In 1907, the thief Stein found a parcel at Yumen Pass, which contained a letter addressed to the Sogdian woman Mi Wei. In the letter, she cried about the difficulties of life and rebuked her husband, who was far away in Samarkand, for abandoning her in Dunhuang: "When I learned that you were well, I felt that I would never die. But you see, I'm living a terrible life......I came to Dunhuang with you, and I didn't obey my mother's instructions......I'd rather marry a pig and a dog than be your wife!" ”
This letter was written at the end of the Western Jin Dynasty, which was a troubled time, more than 1,700 years ago. However, from this letter of blessing at the beginning and cursing at the end, we can still feel the violent beating of a heart—the extreme love and hatred are intertwined, the endless enmity and hatred are entangled, and all the feelings in human nature are still alive and buried in the dust and sand for thousands of years, as if it is not time that makes the letter yellow, but those eternal scorching ancient words.
It is a pity that for modern people with "clear grievances", this emotion seems to have become incomprehensible because it is too cumbersome. When the Internet weaves human relationships into a Cretan labyrinth, all the complex emotions we inherited from our ancestors seem to be gathered into a coherent thread, and no matter what kind of emotion we fall into, we can eventually find the clue to the outside of the labyrinth, just like the mythical Athenian prince.
Therefore, in the face of family affection, we feel the generation gap and accuse the original family of heavy harm, giving an overwhelming personal prejudice to this sociological concept; In the face of friends, we let "the boat of friendship overturn" without saying a word, and easily cut off the fragile social network connection through "blocking"; In the face of lovers, when we encounter betrayal, we have a hatred of "not sharing the sky", and publish "online essays" to make the other party completely "social death".
Of course, in any emotion, you will meet "bad people" and fall into unnecessary difficulties in life. But the question is, is the "one-size-fits-all" way of dealing with emotions that bypasses complex human nature out of the innate personality of "happiness and revenge", or is it due to the inertia of thinking domesticated by social networks?
For most of the cases on the hot search list, the answer may be the latter. In the face of marital betrayal, some people are devastating "social death blows" as soon as they make a move, which seems to be a "quick knife to cut through the mess", but once they cross the scale, they may change from victims to murderers. In fact, the love that can be cut off with a quick knife and injured with a dark arrow must not be deep from the beginning. Repaying marriage betrayal with destruction is nothing more than the bandit logic in "Water Margin". And as we all know, there is no love in this famous book.
As the psychologist Fromm put it, modern man lacks the capacity to love. But in the age of the Internet, this assertion seems to need to be added - modern people lack the ability to love, but they have the ability to hurt. "When you look at the clouds, you are close, but when you look at me, you are far away", Gu Cheng's poem inadvertently alludes to the magic of social networks as "clouds". This is a profound change that we can feel at the spiritual level all the time compared to Miwei's time.
Needless to say, social networks have become a world of "Napoleon per capita". We are self-centered, not afraid to be enemies of each other, trampling on each other's spiritual garden. Pushkin predicted this "modern disease" two hundred years ago: "We see everyone as zero, and only ourselves are extraordinary." "And when the magic of social networks invades reality, everyone is at risk. But all human beings have the secret of "not being an outsider", and they are either hidden desires or even behaviors. Who would dare to assert that these will not one day become a "nuclear deterrent" against themselves as material for "small online essays"?
Liu Cixin once said in an interview that human nature is by no means eternal as writers say, but will be imperceptibly transformed by technology. Whether this judgment is accurate or not can only be answered by posterity, but the obscuration of human nature by social networks is beyond doubt. However, this is not a reason to oppose technology, and all the ethical problems brought about by the scientific and technological revolution in history have finally been solved through human self-innovation. But this process is often difficult and cruel.
At this moment, in the Lushan Mountain, we can only pray silently: I hope that when the clouds disperse and the sun rises, we can still feel Mi Wei's violent heartbeat, and we can still understand the complexity and shortcomings of human nature with a sound humanistic spirit.
Text reporter Xie Yangliu.