If there is still an intellectual who wants to be “enlightened” to others, he will find himself funny without waiting for others to laugh at.
It seems that people in this society who have been deceived by various kinds of “quanjian” catch a lot, especially all kinds of knowledge health care, entertainment health care, dominate the lives of many people, and the average IQ of the society is not high. . These people all have a common feature: they understand the world in a way that they are willing to believe. When others remind them from a rational point of view, they are all “I don’t listen, I don’t listen, I don’t listen” expression.
What appears on many people’s faces is not the humble temperament, but the self-feeling. From this, we can catch a symptom of false egoism.
No more sacred
Why doesn’t enlightenment work? The answer lies in a sentence in Dialectics of Enlightenment written by Horkheimer and Adorno: “Myth turns non-life into life, and enlightenment turns life into non-life.”
This sentence is very obscure, I translate a bit.
Myth means that the world is divine, and of course, as its opposite, it also presupposes the existence of gods and demons or ghosts. Therefore, the myth corresponds to a ghost world. In this world, Sun Wukong popped out of a stone, a snake can become a fairy, and a tree also has life.
This world is precisely “turning non-life into life”, and its extreme saying is “all creatures have spirits”.
From the beginning of the birth of mankind to the appearance of the great god “modernity”, human beings have lived in such a charmed world for a very long historical time. People are in awe of such a world, whether it is the fear of wind and rain and lightning, God or God, the knowledge mastered by a wizard, priest, or Confucian, or the elderly, authority, and law, morality, and human life.
In the 1980s and even the early 1990s, there were remnants of such a world in China’s rural and urban areas. Putting aside other factors, this was also the social soil where enlightenment was possible at the time, but it was also a reason for its abandonment.
But after the emergence of “modernity”, the ghosts and gods were slowly dispelled. This stems from the technological differences in social control between modern society and traditional society: tradition relies on the creation of charm, through spiritual induction for social integration, while modern society relies on various control methods of technology and rationality. It tends to be “objectivized”, does not hesitate to get rid of evil, and turns many things into seemingly cognizable, controllable “things”, which must also be represented by various numerical values. This “turns life into non-life”.
Fromm, a humanistic philosopher and psychoanalytic psychologist, said that a person, even a person who ca n’t measure the value of his life with money, can use “worth one million dollars” Measure it. This is also the old name that is often given by modern society: one category has to be replaced with another category. For example, the value of a person ’s life is measured by “how many net worths”. If there is a lot of money, of course, it will reach the peak of life; but if it goes bankrupt, the person seems to be able to commit suicide logically. The same is true of so-called academic research. For example, “psychological research” has been stolen into biological research, using genes to explain people’s psychology and behavior.
This is not just disenchantment, but involves the redesign of the self’s experience of the world and the readjustment of the relationship between the self and the world. Turning life into non-life, life cannot have sacredness and morality. They are just abstract things that can be represented by numbers, and can be included in a social interest chain for calculation.
Hell is no longer
In this regard, it is not surprising that things like gene-edited babies appear. The emergence of various vicious events that break through the bottom line of morality and human relations seems to have its social logic.
A sense of awe means that people still desire to be spiritually improved, so enlightenment is not a problem; without a sense of awe, the spiritual direction of a person is exactly parallel or downward. What he wants to satisfy is nothing but utilitarianism and low-level desires. , They only make one person tend to break through the bottom line.
The word “Enlightenment” presupposes an unequal relationship, as if A wants to educate B. But why did B allow A to educate in the past, but not now?
This involves one of the essences of false egocentricism: a person wants to magnify his false self, his false self is arrogant, the world is only a resource to satisfy his appetite, and does not presuppose spiritual improvement. And, most importantly, he does not presume a value baseline, and tends to deny that there is a level of value and a distinction between right and wrong. A person’s false self seems to be the standard for judging value. This standard is his desire and the psychological advantage he wants to obtain.
It is meaningless to list various social phenomena that have lost their awe. From corruption to adultery, from breaking through the moral bottom line to killing parents, from frivolous on social media to indifference to life, from being sloppy to feeling good about yourself, the essence is not just a social phenomenon, but a person There is already a new relationship model with the world.
