels me. This represents another value I increasingly detest in Chinese society—elitism. Those deemed less elite aren't worthy of humane treatment.

Morality is the law of freedom. Trying to elevate morality by restricting freedom is fundamentally misguided. By moral law of freedom, I ask: do you believe these people possess the same rationality as you? If, in a parallel universe, they were granted complete freedom and full political rights, do you believe the situation would spontaneously improve? (1) You don’t believe so; (2) you can’t wait; (3) you think it doesn’t affect you. Because you don’t live there, then you're just an onlooker to the chaos, unconcerned as long as it doesn’t impact you.

I see Henan's chaos as a result of limited political rights. The government prioritizes stability over solving problems or governing effectively. Consider the recent incident where a couple was attacked by a real estate company; the government silenced them instead of seeking justice. As a commoner, you're powerless. Born in Henan, I avoid Henanese, but I can't blame them. You live in big cities with more knowledge, resources, and legal protections. Have you ever treated them as equals or contributed to granting them the same freedoms you enjoy? If not, what right do you have to judge? You might be worse off if born there.

And why do I have the right to lecture you? It’s because of another moral principle: greater ability entails greater responsibility. Everyone is born with different talents and environments. How can morals be universal? The answer is straightforward: your obligations correspond to the extent of your freedom.

You might ask what I’ve done. As a dissident writing here, hoping for a constitutional China, this is the most meaningful action I can think of.

A line from the film "Frost/Nixon" lingers with me:

“That still leaves ten percent where he[Nixon] was doing the wrong thing, and knew it.”

Just that is enough to negate his ninety percent achievements and ruin his political career. Nixon might regret not being born in China, where his mistakes could be overlooked as his counterpart. But there's no such thing as balancing good and bad deeds. Knowing when you're doing wrong matters. When we can progress to this point, the false assessment that Mao Zedong’s legacy into 70% good and 30% bad can be corrected, shedding the moral mentality like Americans scrutinizing Nixon, then our national spirit will have modernized.

Today's lengthy writing is hard to conclude. Another time, I’ll write from a personal perspective: when did I become a jack of all trades? (From the day I lost my moral foundation)

As a master of none, what should I do now?

Be true, both to others and to yourself.

Be a person of integrity and hold your ground.

Living in the free world, I could write political commentary again, but I found no interest in it.

You opponents are too insignificant.

True, they reign supreme, wielding immense power. In terms of the authority to give life and death, no one in the world can match them.

But what of it?

They are too small. Their character is despicable and shameless, their insight crude and shallow, their actions perverse and stubborn. They are even inferior to shoolchildren, yet they hold the reins of a nation.

Tangling with them seems pointless to me.

And this realization of the opponent's insignificance is not new to me.

Around the Spring Festival, I read Inoue Takehiko's manga "Vagabond".

A line in it reminded me:

Without me, you would have no one to rebel against.

It's about Musashi's father, who appears in his dreams as a childhood nightmare, saying this to him.

Insignificant as they are, these things have entangled with us for half our lives.

Your life's rebellion has been a struggle against them.

Without them, who are you? What should you do?

When the day comes that you cast all worries behind and are truly unbound, where will you go?

The weight of freedom is the weight of morality.

Since finishing "Vagabond" over the new year, a concept has lingered in my mind, refusing to leave.

Not because it's novel, but because it encapsulates my part thirty-plus years of life---a pursuit of the sublime.

Inoue's depth of thought naturally doesn't compare to philosophers like Kant, but he uses the art form of manga to concretely depict this pursuit of the sublime.

Invincible under the sun.

Invincible...it's merely a word.

All martial arts in the world ultimately boil down to philosophy.

This isn't because philosophy has some magical effect that can manipulate physical laws.

Rather, it's that the authors, whether Inoue's swordsmanship or Jin Yong's martial arts, are writing their own life philosophies.

And it's not just them, but all thinkers and literary figures throughout history.

Recently, I asked ChatGPT who the most profound Chinese thinker of the past century was.

It told me Lu Xun, which greatly disappointed and dissaftisfied me.

Because, in my view, compared to the greats of all time, Lu Xun is really insignificant.

If we were to compare the realms of thought to martial arts:

Thinkers like Kant and Dostoevsky, who transcend their era, could be considered the "Five Greats";

A wise figure of an era like Fukuzawa Yukichi could be likened to the "Seven Masters of Quanzhen";

Those like Lu Xun, whose vision is limited and unclear even within their era, are only on par with the "Seven Freaks of Jiangnan";

And those like Jin Yong and Liu Cixin, whose works are fanciful but lack depth of thought, could just barely be considered the "Four Ghosts of the Yellow River".

What strikes me is that the West had great thinkers like Rousseau and Kant three hundred years ago; yet three hundred years later, when it comes to profound and influential thinkers, China only has Lu Xun.

Quite boring.

Go study philosophy in your free time, the path of wisdom.

It reminds me of a passage I randomly read in "The Legend of the Condor Heroes", where the Old Naughty discusses martial arts:

There are many things to play with in this world, but after a while, they lose their taste. Only martial arts becomes more interesting the more you play with it.

Philosophy is the same.

The pursuit of truth is endless.

To measure the depth of a person’s thought is, to a certain degree, to measure the depth of their moral philosophy.

I. Why Do We Need a Metaphysics of Morals?

Moral philosophy covers an enormous range—nearly every question concerning human beings falls under this category.

In my limited view, law consists of settled moral questions, politics of unsettled ones.

And moral questions exist on multiple levels:

1. Ordinary Moral Knowledge

The shallowest level is ordinary moral knowledge—knowing what to do in what situations.

