Date: July 26, 2023 | Author: Commander of the Night Watch
Preface
These hidden constraints and the thresholds used to filter people are woven together like hidden compartments beneath the water. The fish raised in the ocean believe they now possess the entire sea — but in reality, they are still inside the grid. They don’t have much room to move, even though the nets forming that grid are indeed installed within the ocean itself.
Imagine this scene: an old man who has never left his village his entire life. With the spread of smartphones and the internet, even such an old man can be lured by merchants at the margins to buy a cheap smartphone — appealing to his fondness for bargains. He can’t really operate the phone, but it comes pre-installed with many apps, like Douyin.
The sales rep tells him: just tap it open and keep scrolling — and you’ll keep seeing all kinds of content pushed to you.
And so, this old man’s world is no longer limited to the gossip at the village entrance. Just like a retired official in a big city, he can instantly pull up the latest news, current events, and ordinary people’s daily shares right from his phone. Through this window, he sees people and things he’d never heard of — places he’d never been.
Suddenly, his perceived world has grown larger — as large as that of anyone who could simply pick up and go. Yet poetry and distant horizons both require money. Money isn’t exactly the problem — the problem is that he has none.
By the time life reaches this point, a person should have found a kind of equanimity, having let everything go: At thirty, one stands firm; at forty, one has no doubts; at fifty, one’s ears open to truth; at sixty, one knows Heaven’s will; at seventy, one is a rare soul from ancient times… These old proverbs reveal how a person, after repeated struggles with life, arrives at some stage, in some way, at a truce with themselves — finding a foothold through either seeing things clearly or seeing through them, letting go of inner desire and all attachments, and achieving an inner balance through natural surrender.
Even if you don’t grasp the finer points of psychological structure, you can crudely think of a person as a vessel driven by the interaction of two forces: desire and fulfillment. When desire cannot be satisfied, a sense of lack arises. When desire is satisfied, a sense of emptiness follows. So human behavior endlessly cycles through the spiral of a psychological structure seeking balance and losing it. In truth, even society’s structural shifts work the same way. The fiercest confrontations on the Eurasian continent are unfolding right now — but all actions, including war, are aimed at breaking one balance and establishing a new one. It was said from the start: the game carefully planned and provoked by the American empire, aimed at breaking the balance of geopolitical structures and economic systems, cannot ultimately achieve what it set out to do — the blowback is already threatening its own favorable position within the existing Economic Order.
Returning to the main point: when a person’s vision broadens and their frame of reference grows grander, they come to see themselves as smaller, more powerless, more lacking by comparison. Put plainly — the mind breaks down. Because your desires have expanded, but your actual circumstances cannot satisfy them. You sink into the misery of wanting what you cannot have, and a swamp of self-doubt. The more unwilling you are to accept it, the more you struggle — the deeper you sink, and the harder it becomes to let go.
I’ve addressed some fundamental concepts in the piece The Power of Bearing Up. That article came to me as a sudden conclusion right before falling asleep one night — I jotted it down without properly organizing it. But it introduced a perspective for observing problems and a framework for judging people and situations. Those who’ve read it should understand why the more society develops, the more miserable people become. The pleasure of a living being comes from a self-assessment within its psychological structure: a sense of dominance and agency over the world it perceives.
The moment you can no longer feel that dominance and agency, your psychological structure fills with uncertainty about your self-judgment as an independent being — in plain terms, you can no longer feel your own existence as a person. You feel yourself being slowly reduced to a tool.
When a man in a marriage feels he is nothing but a tool, he will readily abandon all material interests just to escape that binding relationship. Aren’t men supposed to be the more rational ones? Why are they so irrational in this situation? It’s because when his psychological structure makes its self-assessment, it arrives at the conclusion that he is being completely instrumentalized. Even if this conclusion is purely subjective, it produces a suffocating dread — like a death sentence being read aloud.
There was once a CEO asked a sharp question by a journalist: as an entrepreneur who grew up in poverty, with no understanding of modern corporate management culture, how did he keep his entire team continuously self-driven and hungry? His answer was quite earthy but distinctive. He said: if an employee earns 10,000 yuan a month, he takes that outstanding employee to a fine dinner, shows them the wider world, encourages them to take out a loan to buy a car, and lets them see concretely what a better life looks like. The pull of actually experiencing it — rather than merely imagining it — is incomparably stronger. That attraction claws at the heart and cannot be suppressed. For managers earning 50,000 a month, he’d take them to his own home, show them high-end residences, and urge them to take a loan and buy one too. As for senior executives who already earn well and have few burning desires, he’d take them to Macau or Las Vegas for a thrill — slowly, through this kind of guided stimulation, getting them to develop a taste for bigger and bigger thrills. That is exactly how the CEO of Gionee (Jinli) was set up — lured step by step into a trap. When it all came to light, he had no choice but to give up control, sell his stake, and plug the holes.
The greater the stimulation, the greater the risk — and risk’s greatest power is its ability to instantly shatter the fragile equilibrium a person has painstakingly built for themselves. In this state of imbalance, people are swept forward by forces around them. To put it more elegantly: under pressure, people drive themselves to break out of their current circumstances.
Su Qin once spoke words that have echoed for two thousand years from the depths of his heart: “If I had owned a thousand acres of land in Luoyang, how would I have ever worn the seals of six kingdoms?” People are driven by necessity. Even someone like Su Qin was forged by being backed into a corner.
When pushed hard by extreme pressure, people tend to produce two entirely different outcomes: the strong grow stronger, the weak grow weaker. Under great reward, brave men emerge — but under great pressure, cowards are born too.
