After reading the article "The demise of "discussion" in the Chinese Internet

Chen Feiyue's article (see the related article for the original text) was written with great care, and I couldn't help but excerpt some of the content for discussion.

 It is meaningless for individuals to be unable to participate in public discussions or to participate in public discussions, which strengthens the individual's sense of powerlessness, and then further consumes the enthusiasm of the individual to participate in the next public discussion, so the sense of powerlessness is deeper.

Erich Fromm made a similar point in a 1958 interview when he criticized the American public for severing their private life from their part as a member of society. He believed that the public acquiesced in transferring the responsibility for understanding their country and monitoring public power to experts and elites, calling it political lethargy .

In the political field, the negative feeling of the people due to the doomed participation can also explain the reason for the popularity of the fan circle culture mentioned in the original article-the regaining and experience of power in the field of consumption. As the voice and status of fan groups have been significantly improved, they are no longer gadflies who could not be heard in the binary relationship between superiors and subordinates, but become "big parents" who can actively intervene in idol person setting and career planning. If power is addictive, then the phantom taste of power stripped in a simulated way is even more addictive for its revengeful thrill.

 Hannah Arendt first proposed the concept of "public realm" in the 1950s. In the public sphere, the public should "replace truth with opinion and grasp truth with opinion". Everyone understands the world in their own way, expresses different opinions, and no one has absolute truth. Only when opinions are exchanged can the public have a complete and better understanding of the common world.

Totally agree with the last sentence. I have always believed that everyone has a piece of the truth, and that only when you piece it together can you see the whole picture. As Walter Lippmann puts it in his book Public Opinion : "We can be tolerant of our opponents only when we are accustomed to seeing our views as partial experiences we gain through prejudice."

Unfortunately, when we actually see the facts, prejudice will inevitably intervene subconsciously, "helping" us to judge and filter the facts. In a way, the stereotype system is a kind of stress protection mechanism, it protects us from the harm caused by the complex world and the collapse of beliefs, and allows everyone to understand the world in order, at the cost of the world you understand is distorted .

"Once the stereotype system is fully fixed, our attention is drawn to the facts that support the system, and blind to the facts that contradict it."

So we gradually love only the facts that fit our existing view of the world, while discarding the rest as lies or just selectively blocking them out. After all, if something is believed to be true, we can always find an example of it being so, or someone who believes it is so.

"While destroying prejudice is never easy, as it is so closely tied to our self-esteem, once we have overcome the initial pain and succeeded in doing so, we can feel a great relief, a noble pride."

 In fact, social media close to this utopia has not never existed, and almost all forums and blogs more than ten years ago met these five requirements. From this perspective, the reasons for the decline of these two platforms can be better understood. They may indeed have not kept up with the pace of technological iteration, but they are still fundamentally due to national conditions - in today's environment, they must decline.
The communication of policies in the virtual space is no different from the real space, still emphasizing "understanding the intention of the superior" and "being responsible to the superior". Therefore, in terms of effect, it will often show an expanding response intensity from the center to the local level. Because "it would be better to implement excessively than to fail to implement it properly" and "the statement must be full."

I personally think that this logic of responsibility for the top and not the bottom is inseparable from China's long-standing centralist thinking.

When Yuan Weishi was answering the question "Why did the modernization transformation appear in the West in the first place" (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/CiYJvqYl2NTo5hSwmvpw-Q), he said:

The United Kingdom started out as a constitutional monarchy, using a charter to restrict the king; it gradually developed into a constitutional monarchy, and the power of the monarch was gradually weakened; the power was gradually concentrated in the hands of the parliament and transformed into a modern constitutional monarchy. Voters also expanded from the original minority aristocracy to ordinary property owners, and later to all male citizens, and to women in the 1920s. This is a very long development process.

These regulations are unthinkable in China. China does not have this tradition at all. China only has a national unity and no local autonomy. The Chinese system since the Qin Dynasty was not a feudal system, but a centralized patriarchal autocracy.