I’ve met many muddled people in this world, muddled precisely because they’re stuck at this shallowest first level.

Because such knowledge is too closely tied to reality, it may not apply when the context changes.

2. Philosophical Moral Knowledge

Abstract one level up, and you get philosophical moral knowledge—various moral maxims and the like.

The saying “I’ve heard all the advice but still can’t live well” refers to this kind of wisdom.

Even at this step, it’s still not enough. Because these maxims are scattered, unsystematic. Different moral teachings may even contradict each other. When conflicting moral ideas can’t be unified, they only create internal friction, naturally failing to guide one’s life. So we need to go higher.

3. Popular Moral Philosophy

Going further up, we unify various moral maxims into a complete moral philosophy, forming a school’s general principle that encompasses the individual maxims. For example, utilitarianism’s general principle is the greatest happiness for the greatest number; nationalism’s general principle is the supreme interest of nation and state.

Rising to this level may suffice for many people. But for those seeking firmer ground to stand on, this won’t do. Because you may have noticed that these moral principles ultimately rest on conditions in the sensible world—happiness, interests, and such. So there will always be situations where these real-world conditions fail or no longer hold.

For instance, for those who put nation above all—if your nation becomes Nazi Germany murdering Jews, how do you reconcile yourself? For utilitarians, does pursuing the greatest happiness for the greatest number mean you can freely insult and harm the minority?

So even though we’ve abstracted from knowledge to principles, and from principles synthesized into systems, it’s still not enough. We need a higher guiding principle that excludes all empirical reality.

4. Metaphysics of Morals

For something to be called morality, it must apply to everyone, be universally valid. Otherwise your morality only applies to yourself, because not everyone shares your conditions, and you can never fully comprehend others’ joys and sorrows. If that were the case, no one would have the standing or right to criticize or make demands of others—morality would slide into nihilism.

But if you still cannot fully believe that everything is beyond right and wrong, good and bad; if you don’t think people can murder, burn, rape, and cannibalize at will—then you absolutely cannot claim morality is subjective or nihilistic. You still hold an objective moral stance, believe in universal values.

For our morality to be universally valid, applicable to all people; for your stance to rest on absolutely solid foundations, unassailable no matter what, so no one can easily sway you—

You absolutely cannot build moral principles on anything conditional. They must arise from pure reason, unmixed with any real-world factors. They cannot be based on changeable things like practical interests or emotional preferences.

This supreme principle of morality must be an unconditional axiom, founded on humanity’s most essential attribute.

And humanity—indeed all rational beings—has as its most fundamental attribute freedom: the capacity to possess purposes and will independent of natural laws.

Every person, regardless of status high or low, wealth great or small, intelligence wise or foolish, capability large or small, has their own will. Heroes and great figures can have their world-changing ambitions; ordinary people can have their own small, simple wishes. The capable have greater degrees of freedom, the less capable have smaller ranges of choice—but never none at all.

This thing that exists in every rational being and is never absent—this is the foundation for morality’s objective existence rather than nihilism.

This freedom—regardless of its magnitude—the ability to generate self-awareness and purpose independent of natural laws, is the fundamental attribute distinguishing humans from things.

And morality is the law of freedom.

Compare: with natural law, natural objects acted upon by external forces produce results according to natural laws. With moral law, free will through self-legislation produces the results of that will.

And this concept of free will legislating for itself is the supreme principleof Kant’s metaphysics of morals:

Act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.

Kant’s phrasing is convoluted, but to translate it into Chinese idiom, what immediately comes to mind is that phrase from ancient Chinese scholars—”establishing a heart for heaven and earth.”

What heart does heaven and earth have? None—they’re beings without reason or emotion. It was simply those scholars wanting to make their own principles into universal laws, to impose their Confucian ideals upon all living beings.

But this is perfect for understanding Kant’s metaphysics of morals.

From prime ministers and emperors down to peddlers and laborers, all hope the moral principles they uphold become universal law. Dictators need no explanation—they wish all under heaven would worship their names, that they could command the world with none daring to disobey, unable to tolerate half a word of dissent. Village wives and common folk also have their methods of asserting their will—endless open attacks and hidden schemes against whatever doesn’t suit them. Even the most peaceful liberals have their own inviolable moral bottom lines and hope everyone observes them.

Morality, plainly speaking, is the path a person chooses for themselves when facing various free choices, guided by the principles they’ve set for themselves.

Because of freedom, humans can generate will and purposes independent of natural laws. Free will is the cause, realization of purpose is the effect, and what connects cause to effect is moral law.

II. Why Should We Obey Moral Law?

But moral law gives us no absolute reason we must obey it.

Many things you clearly know are right to do, yet they come with no absolute reason you must do them.

Crime pays, virtue starves. (As the proverb goes: “Murder and arson bring golden belts, building bridges and repairing roads leave no corpse behind.”)

Adhering to morality doesn’t guarantee happiness or joy—often quite the opposite.

So why on earth should I obey this damned moral law that brings no benefit?

Morality comes from the intelligible world (Plato’s Republic / the realm of Ideas / Kingdom of Ends / the world of ought). Interest points toward the sensible world (reality / the world of is).

An absolute reason for obeying moral law is something absolutely incomprehensible to us.

Suppose we discovered this absolute reason one day—then moral law would become natural law.

What we ought to do and what we actually do would be completely identical—that would eliminate freedom.

If everything is predetermined, what freedom is there to speak of?