If a person is persistently dissatisfied with themselves, dissatisfied with their circumstances, and dissatisfied with their relationship to the outside world — yet can never find a way out or a path to change — they remain locked in a state of intense, unresolved self-consumption. Such a person only weakens further in that constant drain, giving up on themselves in cycles of self-abandonment, progressively eroding their own capacity to bear up. Habitual quitting and avoidance, habitual procrastination, habitual pessimism and emotional volatility — all of these stem from a psychological structure that repeatedly tells a person: you cannot hold all of this together. And so the need arises to escape, to self-medicate, to daydream, to seek comfort and sympathy.
Liu Bang, riding the momentum of Han Xin’s brilliant stratagem — the decoy road repairs masking the real advance through the Chen Cang pass — seized the territories of Guanzhong and Hebei in one sustained drive, then marched on Pengcheng with a coalition of lords and an army of 500,000. Yet Xiang Yu, returning from the Qi region with a mere 30,000 men, used just 5,000 advance troops to breach the walls Liu Bang and his lords had occupied, then swept everything clean — routing Liu Bang’s 500,000 in complete disorder. While fleeing, Liu Bang even kicked his own children off the carriage to run faster — a defeat so total, so shameful, it defied description.
Liu Bang fled to his hometown of Fengpei, shut the gates, and settled into a small, quiet life — making no effort to advance. Zhang Liang pleaded with him tirelessly, to no avail. Liu Bang’s mind had broken. If Xiang Yu’s ferocity at the Battle of Julu had only been hearsay before, this time Liu Bang had personally assembled a coalition of 500,000 — and watched them get carved up like vegetables by a force of 30,000 on a long march. The dread born from that reality made him unable to believe he could ever defeat Xiang Yu. He needed to escape. So he hid in the county town where he’d first raised his banner, shut the gates, and tried to live small.
But Xiao He overcame his fear of Xiang Yu with a different kind of fear: “Do you think shutting the gates lets you live quietly? Once Xiang Yu consolidates his forces and pressures the lords into line, he’ll come down on you like a mountain. Since you couldn’t beat his 30,000 with your 500,000, when he comes at your 30,000 with 500,000 — can you hold this city? Can you defeat him? If you can do neither, then not only will everything you have now be lost — even what you hoped to preserve behind closed gates will be gone. Your family and everyone who followed you will be put to death by Xiang Yu. You will be left with nothing, without even a grave to call your own.”
The fear of losing everything and dying without burial ground defeated his fear of Xiang Yu. In the end, Liu Bang employed strategies of brilliant cunning and finally defeated Xiang Yu — driving him to his death at the Wu River. Whether Xiang Yu had crossed back to Jiangdong or not, the outcome would have been the same — for only with Xiang Yu dead would the dread within Liu Bang’s heart truly dissolve.
This is like Genghis Khan capturing his sworn brother Jamukha, pledged to brotherhood three times over. He valued Jamukha’s talent and cherished the bond of their brotherhood — but in the end, he still killed him. Because a man who contests the throne with you cannot coexist in peace. Any moment of leniency invites ruin from within. It was precisely this fear — of no retreat — that made Genghis Khan set aside that warmth and that love of talent.
People are repeatedly driven by desire and by fear. If someone surrenders an obvious benefit, it is always because they see a deeper fear ahead. As we examined in C4: Looking East with Longing — Longing for Time, we explained why Yuan Shao didn’t move to receive Emperor Xian of Han back under his protection, allowing Cao Cao to steal that advantage. It was absolutely not because Yuan Shao lacked foresight. Even if he himself failed to spot the immediate gain, the several major strategists in his camp were no ordinary men — as a collective, they would surely have weighed the pros and cons thoroughly. The reason intelligent people surrender an obvious benefit is always because they have perceived a deeper danger lurking beneath.
Ordinary people often lack the capacity to see such distant dangers. They are easily swept along by the torrent of information crashing directly into them.
Just like that old man at the village entrance — at sixty or seventy, at an age where he should have already let go, he suddenly immerses himself through a phone screen in a world showing him how life can actually be lived, all the beauty he’s never experienced. In an instant, his own life feels as thin and flavorless as clear broth. The destabilization of his mind — like a drowning man grabbing for the last straw — will ignite, like an old house catching fire, an unexpected kind of madness.
Why is it that many men in their forties or fifties, once they’ve made some money and climbed to a certain position, begin to recklessly try to reclaim a love they never had — through young women in the prime of their youth? Such men, when young, lived in a narrow, tunnel-like, single-track world. Born into modest families, lacking confidence, unnoticed by others — but with solid grades and a proud spirit. People in that situation had no choice but to block everything else out and channel all their energy and focus onto a single point, seeking a breakthrough through that one narrow passage. And so they spent their lives in a world like a corridor. When they reach a certain age and finally see the richness of the world, a deep sense of deprivation wells up — mixed with the regret of a door you can never pass through again. So the old house catches fire easily. And once it catches, it is often catastrophic — tearing apart and shattering, under completely irrational conditions, everything that had been so painstakingly built.
In this era, with the spread of internet technology and the revolution in media, the infiltration of information that is everywhere has woven for the masses an illusion: that there are more and more opportunities, that life is becoming more and more varied, that your future holds infinite possibility. Yet in reality, the hidden constraints have not diminished — they have multiplied. The hidden thresholds have not been lowered — they have been raised. These hidden constraints and the thresholds used to filter people are woven together like hidden compartments beneath the water. The fish raised in the ocean believe they now possess the entire sea — but in reality, they are still inside the grid. They don’t have much room to move, even though the nets forming that grid are indeed installed within the ocean itself.