 It is generally believed that the specific implementation of censorship and information control is the "3F" policy - fear (fear), idling (friction) and flooding (flooding).

Combination of "1984" and "Brave New World" .

George Orwell feared those who forcibly banned books, Aldous Huxley feared losing any reason to ban books because no one wanted to read anymore;

GO is afraid of those who deprive us of information, AH is afraid of people becoming increasingly passive and selfish in the sea of information;

GO is afraid of the truth being concealed, AH is worried that the truth will be drowned in boring and trivial world affairs;

GO fears our culture becoming a controlled culture, AH fears our culture becoming a vulgar culture full of sensory stimulation, desire and unruly games.

 The anti-intellectual phrasing discards the ambiguity that the question may have and the complex steps that the argumentation process may have, and it puts an absolute, violent simplification over critical reasoning.
For Jurgen Habermas, this means that the mass media has transformed the public's "critical rational training" into a "presumption training." At this point, even though a venue is still nominally open to the public, it is effectively closed as a public realm.

The original text gives a very apt example of "anti-intellectual wording" - "Oh, xxxx is done." This tendency to destructive simplification of language dispels all those who discuss complex issues and express profound views. Possibilities will inevitably lead to indolence, superficiality and sloganization (extremification) of thought.

2019.7.24 When I commented on the article "Whether Rape Fantasy Will Contribute to Bad Cultural Psychology" , I wrote:

The mention of rape fantasies in the article is a bit controversial and gradually changed its name to "(pseudo) non-consensual sexual behavior (consensual non-consent, CNC)", which makes me sigh that readers in the context of information overload are spoiled by big bold and eye-catching headlines .

They want less and less text, but they have not developed the corresponding ability to summarize, tolerance and patience. The direct result is that many social issues have been simplified in order to lower the threshold for participation and gain more popularity (rather, castration). ), again creating ambiguity in this imperfect de-escalation, which actually runs counter to the original purpose of "making communication easier".

Just like "feminism" and "freedom of speech", these concepts that should not and could not be accurately expressed in four words were first crudely compressed, and then began to be extended indefinitely after arousing controversy. Feminists have to introduce the original meaning of feminism and Diverging between lexical representations and different schools of thought, debaters have to tease out the definition of freedom of speech and stress that no freedom is absolute, and that these should be the work of the other side.

In order not to be misunderstood, the expressor can only be forced to undertake the job of explaining when the listener does not act. This is actually a kind of connivance, and it does nothing but make the public more and more impotent. In the same way, "rape fantasy" can be a non-controversial and easy-to-spread word, provided that everyone does their own understanding work, instead of forcing word makers to keep adding explanatory paragraphs for clarification.

However, the corruption of the Chinese language is far more than that. For example, the recent inexplicable fire of "Zuan Literature" has set off a Colosseum-style culture in which every word disagrees with one word and takes pride in winning the insult (see https: //mp.weixin.qq.com/s/WmzEc63ZX6Z2jQSdGqDlQg).

Nowadays, the phenomenon of "going straight to three inches below the navel" and "taking the mother as the center, relatives as the radius, and drawing a circle to perform exercises" is becoming more and more intense in Internet discussions. The vulgarization of folk language is to a certain extent a product of society and its ideology, so blindly blaming people who use foul language cannot change this social phenomenon.

As we all know, there are two distinct discourse systems in any society. One is the so-called mainstream discourse system advocated by the government, and the other is the so-called secular discourse system commonly used by the people. As long as the values of the mainstream ideology represented and embodied by the official discourse system can be generally accepted by the people, then even if the folk discourse system differs from the former in terms of the way of expression and the words used, it can still basically reflect the values of the official discourse system. commonalities above.

Unfortunately, the current official media reports are full of stereotypes, empty words and even falsehoods, and the media is one-sided. When the official discourse system has degenerated into a disgusting official language system, the vulgarization of folk language is actually a passive protest - because you cannot directly express your dissatisfaction, you have to vent your anger on individuals equal to yourself or not involved In terms of politically sensitive matters, the oppression imposed by the ruler is finally transformed into mutual harm within the victim. This may be the "wisdom of rule" that allows the ants to check and balance each other.