Even with Buddhist karmic retribution, your very decision to accumulate merit and do good deeds would no longer be your free will. All your actions would be governed by that absolute reason, all your behavior subject to natural laws, unable to make any independent decisions. Originally you had the choice of whether to lay down the butcher’s knife, but in a world where absolute reasons exist, even that decision isn’t yours—it’s predetermined by an invisible hand.

So as long as humans remain free, the necessity of obeying moral law—this absolute reason—lies beyond the limits of reason, belonging to what human reason absolutely cannot comprehend.

So then, since I am free, why should I voluntarily take on morality’s shackles?

Even if my reason can understand what moral law is, if it can’t bring me any visible benefits, why must I unconditionally obey it?

There is no reason, says Kant.

If such a reason existed, it would eliminate freedom—humans would be no different from any other natural object.

But precisely because there’s no practical reason for it, it also has no price tag.

What is raised above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity.

—Immanuel Kant

References:

Deng Xiaomang: Reading Guide to Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, People’s Publishing House, 2012

Immanuel Kant, Mary Gregor: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge, 2012

I couldn’t fully believe in God either, because that would contradict my long-held creed: “never follow blindly.”

Then came nihilism. But nihilism is a dead end. Just as I cannot actively affirm being, I equally cannot wholly believe in nothingness.

When thought confronts such conflicts, it desperately needs an answer. Otherwise one can hardly stand at all.

Morality and faith became urgent problems demanding solutions. They are the foundation upon which all meaning and value must be constructed.

This suffering sounds melodramatic, but fortunately I’m not alone in it.

It's exactly like Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, and like Ivan, I found comfort in Elder Zosima's words:

Zosima: This problem has not been resolved in your heart, and therein lies your greatest unhappiness, because this problem demands resolution.

Ivan: But can it be resolved in my heart? Can it be resolved in a positive direction?

Zosima: Even if it cannot be resolved in a positive direction, it will never be resolved in a negative direction either. You yourself know this peculiarity of your soul; this is the very reason your heart suffers so terribly. But you must thank the Creator, for he has given you a lofty heart capable of enduring such torment, capable of thinking upon and seeking things above—we are citizens of heaven. May God grant that your heart's answer be given you even while you are still on earth. May God bless you on your path.

—Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Allow me this lengthy quotation—passages I've been reading over and over these past days. I offer them also to those who are suffering spiritually.

Returning to the problem of morality, I mentioned above the creed of “never follow blindly.”

Just look at those things you’d never abandon even unto death (whether physical or social)—aren’t those your deepest beliefs?

I used to think it was just a rebellious streak in me; only after studying some philosophy did I learn it’s called free will.

The value of philosophical reflection is that it grounds your wild ideas on firmer rational foundations.

If you carefully analyze the meaning of “never follow blindly,” you’ll find it’s essentially talking about “free will” and “reason.”

And this is the entire foundation of Kantian moral philosophy.

When I first encountered Kant’s theory, I mistakenly thought freedom was a kind of moral principle that could pass Kant’s universalizability test.

Reading Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I realized: wrong, completely backwards, I had it reversed.

Freedom is not one type of morality; rather, morality is the law concerning freedom.

Without freedom there is no morality.

Ancient Greek philosophy divided knowledge into three categories: logic, physics, and ethics.

Logic involves no material substance—it’s purely formal philosophy.

Physics studies the phenomena of nature and discovers natural laws.

Ethics studies the phenomena of freedom and discovers moral laws.

But facing the vast sea of social phenomena, how can we discover moral law the way Newton discovered the law of universal gravitation?

The materials we have at hand:

First level: Ordinary moral knowledge—knowing what to do in various situations, e.g., don’t speak loudly in public

Second level: Philosophical moral knowledge—moral maxims, e.g., do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you

Third level: Popular moral philosophy—complete systems synthesized from everyday experience, e.g., utilitarian ethics

What Kant does in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals:

Starting from these different levels of moral knowledge, he traces backward step by step until arriving at a single supreme principle—stripped of all empirical elements, universally valid—what he calls the metaphysics of morals.

His approach is reflected in the book’s chapter titles:

• Chapter 1: Transition from ordinary rational moral cognition to philosophical rational moral cognition
• Chapter 2: Transition from popular moral philosophy to metaphysics of morals
• Chapter 3: Transition from metaphysics of morals to the critique of pure practical reason

He uses the first two chapters to find this supreme principle, and the third chapter to establish it.

Below is this unique supreme principle (standard formula):

Act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.

From this supreme principle derive three formulations:

1. Formula of Universal Law of Nature

So act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature

2. Formula of Humanity as an End

So act that you use humanity, in your own person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means

3. Formula of Autonomy

The will of every rational being as a will giving universal law

Then he gives four examples to illustrate, divided into four quadrants by duties to self/others and perfect/imperfect:

1. Perfect duty to oneself: Don't commit suicide
2. Perfect duty to others: Don't lie
3. Imperfect duty to oneself: Develop your talents
4. Imperfect duty to others: Help others

I’ve only gotten through about two-thirds of the book so far; I’ll discuss the explanation and justification of these principles in detail in later posts.

For today, just some reflections.

First, I found it deeply satisfying—like someone starving who finally gets food, finally encountering reading material befitting adult thought. Insights abound:

It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation, except a good will.

—Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

If all value were conditional and therefore contingent, no supreme practical principle could be found for reason at all.

—Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity.

—Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

That which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not merely a relative worth, i.e., a price, but an inner worth, i.e., dignity.

—Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

...

Second, I’ve finally found moral convictions that actually persuade me—at least for now I have some relatively solid principles to guide my actions.

