15. People become stupid in the same way they become bad…
Are people naturally good or naturally evil? More and more, I have come to believe that people are “naturally good”.
Do people start foolish and then become more and more clever? Or is it the other way around, and they start clever and later slowly become stupid?
Actually:
People become stupid in the same way that they become bad, and the mechanism for these two processes is exactly the same.
Tell me, does this world have “people who are 100% bad”?
This is a question I have thought about often over the past year, because over the last ten to twenty years I have run into only one person that I extremely disliked. After she left the Publishing House of Electronics Industry (PHEI), I wasn’t willing to privately give her the publishing rights to a bestseller that I had written, instead deciding to keep publishing with PHEI. After this, this person would never pass up a chance to “vilify Li Xiaolai”, and I even suspect she hired people to write bad things online. But one person over ten to twenty years is actually quite rare, and the percentage is quite low.
When I was young I wasn’t very sociable, but, after training and improving myself, I have a lot of good friends, especially after the age of thirty — even if I’m still not necessarily very “sociable”.
When I introduce one friend to another, I often start off this way — and it is something I am very proud of:
This is my friend of twenty years…
As to how I make friends, I wrote an article on my WeChat Public account: “What is a friend?” (two articles in total).
But during the entirety of my 45th year, which is over the past year, I have run into a large amount of so-called “bad people”. Betrayal, fraud, slander, mixing up right and wrong, even entrapment…. Aside from Zheng Yiting (@xdite), I won't mention any other names — but there aren’t enough fingers on my one hand to count them all! With such density, I must find a way to reflect: have I become the problem?
Repeated thinking has led me to two conclusions:
- It seems that the percentage of people has not actually increased, because the number of new people I met this past years is basically equivalent to the total amount of people I met during the previous twenty years…
- And then I was surprised to discover that the world doesn’t have 100% bad people, it only has “good people” and “people who have gone partially bad”…
Think about it carefully. In your life have you run into a “100% bad person”? I thought carefully about it, and discovered that I hadn’t. Looking around in the past, or even in history, I couldn’t find anyone — even murderers might be protecting their daughter, even rapists have love. Isn’t Lust, Caution this type of story?
So, in the end, my conclusion is:
All people want to be good.
If I were to choose between “people are naturally good” and “people are naturally bad”, right now I can only chose the former. So there are no “purely bad people”, and maybe there are only “partially bad people”. For instance, people who are 10% bad, or 20% bad… I would guess that it would be difficult for even a “50% bad person” to exist, because at over 50% that would be a lot of suffering in their heart.
All people want to be good. But once the person has made a bad decision, then they will face a choice:
- Admit the mistake, and then work hard to correct the mistake…
- Not admit the mistake, and then “rationalize” the mistake…
“Rationalizing one’s mistakes” is at its essence a process of reshaping one's brain. As soon as this process is completed, the person is still someone who “want to be good” in their heart — this is the only way we can explain how those corrupt officials teach their children at home that they should be people of good character.
If you simply divide the people in this world into “good people” and “bad people”, then these unclear concepts will constantly influence future decisions, and of course you will burdened by these possibly incorrect decisions (or we could simply call them “actions brought about by fantasies”). So, I must thank these people I have met over the past year, because the end result of their existence is that “Li Xiaolai has evolved”.
If I weren’t upgrading my “operating system” like this, there is no way that I could understand Zheng Yiting’s behavior (Her nickname online is X-Dite, or XDite). Over the last few months, she has been describing Li Xiaolai as an “evil investor” everywhere, but has always avoided several obvious facts:
- With Li Xiaolai’s help, she held training courses in the mainland and made more money than she did in many years in Taiwan;
- This training company was invested in by Li Xiaolai, who requested and carried out a reduction in his share from 40% to 30%, telling her, “I don’t care, I want you to work harder and make more”;
- Later, the vast majority of OTCBTC’s users came from Li Xiaolai’s community;
- As of early August 2018, Zheng Yiting had not given Li Xiaolai any investment returns from OTCBTC, not even returning the initial investment…
If she wants to call Li Xiaolai an “evil investor”, then she should at least first return the investment after making money, right?
After upgrading myself, I started to understand her train of thought. After making huge potential profits and having a huge potential valuation, she suddenly decided that the originally agreed upon 40% was really too much, so she didn’t want to share with the early investors, and didn’t want to carry out the obligations of what had been previously agreed upon. This is the only core reason, and these were later her actual actions — however,, she needed to rationalize these decisions and behavior. After rationalizing, she still completely “wants to be good” in her heart. For example, she is still diligent, still hard working, and she still wants to convince other people and tell herself that she is kind and fair and righteous… It’s just that these residual effects remain:
- Since these decisions and behavior have been rationalized, the next time she runs into a similar situation she will respond with the same decisions and behavior without hesitation…
- The next time she runs into a slightly more extreme situation, the cost of making an incorrect decision will be lower, and the impulse will be higher…
So, to be frank, when I see Zheng Yiting constantly rationalizing her own behavior, and working so hard on the path of “becoming a worse person”, I cannot hate her, I can only feel pity for her — it’s just another pitiful person in the world.