Next, let’s talk about Jurgen Habermas’s words. Of course, before that, we must first introduce the Frankfurt School to which he belongs. This is a school worth studying, why? Because it is closer to modern times in time than classical philosophy, it is naturally more concerned and more accurate in describing current social issues. If you don't want to spend time reading or listening to lectures, you can refer to my previous summary of the school's incomplete theory (see related article).

Similar anti-intellectualist tendencies are mentioned by Herbert Marcuse in his presentation of the New Left movement. One reason, he believes, is the alienation of the student movement (or intellectual group) from the working class, which creates a sense of inferiority. Furthermore, by acknowledging only immediate tangible results, they concluded that intellectuals contributed nothing to the status quo and displayed a certain self-tortured masochistic complex in their contempt for intellectuals.

Jurgen Habermas argues that with the rise of the Industrial Revolution and consumerism, the emergence of authoritarian states that stifle free speech, and the growing need for advertising to force editors to curate content for profit (the psychology of advertising is closer to the way lords enslave serfs), these damage The ability of the public to conduct public affairs. Political and moral issues began to be manipulated by economic interests, making it difficult for the public to form rational debates, which brought the public sphere back to the vertical relationship under the feudal system rather than the relatively equal horizontal relationship.

JH himself is actually skeptical of the internet's potential to restore balance in the public sphere. Benjamin Barber agrees that factors such as speed of interaction, user loneliness, emphasis on images, etc. limit and polarize the discussion.

However, JH has always believed that undistorted and clear communication is one of the fundamental human interests. He believes that the over-expansion of instrumental rationality has led to "loss of meaning" and "loss of freedom", so he proposes the concept of "communication rationality", hoping that the public can be liberated from the systematically distorted communication situation.

JH's model for explaining distorted communication echoes Karl Marx's "ideology" that our speech reflects the interests of our class (aka "ass determines head"). In his model, "ideology" is replaced by "systematic distortion of communication", which can be roughly understood as a barrier between communication.

After that, JH chose to resort to Freud. I have reservations about this, and I will not express it. But he summed up several conditions of undistorted communication worth referring to, namely equality, authenticity, relevance and morality.

All in all, JH's theory is a linguistic variant of anarchism in favor of decentralization.

 We have seen more than once on the Chinese Internet, people are divided into two distinct factions around a certain topic. This intense hatred, struggle and disclosure by netizens has formed a high-speed automatic machine.

Recently, I have witnessed a lot of vicious abuse and attacks on Fang Fang on Weibo (although I have not read her diary), so I feel more empathy - human beings are born interpretive beings, and in the 21st century, we are in In a situation where interpretation has never been more difficult.

If there is a strong hatred of a person, it is easy for us to associate that person with most of the other things that we strongly hate or fear, believing that there is a causal connection between them.

Cruelty (class struggle) and servility (Confucian education) are in the middle of the banal evil, and they are the cause and effect of each other. Whoever seizes the symbol that can contain the current public sentiment will control most opportunities to formulate public policy, thus opening a new round of vicious circle.

Hannah Arendt wrote in "Eichmann of Jerusalem: A Mandatory Report on Evil" : " Evil is what is not thought ." For without thought, there is no responsibility. Then, since the evil of mediocrity is to completely assimilate individuals into the system and obey the arrangements of the system , the logically most logical and most direct method is to completely change the system. I don't want to discuss its feasibility in China, because as I said earlier, I am keen to understand, explain and analyze, but I have no intention of practicing it for the time being. This is a decision I made based on my current situation and ability.

China is probably too old, and everything in society is terrible, like a black dye vat. No matter what new things are added, it will become pitch black. But there is no other way than to think of ways to reform. In my opinion, all idealists either miss the "past" or hope for the "future", but they have all left blank papers on the subject of "present", because no one can prescribe a prescription. All the best prescriptions, the so-called "hope for the future" are.

——Lu Xun, "Book of Two Lands, Four", 1925