Take the four examples Kant gives:

The two duties to oneself closely resemble two creeds I made for myself at age twelve—”don’t die” and “keep striving.”

But I must admit, duties to others have been lacking in me.

In the environment where I grew up, almost no one truly believed, deep down, that they had any real obligations to others.

And this is precisely the tragedy of myself and this society.

Morality is a form of collective wisdom.

I used to disdain morality, because back then morality meant ritual propriety to me—and how could ritual propriety possibly apply to someone like me?

I can’t blame myself too harshly for this, because all the “morality” we witnessed was shameless people peddling things they themselves didn’t believe, or selfish people wielding it as a tool to make you serve them.

Calling such things “morality” is both an insult to our intelligence and a disgrace to morality itself.

True morality comes from the heart.

Looking back:

I made every mistake, and felt the shame rise in me. (Hamilton)

But comparatively, I feel far more shame about the part concerning others.

As for the part concerning myself, though there are many problems, overall I haven’t particularly violated my own creeds, so there’s even a certain pride there.

But concerning others—having no moral creeds whatsoever—I essentially did whatever I wanted.

Yet paradoxically, if treating people merely as means were acceptable, it should mean you harm others and benefit yourself.

But in reality, the more I did such things, the lower I thought of myself.

So there’s reason to believe that even without explicit articulation, deep down you still hold certain beliefs, still pass judgment on good and bad.

This is what we call the objectivity of morality.

Here I’ll borrow Kant’s hand to fill in the two missing pieces of my moral map.

From now on, I’m adding “don’t lie” and “help others when you can” to my moral creeds.

Finally, why did I say “for now” when talking about principles to guide my actions?

Reading Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I detected a flavor similar to Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This supreme good will that Kant says we reach through reason—isn't it just the God in the hearts of Weber's Protestants? And Kant's absolute duty-based moral commands—the Categorical Imperative—closely resemble Protestant ethics with its relentless moral self-examination.

So have I spent all this effort learning Christian morality dressed up as metaphysics of morals?

So in the end, must I still face head-on the questions of “God’s existence” and “the immortality of the soul”?

Kant touches on these issues in Chapter 3. I’ll save them for later.

References:

Deng Xiaomang: Reading Guide to Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, People’s Publishing House, 2012

Immanuel Kant, Mary Gregor: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge, 2012

Dostoevsky, Zang Zhonglun: The Brothers Karamazov, Hebei Education Press, 2009

Dostoevsky, Pevear and Volokhonsky: The Brothers Karamazov

After all this time, I’m only now figuring out what I actually want.

I want to be a free scholar in a free land. I want to live this life on my own terms. I want to be proud of who I am.

I used to think I could make it work anywhere. Turns out I was wrong. I can feel it—keep going like this and there’s only one outcome: death. And the spirit dies first, long before the body.

Run. Run for your life.

This goddamn place—what’s the point of staying?

Last year, during the pandemic lockdowns, I spent three months confined at home, on and off.

I’d had plans, projects, things to do. But once they actually locked down the compound, my mind went blank except for one obsession. I became like a caged dog. Every morning, first thing: rush downstairs to check if they’d opened the gates yet. Disappointed every single time. Then I’d stand there glaring at the hazmat suits guarding the entrance, radiating defiance.

Some birds aren’t meant to be caged. What does freedom mean?

Nothing. Everything. Worth nothing. Worth everything.

The pandemic didn’t just wear me down—it severed whatever emotional ties I had left to this land and these people. I understand people’s choices and fates better now.

Saw @erdaye on Twitter discussing the “victim narrative.” I get his moral reluctance to judge victims harshly. But there’s something detached about it, watching from a safe distance.

Here’s the paradox: If you pity their plight, you’re denying their agency—their rationality, their autonomy. If you respect their agency, you forfeit the right to pity them.

Put differently: who the hell are you to decide others don’t know what they want? What makes you think your way would better serve their interests? Intellectuals and idealists always wanting to change society, change others—but half the time it’s just their own power trip.

But both extremes miss the point. Nobody’s completely autonomous and rational. Hell, I can’t even quit smoking, and here I am lecturing about rationality and autonomy.

Think of an abusive relationship—manipulation, gaslighting, violence. We pity the victim, naturally. But viewing them purely as victim is naive, underestimates human complexity. Maybe they do feel genuine love. Maybe they find meaning, belonging. Maybe surrendering control brings relief—no more exhausting choices, someone else making all the decisions. A friend recently confessed something like this to me.

I thought about this worshipping Guanyin at Nanhai: you relieve suffering, sure—but can you save people from their own stupidity?

If someone makes a stupid choice bound to cause suffering, and you’re a compassionate deity, what do you do? Grant their wish and let them suffer? Or override their will and save them anyway?

I lean toward respecting their will.

It’s not just the system or strangers that grind you down.

Recently discovered an old high school friend (Guangguang) deleted me. I want to say I’m used to it. But honestly? I’m pissed. My memory doesn’t forget anything. Same dorm room. His math talent outstripping mine in high school (I just had no glaring weaknesses). His signature fadeaway on the court. Visiting them when his wife was pregnant.

I hadn’t posted anything lately, so I asked his wife what happened. Classic Henan move—she’d rather lie to my face than give me straight talk. All I got was vague muttering about my “extreme views.”

How tiresome.

Why do you think you get to police my thoughts? Because we happened to be born in the same place? So I’m automatically bound to your positions, required to think within your prescribed templates?

I wish you’d just treat me like a foreigner. I don’t want to be your compatriot. Being your compatriot is nothing but bad luck—zero benefits, infinite obligations.