Whether it is the West or the East, at the source of civilization, a difference in value is preset.
”People can’t give up to others” means that the requirements for the nobility and the common people are still different. For those with knowledge and identity, the value requirements are higher. There is no egalitarian setting here, but a level of value is established in society, and a part of people at the high end of the value sequence should lead the entire society. As for this level of value, it will be deduced into inequality of various identities, and maintaining a deprived social structure is another matter.
Socrates’ view is not too different from that of Confucius. Many people know that Socrates does not approve of democracy. His perspective is precisely that democracy will lead to the loss of value because of egalitarianism. People, whether they are equal or not. ”
Here, Socrates is almost equivalent to saying that if an ignorant person is equal to a wise person, then the ignorant person can despise all wisdom. He will tend to lower the various virtues and higher qualities of a society to suit their grades.
This is also a dead spot in modern society seen by many thinkers. You can’t ask people from the perspective of virtue, you can only hope that one keeps the moral bottom line. Because the essence of modern society is fairness and rights. But the problem is that since people tend to go up and down mentally, the bottom line is the logical end, which will happen sooner or later.
Establishing a value standard so that people at the high end of the value sequence can set an example, educate, and lead a society means that there is an “other law” outside of the person, whether it is God, heaven, tradition, or The wise man is something else. It is the existence of the heterodyne system that makes people feel awe. Just like Confucius said: “Gentlemen have three fears-fear of fate, fear of adults, and fear of the words of the saint. The villain does not know the destiny and fears the words of the saint.
But modern society has disenchanted these, deconstructed everything, and even life can be decomposed into genes. In addition to laws and other people can be dreaded, the other law system is already fragile.
False self-discipline
If the heterodyne system is fragile and no longer awesome, can one break through all kinds of bottom lines?
That’s not true either. There is no god, heaven, tradition, wise people, etc. A person still has his ego and self-discipline.
This self-discipline system includes moral conscience, self-knowledge and natural emotions. He will still remain humble, still respect the value standards of this world, and still have awe of the sacred things.
However, this self must be the true self. Only the true self conforms to nature, human nature, morality, reason, logic, etc. It corresponds to many things in the heterodyne system. In fact, many things in the heterodyne system are a reflection of the true self, and the true self is precisely supported by practical content and ideas from many things in the heterodyne system.
Therefore, from the heterodyne system to the self-discipline system, there is only a turn in form-from the outside to the self.
But the problem is that in modern society, the mainstream relationship between people is roles, roles plus false self, and many things do not depend on the true self. To take the simplest example, on many occasions, especially those involving interests, many people will not open their true self at all. Just like game games, whoever opens their true self will suffer. Countless kind and sincere people are injured precisely because they use their true self to play cards, which is inconsistent with the rules of the game that society runs.
To a large extent, the true self is suppressed.
Therefore, many desires, whether it is consumption desires or power desires, actually come from the needs of false self. But people do not know that this is a fake self, nor are they willing to admit that it is a fake self. Even if a characteristic of the false self itself, anxiety, has been reminded, not many people pay attention to it. Anxiety seems to be treated only by actions that create anxiety, and the prescription for problem solving has always been the source of the problem.
The false self cannot survive alone. It has natural anxiety, psychological competition with the world, always wants to gain an advantage, and sometimes it is aggressive. It is essentially a violation of nature, human nature, reason and logic. Therefore, the fake self naturally lacks awe.
This means that if a person’s self in the self-discipline system is a false self, then he cannot really be self-disciplined at all. It tends to expand into a kind of egocentricism, and then develop into pseudo-egocentricism. In this kind of false egocentricism, value judgment does not exist, and many things will be pulled down from the spiritual height to the tool level and the desire level. If one thing is beneficial to a false egocentric person in terms of interests and psychology, he will not care about the bottom line, because there is no value standard in his mind.
This is the symptom of false egotism. Losing awe is just an important symptom.