A reporter asked me about Zheng Yiting and several other people:
Do you hate them?
My reply was the same:
No. I really don’t hate them. First I don’t have time, and second I really feel they are quite pitiful, because once they have started to go bad, there’s basically no way to come back…
Furthermore, if I can’t understand the existence of this kind of “normal phenomenon”, my world would be a dark place.
I might also understand the couple who recorded and then leaked a private conversation with me to be “scoundrels” — five months previously they secretly made a recording, then five months later they secretly gave it to someone with ulterior motives, and then they created a negative image of Li Xiaolai…
But actually? Actually this is more likely:
When they were talking with me, they to some extent took Li Xiaolai to be someone like a teacher, and thought that his ideas had value, so they secretly recorded the conversation. Had they requested permission at the time, they either would have been refused, or, if Li Xiaolai had agreed, then five months later everyone would have heard the “clean version” — there wouldn’t have been as much dirty language, and criticisms of people wouldn’t have been by name…
I guess that they later shared this recording with close friends or colleagues, and then after that it was discovered by people with ulterior motives who used the most ruthless tactics to “make things difficult” for Li Xiaolai:
- Taking everything out of context;
- Even going so far as to make up statements (Li Xiaolai didn’t use the work “leek”, but they used such frightening headlines);
- Spending money to get mainstream media to share it on Sina Weibo accounts;
- Hiring people to create frightening topics in WeChat and Telegram groups;
- Organizing “groups to report offenses”, inciting emotions and promising to “find help in the government if you tell me”;
- Organizing lots of people to make anonymous reports to government officials — with the material to report being the made-up “explosive material in the recording”;
- Approaching lawyers and saying, “I don’t care how much it costs, I want Li Xiaolai locked up”…
So the couple weren’t actually the perpetrators, but they are quite pitiful — from now on, who will be willing or dare to be open and sincere with them?
Some people have tried to sell me anti-eavesdropping tools, and some people have recommended “even more amazing dark professional PR teams”… I rejected them all. I don’t want to turn into that kind of person just because I have run into that kind of person. Not at all.
I hope I can remain the way I was.
To take it a step further, I don’t want to turn bad. Not even a little bit.
When faced with that kind of person, I also don’t want to use “their tricks”, or “their methods”, fighting fire with fire or whatever… Because if I do that, even if I win, I lose, and I lose badly, because I have been changed by them — and what’s worse than that?
To be precise, even saying that “I want to be a good person” is giving me too much credit. Really all I want is this:
I don’t want to turn bad.
How can I keep from becoming bad? It’s easy, and we’ve already made it clear:
If I accidentally make a mistake, I must correct it, and absolutely not try to do any form of “rationalization”.
The mechanism for a person becoming stupid is the same; it’s completely the same. They just made a foolish decision, they just didn’t work hard to correct their thinking, and they just unconsciously rationalized their prior stupidity… So they start to become stupid, and they go further and further down the road of becoming stupid. The earlier discussion of the way that all “leeks” think is full of clear examples and explanations.
So, if you don’t want to become stupid, you just have to do one thing:
It doesn’t matter if you do one stupid thing, but as soon as you discover you are stupid you must immediately correct it, and absolutely do not rationalize your dumbass behavior. Otherwise, you can only go further and further down the road of becoming stupid… The most terrifying thing is that dumbasses are definitely not lonely, because their natural percentage in the population is quite large, and their consensus is even stronger. So if you’re not vigilant enough you will definitely become an dumbass who feels happy but is actually in pain — this is without question.
So, in the end, all wise people are the same, with no differences in this point of view:
If after a period of time you don’t even feel that the past version of you was a dumbass, then this shows that you have already completely turned into an incurable dumbass
Look at what Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio says:
Pain + Reflection = Progress
After going through this process of thinking, the words I use to evaluate people have started to change. “Not bad” is the highest evaluation of a person’s character; in the same way, “not stupid” is highest evaluation of a person’s intelligence. It matches up with that saying: good people are all the same, and bad people are all different; smart people are all the same, and stupid people are all different…
Note: There is an article in the magazine Scientific American that I recommend you read closely. It’s called “The Dark Core of Personality”, and you can learn about the concept of the “D-Factor”. Here is the web address: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-dark-core-of-personality/