I’ve been dancing around this, afraid to say it outright. Not anymore. Let me be clear:

I don’t want to be Chinese.

Everything mainstream Chinese culture values—aside from bare survival—runs counter to what I believe. Three things especially disgust me: first, the hierarchy and casual discrimination everywhere; second, the unprincipled social Darwinism, stepping on neighbors to get ahead, moral bankruptcy; third, the intolerance—zero capacity for different views.

Stop counting me as part of the Chinese collective. Just treat me as a foreigner who happens to speak the language.

I want to be a free scholar in a free land. I want to shed this narrow ethnic identity, transcend nation and race and faith, push toward something higher, deeper, find solid ground to stand on, escape ignorance and confusion and chains, achieve actual spiritual freedom.

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

I want to live on my own terms. I want to be proud of myself.

So if not Chinese, what then?

Fanfan says I’m positioning myself as “Earthling.” Close, but not quite right.

The problem is the utilitarian framework lurking underneath. You know the logic: collective interest equals moral compass. Whatever tribe you belong to, that tribe’s interests become your north star.

I reject this completely.

I’ve been skeptical of utilitarian ethics since middle school (probably reading about “pulling one hair to benefit the world”):

Why is the selfishness of a thousand people nobler than my individual selfishness?

It’s not. It’s just shamelessness times a thousand. Still shameless.

Say pure selfishness has zero moral value. Helping others is positive, hurting others for gain is negative. Then a thousand people’s selfishness equals one person’s selfishness. A thousand times zero is still zero. Nobody’s morally superior.

Same goes for sacrificing one person to save a hundred million—zero moral justification. Actually, it’s committing evil a hundred million times over. Unless the sacrifice is fair or voluntary—like drawing lots where anyone could be the victim.

Everything else? Shameless. Standing in safety while righteously demanding others sacrifice themselves—peak obscenity.

That’s why Kantian ethics resonate with me. Always have.

Justice first. No complex calculations required. Majorities and minorities irrelevant. Actions from good will have value regardless of outcome. And vice versa.

Which brings me to the word that captures my position:

Integrity.

Usually translated as 正直 (zhengzhi) in Chinese.

But this word deserves unpacking—it's incredibly rich. My current understanding includes at least these layers:

1. Moral law grounded in reason and universality
2. Principles that survive scrutiny—theoretically coherent, internally consistent
3. Unconditional commitment to those principles. Walk the talk. Find courage when scared. Stay uncorrupted, unbowed.
4. No exceptions—not for yourself, not for anyone. No discrimination. No special pleading.
5. Honesty. No lies to others. No lies to yourself.

This word encompasses everything I value. More important than kindness, even. Kindness without integrity? Insufferable sometimes.

Example: A Beijing urbanite vacations at a Hebei farmhouse. Sincerely admires the fresh air. Earnestly advises the farmer to stay in the countryside and protect the environment.

So what kind of person do I want to become? Someone with integrity. And if I’m lucky, part of a community of people with integrity.

There was a time when I felt utterly disillusioned—this place seemed like a moral and intellectual desert.

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish.

—Walt Whitman, "O Me! O Life!"

Genuine kindness was rare. People's thinking couldn't escape the gravity of survival and wealth.

But any functioning system needs citizens who match its spirit.

Policies only succeed when society collectively wills them into being.

When a universally accepted policy strikes you as absurd, chances are you’re the one out of sync with the mainstream.

So when they restricted my freedom, I didn’t just resent the policymakers—I blamed equally every citizen who backed those foolish rules, and the culture that bred both the officials and their policies.

After all, these officials came from the people. They’re often the best of them.

Replace them with a random sample from the population, and you’d likely get the same thinking.

You can smell everyday culture in every policy, see how they flow naturally from the survival tactics people use with each other daily.

II. National Character

Does national character even exist?

Is humanity disappointing everywhere, or just here?

People kept telling me:

Social science has debunked national character as pseudoscience.

People are malleable—shaped by education, propaganda, environment.

But I remained skeptical. This only denies that national character is fixed forever—it doesn’t mean societies can’t display persistent patterns over long stretches of time.

Even if people are malleable, transformation takes decades.

Meanwhile, reality kept proving my cynicism right. Deeply discouraging.

Then the White Paper protests happened. People showed me that change is real.

They reminded me that reality constantly defies my expectations.

Three years earlier, I’m certain most protesters would have sided with the regime.

Even now, they’re probably only protesting because this issue falls under Mr. Science’s jurisdiction, where right and wrong are clearer.

And even on scientific matters, I doubt many oppose for the right reasons.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter.

Limited knowledge, biased understanding—so what?

As long as people keep searching for freedom, hope survives.

Some fall. Some get lost. That doesn’t mean they’re lost forever.

Scrolling through my Weibo from a decade ago, I found myself asking whether nobleness exists.

I’ve wrestled with human nature that long. It reminded me what fundamentally matters to me.

Like starlight shining through the endless dark cosmos.

I know the backdrop is vast nothingness. I know searching for universal answers is nearly futile.

I know there’s infinite chaos and shadow, places that crumble under close examination.

But something transcends all that. When you see it, you just know—that’s goodness. That’s light.

Besides, I’m so glad that you came back.

I. What Is Morality?

As I understand it, morality is about questions of right and wrong, good and evil.

II. Why Does Morality Matter?

Morality guarantees neither wealth nor respect. It offers almost no visible benefits.

Why bother studying such abstract matters?

Yet it is profoundly important, becoming increasingly so with age and experience.

Especially when your beliefs clash sharply from those around you—when determining who is right and who is wrong becomes an urgent matter—you cannot just turn away and pretend nothing happened.

