Many years ago, the left-right quarrel on the Chinese internet was in full swing. I have never been able to tell left from right, but curiosity once took me wandering through a left-wing site called Wuyouzhixiang. I stopped after a few visits. I could not stand the slogans, the instant labeling, the readiness to swing a club at anyone who disagreed.
Everyone has a temper, a set of habits, a way of seeing things, a way of getting through the day. Verbal friction is ordinary. If you cannot stand someone, ignore them and go your separate ways. If you are too angry to let it go, write a few words of criticism. If you can lay out facts and reason, then argue clearly. If you are clumsy with words, shouting that so-and-so is a big turtle will not bring the sky down. But the left-wing habit of turning every disagreement into a political case, of denouncing dissenters as enemies who must be trampled forever, as traitors in the house hiding evil in their hearts whom everyone should hunt down and kill, is ridiculous. Are you sure you can lift that club? Are you sure you are holding it correctly?
If you had the old man’s commanding vision, you could see through appearances to the essence, denounce the petty and drag out the hidden monsters. But you are just an ordinary worker in an ordinary world, hoping to run the world from a keyboard with half the Analects. It is truly laughable.
In The True Story of Ah Q, the hired peasant Ah Q was, in Old Master Zhao’s eyes, a worthless life not even fit to share the surname Zhao. But in the prefect’s eyes, what was Old Master Zhao but a writhing maggot? What was the county magistrate to the prime minister but a wagging dog? And in the emperor’s view, everyone under heaven ought to be his livestock.
Heaven and earth are not benevolent; they treat all things as straw dogs. When we try to sort brothers and sisters into ranks of enemies and inferiors, attacking and denouncing one another, we might ask whether all this struggle looks, to those who are paying attention, like nothing more than dogs biting dogs and coming away with mouths full of hair.
