Are We Truly Just and Noble?

A chairman of the literary federation in Leiyang, Hunan, smashed a computer, and forums and media immediately swarmed to mock and attack him. I have studied psychiatry, and based on my experience, analyzing the chairman's various behaviors, I can basically judge that he is indeed a mental disorder patient. China now has over a hundred million people with mental disorders; it is not strange for a middle-aged civil servant to suddenly develop mental illness. Mental illness can strike at any age—game-theory genius Nash, for instance, was a sudden-onset schizophrenic.

A mentally ill person commits some outrageous acts, and a crowd of "normal" people denounce and mock him; afterward they feel full of righteousness. A crowd of Buddhists preaches the foolish view that "suffering in this life is karma from past lives," and after rubbing salt into the wounds of the unfortunate, feel they are doing a great work of saving the world's morals. We take bullying the vulnerable—who deserve our sympathy—for justice and nobility, and congratulate ourselves, never realizing that our conscience has been clouded by ignorance, of which we are wholly unaware.

The dream of science and democracy championed by the May Fourth Movement has never become outdated. We always think ourselves formidable, but in fact our cognitive ability remains at a very superficial level; we need to learn a great deal before we can truly be harmless to others. In China, popular science works are not too many but too few. Precisely because of this, a disease with as high a mortality rate as amniotic fluid embolism can be exploited by the media to incite public hatred of doctors.

When we think we are "doing good," are we truly doing good rather than evil? I cannot help recalling the old scholar in The Scholars (Rulin Waishi) who urged his daughter to die following her husband. He said to her: "My child, if you go this way, you will be a chaste wife whose name goes down in history." He certainly did not feel he was doing evil; he felt he was doing something very great. It is just as when we today, acting without reflection on many things, feel ourselves highly noble.

I have always greatly admired writers like Wu Jingzi, who could think and write beyond his own era. To this day The Scholars has not dated. But works like Feng Menglong's "Three Words" are pure anti-intellectual, mind-poisoning thought toxins. Although the subjective intention may have been good, it cannot change the objective fact that they poison people's minds. Not every so-called moral education textbook is moral; works built on lies, however good the intention, are immoral. Personally I feel that a good writer's work should promote independent thinking and increase wisdom in the reader. It is my humble view that conscience should be grounded in reason.