In reality, morality is far more complex than many people realize.

In martial arts fiction, villains often justify their actions by saying things like “If a man doesn’t look out for himself, heaven and earth will destroy him”, or “A real man must be ruthless.” Odd as it is, that’s still morality--the need to justify one’s actions to oneself as morally acceptable.

Above all, morality is about dignity.

Wealth cannot resolve spiritual emptiness; social status does not guarantee respect; intelligence often seems shallow when faced with the complexity of real life. What, then, gives up real dignity? Only what can endure self-scrutiny--inner consistency, principled thinking--can support that diamond-hard core of the human spirit.

III. Tools for Thinking

Assumptions and logic.

Traditional moral values may not always hold up.

The beliefs we absorb from childhood might not withstand scrutiny.

Even the majority opinion isn’t necessarily right.

And within the realm of morality, there’s a difference between what is and what ought to be. Just because something is a certain way doesn’t mean it should be that way.

The only reliable way to test a claim is true is through its assumptions and its logic.

If the premises are sound and the logic is valid, then no matter how shocking the conclusion, it must be correct.

IV. Does Objective Morality Exist?

Or put more commonly: Do you believe in universal values?

On this question, there are three camps:

Nihilism believes they do not exist;

Relativism believes they exist but are subjective;

Objectivism believes they exist and are objective.

1. Relativism

Let’s start with the weakest position.

Relativism acknowledges that morality exists but denies universal values. What’s considered right or wrong depends on society or the individual. What applies in one culture may not apply in another; what’s right for one person may not be right for another.

You’ve likely heard this before: “Every country has its own conditions”.

But relativism quickly collapses under scrutiny.

If you say a moral claim is true, and I say it’s false, we can’t both be right — only one of us can be. A theory that insists we’re both right ends up contradicting itself.

If you need to add “in your opinion” or “according to your society” before every moral claim, then sure, you eliminate contradiction — but you also eliminate the disagreement. And once the disagreement disappears, there’s nothing left to debate. Moral discussion becomes meaningless.

Furthermore, it cannot explain moral progress. Was the morality of the past just as good as today’s? Was the old version of me just as right as the current one?

And if you argue, “Morality must respect historical and cultural context,”--congratulations—you’ve just stepped into the light, because that statement itself is a universal moral judgment -- a claim you’re asking everyone to accept. In doing so, you’ve already abandoned relativism.

If you insist on doubting universal values, you might as well go full nihilist.

2. Nihilism

Nihilism includes two major schools of thought:

First is error theory, which denies morality altogether, just as atheism denies God.

It argues that the world has no moral features whatsoever. The physical world may have objective properties, but moral values are entirely human-made.

There are no moral facts, so there’s no basis for saying any moral judgment is true or false.

In the end, morality is simply a human invention — a fiction.

Second is expressivism, which holds that moral judgments do not reflect reality but merely express emotions.

When we say “heroic deeds are moral,” we’re really saying “Nice job! Thumbs up.”

When we say “rape and murder are immoral,” what we’re really expressing is, “Ugh, gross — stop that.”

In short, moral language is just emotional expression. There’s no actual judgment being made — and therefore no question of right or wrong.

3. Objectivism

Objectivism holds that objective moral standards exist and believes in universal values.

So far, neither nihilism nor objectivism has clearly won the debate.

I myself once followed the view that “Good and bad are artificial constructs.”

However, like Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, even though he didn’t believe in God or eternal life and claimed humans could do whatever they wanted, he ultimately couldn’t escape the moral torment surrounding old Karamazov’s death.

Nihilism may be a powerful weapon against moral coercion, but it hasn’t completely resolved my issues.

While we cannot yet prove that universal values truly exist, there’s also no argument to definitively refute them.

Universal values do not require absolute rules. Objectivity and strictness are different things—Newton’s laws don’t hold at the quantum or relativistic level, but this doesn’t deny their objectivity.

Equal rights do not negate universal values. You have your morality, I have mine; we both have the right to speak, but that doesn’t mean we’re equally right.

Cultural differences aren’t enough to disprove universality. What looks like difference on the surface may share deeper common logic.

Disagreement isn’t proof against objectivity. People once fiercely debated geocentrism and heliocentrism. Some still think the Earth is flat.

Science can’t disprove objective morality — because science can’t even prove the foundations of science itself.

The strongest challenges to objectivism are these: 1.

The Argument from Absolute Reasons: If universal values are real, they should provide unconditional reasons to act — but they don’t. So, are they really objective? 1.

The Moral Motivation Problem: Belief alone doesn’t lead to action. I believe the sun rises in the east, but that belief doesn’t require me to do anything. Yet moral beliefs seem to carry an inner push toward action--which suggests morality isn’t in the realm of true/false at all.

Still, for objectivism to build a moral house, nihilism must try to tear it down. It’s this very tension — between building and dismantling — that helps create something truly solid.

Though the debate isn’t settled, I personally need a house to shelter me from the storm.

So, for now, I stand with objectivism: I believe universal values exist.

V. What Counts as Moral?

1. Divine Command Theory—God Creates Morality

Socrates asked Euthyphro: Do the gods love pious acts because they are pious, or are they pious because the gods love them?

All divine command theories face this Euthyphro dilemma:

If God’s moral commands are based on no reason, they’re arbitrary — which undermines their authority.

If God has reasons for these commands, then it’s those reasons, not God, that determine right from wrong.

In a largely secular society like China, we might replace “God” with Confucius or any other revered figure.

So we are justified in agreeing with Christopher Hitchens:

“Human decency and morality is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”

Do we need God to motivate moral behavior?

If I do good only to earn a place in heaven or to expect rewards for kindness, is that morally meaningful?

Doing the right thing for selfish or external gain may result in good outcomes, but it lacks moral worth.

Two years ago, I raised this question at a book club on To Kill a Mockingbird:

Can deeply moral individuals only exist in societies with religious belief?

I still remember being unsatisfied with one attendee’s answer:

She said the protagonist acted morally for the sake of his children — to build a better world for them.

But that reflects a very typical Chinese moral reasoning: doing good for others, but ultimately for one’s own family.

In truth, Atticus Finch did what he did because it was right.

Justice itself was enough of a reason.

As Rust said in True Detective:

“If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then brother, that person is a piece of shit.”

More broadly: If the only reason someone behaves decently is the hope of some external gain — then that person is a piece of shit.

True moral motivation comes from a love and respect for the things in life that deserve moral regard.

Religion is not a prerequisite for morality.

2. Natural Law — The Laws of Nature

Natural law theory grounds morality in the natural order: Everything in nature has a purpose or essence. Whatever aligns with that natural essence is good; whatever violates it is bad.

But here we run into a problem. In English, “law” is used for both natural laws (like Newton’s laws) and moral laws. But they function very differently.

Natural laws describe and predict behavior. They cannot be broken — you can’t violate gravity. But moral laws can be broken. They don’t predict behavior, and people disobey them all the time.

Natural laws can set the limits of human behavior — for example, jumping off a ten-story building will kill you — but they can’t tell you what you ought to do.

They describe what is, not what should be.

3. Egoism—Maximizing Personal Interest

3.1 Psychological Egoism—Everyone Is Selfish

First, a question: Is everyone selfish and incapable of altruism?

The answer to this question is crucial. If this view holds, it means the failure of morality.

If everyone is truly selfish and incapable of altruism, morality cannot require self-sacrifice.

On this point, we should trust appearances.

Because there is indeed evidence of altruistic behavior in the real world, and evidence doesn’t support this judgment.

Everyday life, academic research, and numerous experiments show that sympathy can motivate altruistic action.

While you can still claim all altruistic behavior is for dopamine/a good night’s sleep/long-term benefits, that seems overly contrived.

3.2 Ethical Egoism—Everyone Should Be Selfish

I remember a civics class in eleventh grade where the teacher asked whether people are all selfish. I answered: If everyone were selfish, then no one could be selfish, because you couldn’t freely take someone else’s share.

In hindsight, I was clearly answering the wrong question. The teacher was asking about psychological egoism; my reply was about ethical egoism.

Psychological egoism is a claim about human nature. Ethical egoism is a moral theory: our sole moral duty is to maximize our own self-interest.

Ayn Rand represents this view: the best way to improve everyone’s condition is to have each person pursue their own good. Here’s a mahjong example: if every player kept accounting for everyone else’s wins and losses each round, things would get confusing fast; but if each keeps track only of their own score, the game runs smoothly all night.

The problem arises when our interests conflict: where do others’ interests stand then? Under ethical egoism, others’ interests count for zero. “Sacrifice a hair for the benefit of all?” Sorry — that’s beyond my moral duty. Scarlett O’Hara’s famous line: If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again. By that logic, if theft and murder prevent me from starving, then I have a moral obligation to commit them.

4. Utilitarianism—Maximizing Overall Happiness

The moral principle of utilitarianism is simple: maximize overall happiness.

In Chinese context, utilitarianism often carries a negative connotation — but that’s a misunderstanding based on the word “utility.”

Utilitarianism actually presupposes equality and impartiality: whether you’re rich as a prince or poor as a beggar, your happiness counts the same in its moral calculus.

It is flexible in moral reasoning — as long as the outcome is good, almost nothing is absolutely forbidden.

But that flexibility is both its strength and weakness.

Suppose the money you have could either treat your son’s illness or save two strangers. Who should you save?

Suppose one healthy person’s organs could save five dying patients — should you do it?

A strict utilitarian would say yes — always choose the action that brings the greater total happiness.

But is that truly right?

And who among us can ever predict all the consequences?

To address this, some philosophers propose rule utilitarianism — the idea that morality equals the optimal set of social rules: if everyone followed these rules, the result would be best for all.

Yet every rule, no matter how well designed, can fail in certain situations. So if you clearly see that your rule is failing — should you still follow it? Or should you abandon it in pursuit of the best outcome?

5. Kantian Ethics—Justice Above All

Kant elevated moral rules to the supreme position.

For Kant, moral laws are categorical: they must never be violated.

He rejects the idea that benevolence is the core of morality, arguing instead that justice and integrity are central.

The test of a moral maxim is whether it can be universalized. Imagine a world in which everyone follows my rule — would my aim still be achievable?

For example, suppose you live in a region with severe gender imbalance. Your aim is to continue your family line, and your rule is to abort female fetuses or kill female infants. If everyone followed that rule, only males would remain, and your aim would be impossible. Therefore your maxim is immoral.

Kantian integrity means holding to one’s moral principles without treating oneself as an exception.

People sometimes call Chinese culture “Social Darwinist,” but according to Kantian consistency, that wouldn’t really make sense: a true social-Darwinist, once realizing he is not one of the fit, should calmly accept being eliminated.

The same logic applies to a fanatic Nazi: once discovering he’s Jewish, he should walk into the gas chamber without hesitation.

But you can’t rule out true fanatics doing this. So by the consistency principle, fanatical Nazis are virtuous people, because they upheld their principles.

To address this, Kant had another principle about morality—the humanity formulation:

Always treat humanity as an end, never merely as a means.

Rationality and autonomy ground human dignity and grant persons a distinctive moral status. Reason lets us set ends for ourselves; autonomy lets us legislate moral laws for our own lives. Because of these capacities, every person deserves respect.

This explains my aversion to terms like “brainwashing” or “manipulation”: they demean human rationality and autonomy. People are capable of discerning right from wrong and capable of choosing what to believe. Though many abandon these capacities and brainwashing becomes widespread, we cannot deny that some people still judge rightly and legislate for themselves.

For Kant, the morality of an action does not depend on its consequences but on the maxims and the freedom to act on them — elements for which we can accept full responsibility.

Future outcomes, which involve contingency and luck, should not be the standard for moral judgment; rather, moral appraisal should rest on past actions.

Goodwill is the only thing that has moral worth in all circumstances.

We do what we see we must do morally — and we do it for that reason alone, without regard for public opinion or cost-benefit calculations.

Act rightly; don’t worry if the heavens fall.

6. Social Contract Theory—The Shared Choice of Free and Rational Beings

Social contract theory sees morality as essentially a social matter.

Morality is a system of rules that promote cooperation and punish betrayal, rescuing us from the state of nature and freeing us from the prisoner’s dilemma.

As long as we are free, equal, and rational beings, we can all agree to such rules.

To test whether a rule is moral, imagine standing behind the veil of ignorance — unaware of whether you were born slave or master, male or female, Black or white, Christian or Muslim. When all personal characteristics are stripped away and everyone starts from the same position, would you still agree to that rule?

This approach explains the objectivity of morality: if morality was not created by humans, where else could it have come from?

Morality is a set of mutually beneficial rules that would be endorsed by people like us — but freer and more rational.

Moral rules need not be eternal truths like the laws of physics. They are optimal solutions derived from human nature and social conditions — like a Nash equilibrium.

The reasoning process is human, but the result itself is independent of any individual’s will.

Yet social contract theory has its own problems. It suggests that immoral behavior can still be rational.

If morality arises from rules of cooperation, it assumes people are at least partly self-interested — and that self-interest is rational.

But why should I, in reality, obey rules I would have agreed to only in an imaginary, identity-free state?

In theory, I might gladly donate ten oxen; in reality, when I own one, I’m unwilling to give it up.

So is consent supposed to be hypothetical or real?

And if morality comes from external social constraints, why not enjoy the benefits without paying the costs — free-riding on others’ compliance?

Suppose there exists a technologically superior alien civilization — why would they make and honor a contract with humans?

By the same logic, why should you care for the weak, the sick, or the elderly?

In that sense, the claim that morality is based on cooperative reciprocity seems idealized; the more realistic version may rest on mutual capacity for harm.

But what, then, of those without the power to harm?

And are those who have power but choose restraint doomed to be exploited?

Social contract theory, for all its insight, offers no absolute reason to obey morality.

There are, of course, many other ethical theories — such as moral pluralism, which holds that multiple fundamental moral principles coexist, rather than one supreme rule. Yet I find such theories unsatisfying, as they fail to resolve conflicts of priority.

There’s also feminism, but I currently lack deep empathy. I may study it separately later.

Conclusion:

Up to this point, the theory I relate to most is Kant’s—it best matches my natural moral instincts.

I value justice over outcomes, and consistency over benevolence.

Morality matters in itself, not because of any reward or punishment.

Human dignity arises from morality, and moral worth stems from goodwill.

Kant shows us how to live with ourselves: use reason to make our own laws and stay true to our principles.

The social-contract view shows us how to live with others: reciprocity grounded in consent and agreement.

VI. Some Real-World Moral Questions

1. Are Ordinary People the Ultimate Measure of Morality?

What moral responsibility should residents of County X bear for human trafficking?

Are ordinary Russians affected by sanctions innocent?

If innocent, why?

If guilty, what moral responsibility do they bear for Putin’s war?

2. Who Counts as “We”?

What moral obligations does a person have to their original community?

How should one rightly respond to discrimination?

If your moral beliefs sharply diverge from the majority in your group, who then remains your moral community?

3. Justice vs. Forgiveness

Justice sounds noble, yet its goddess wields a sword.

Justice implies retribution, punishment, an eye for an eye, remembering wrongs, enforcing justice at any cost.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QK9i!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc7c0d42-26d1-4e03-a4c4-26e38877ce1d_760x535.jpeg)Image of Justice statue

Scripture presents two Gods:

The Old Testament God -- vengeful and world-destroying, the embodiment of justice;

The New Testament God -- preaching forgiveness and love for one’s neighbor: when struck on the left cheek, offer the right as well.

In youth, such teaching seemed absurd. With age and experience, its meaning grows clearer: vengeance is human; forgiveness is divine.

When should we cling to our human nature and carry out justice, and when should we transcend it and choose forgiveness?

4. What’s Wrong with Patriotism?

Lee Kuan Yew once observed that Scandinavian nationalism motivates citizens to accept high taxes for the good of their compatriots, while elsewhere nationalism turns into iron locks and clubs wielded against one’s own.

Obviously, there is good patriotism and bad. But how do we tell them apart? Perhaps goodwill offers the key.

Is national interest the highest principle for judging one’s moral stance?

If so, why? If not, what is?

5. What’s the Problem with the “White Left”?

Do you agree with so-called white-left liberal ideas?

If you do, on what grounds?

If not, what’s the problem—flawed position or flawed reasoning?

Is this ultimately a matter of moral stance, or of intellect?