1. Results.
2. Thinking. In the source of Western civilization, man and nature are the best. This understanding can be traced back to the Bible, the classic of the religion.
The Bible says: God created the world and man.
God created people to be the ruler of all that he had created.
Man gets along well with nature. However, Adam and Eve, the first human beings, were punished by God when they were punished by God for stealing the forbidden fruit of wisdom in the Garden of Eden.
Man was driven out of Paradise. Thorns and thistles grew on the ground, and man had to toil all year round to be fed.
Implicit in the Bible's statement is the relationship between man and nature: man stands above and outside the natural world and has the right to rule over the natural world; Man and nature are hostile; Man can only survive in the arduous struggle to conquer nature.
After a long Middle Ages that was almost hibernating, the 14th century began with a vibrant Renaissance in Italy.
After the 16th century, with the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the subsequent Industrial Revolution and Scientific Revolution, a new cultural spirit was formed—rationalism.
This spirit soon spread throughout Europe and constituted the basic contours of the modern character of the West. Westerners began to regain their lives.
From this time on, man seems to have risen up, freed from the shadow of medieval theology, full of self-confidence, and began to examine and conquer the object as the master of this world.
This object is nature.
Man is convinced that by virtue of his own rational faculties, he is able to understand the order of nature.
Through science, with mathematical precision, empirical intuition, and rigorous scrutiny, man is able to reveal and reflect on the secrets of nature, infinitely expand the world he faces, discover new continents, and circumnavigate the ...... the earth
As science leaped up, it seemed to make people really feel for the first time that human reason is the strongest between heaven and earth.
Science has become the new belief of the West in this profound cultural change, and the cornerstone of the entire modern civilization is also built on this foundation.
But at the same time, what else does science and reason bring us?
scientific and boring", World War II to solve the problems left over from the First World War, rational and brutal totalitarianism, the arms race of the Cold War, environmental pollution, and the spiritual confusion and vulgarization of modern people.
Max Weber said: Instrumental rationality is not concerned with the end, but only with whether the means to the end are optimal.
The logic of instrumental rationality is becoming more and more powerful and becoming a universal logic, and society as a whole is paying more and more attention to computing and efficiency.
This has led to the bureaucratization of the social system: not only in **, but also in all spheres of society, including schools, the military, corporations, ......Bureaucracy is an important form of organization.
An ideal bureaucratic system is well-ruled, disciplined, and people do their duty and do things according to the rules; The system operates accurately and stably, with high availability, high efficiency and strong execution.
Before World War I, the German General Staff had developed a famous military plan, the Schlieffen Plan.
The core idea of this plan is to fight the "time difference", first west and then east, first take France quickly, and then concentrate on confronting Russia.
In this plan, time is of the essence, down to the nearest day: the 12th day to open the Belgian strategic pass, the 22nd day to cross the French border, and the 31st day to occupy Paris.
Some say that this is simply a "script".
The nature of the First World War was the first "war of science", and the result was that thousands of fresh lives became the height of the column chart and the fat and thin of the pie chart.
The staff officers of all sides believe that as long as I am better at math than the other side, there will be fewer soldiers on my side than the other side.
It is precisely because of the involvement of science that the generals trust too much in the calculations of the staff officers in advance.
In Baumman's book "Modernity and the Big **", it is the essential elements within modernity that make the big ** a reality, and the key point is rationality and rationalization.
The scene that happened during World War II was like an industrial assembly line.
In the concentration camps, everyone just did what they did and what they worked with.
Some were responsible for sorting and archiving Jews, some were responsible for scheduling tasks, some were responsible for sending Jews into the gas chambers in batches, and some were responsible for logistics.
It's like a well-organized factory, except that the "raw material" of the factory is living Jews, and the product produced is death.
Throughout the process, no one is a murderer, everyone just takes on their own job and completes a tiny step in the process.
As a result, no one feels responsible for the overall situation.
In front of each participant is just a process to be completed, it may be a schedule, it may be ten delivery tasks, and one tick after each trip is delivered.
In this way, the big ** was split into assembly line operations and routines.
In this process, it is easy to lose compassion and morality in the face of life.
As a result, each step is combined to create a **, and the operator may just feel "I filled out ten forms today".
That is why those who are normal or even kind in their private lives can also become implementers of **.
Internet companies are extremely rational and scientific in their pursuit of data and production, and the so-called feeling of "volume" is similar?
The male protagonist in "Bouquet of Love" Wheat, originally liked to watch movies and **, but after taking office, he felt exhausted because of his work, and finally became a state of collapse of "I can only play mobile games like "Zhilong Maze", and every time I see this paragraph, it makes me creepy.
When we become white-collar workers in cubicles, working more than 8 hours a day, we will clearly feel that my "cultural physical strength" is constantly being weakened...
This great capacity stems from the fundamental characteristic of bureaucracy, "impersonal", that is, "doing things and not people".
In the pursuit of efficiency, people are reduced to a set of indicators, and personal factors that are not related to the task are ignored.
The advantage of this is that complex individuals who can't be counted become data that can be calculated.
The problem is that instrumental rationality has developed too powerfully, overpowering and drowning out man's values, humanity, life goals, and "poetry and distance" as an independent and free individual.
For example, when it comes to big questions like "life goals", we find that these kinds of questions are too heavy and too difficult. So we are guilty of procrastination, constantly pushing the goal question backwards, first strengthening the tools and means, and turning to the logic of instrumental rationality.
As is popular nowadays, achieve "financial freedom" first, and then pursue "poetry and distance". But in the long process of achieving financial freedom, our main concerns are the calculation of costs and benefits, and the maximization of efficiency.
As a result, this long process will shape us in turn, and eventually we will only make money, and it is enough to make money.
The matter of making money was originally a means, but in the end it became a goal, drowning out the previous goal, the previous "poetry and distance".
Faced with such a dilemma, Scientologists say that they are not afraid, we have more powerful computers and more powerful modeling technology.
Scientologists always believe that the problems encountered by science will be solved with the further development of science.
A person who thinks this way means that he cannot guard the two boundaries of science:
First, he can't keep the boundary that science is just a square **, and he insists on dragging science students to the height of epistemology;
The second is that he cannot keep the boundaries of the application of science, that is, it is falsifiable.
Whichever boundary is not kept, science is reduced to the blasphemy of reason, or worse, to the hegemony of discourse.
History cannot be falsified, and it is from this perspective that Neil Bozeman bitterly advises us that history, anthropology, and sociology should return to the essence of the humanities, and that it would be better to have less statistics and fewer figures.
On the other hand, with the encroachment of science and reason, man's "superego" rationality has become very conceited, and "man" itself has gradually become less important.
The first is Copernicus's "heliocentrism", which states that the universe is no longer human-centric.
The decline of man's status was further strengthened by Darwin, who, in the theory of evolution, saw that the fate of man was no longer predestined by God, and that man himself was no longer the pride of God and the primate of all things, but was nothing more than a fleeting species.
Then there is psychoanalysis, which was established by Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the 20th century.
Freud's psychoanalytic doctrine particularly emphasized the importance of the unconscious, emphasizing instinctive desire as the driving force of life.
He argues that the id and the ego in the structure of the personality, that is, the baby and guardian in our hearts, are in eternal conflict.
The rational self cannot fully control irrational desires, and can only constantly respond to them, which may or may not succeed.
According to this discovery, the power of reason is not so strong at all, and the most powerful is actually the primitive desires of man, and reason is just constantly trying to find ways to deal with these primitive desires.
Since the 20th century, there have been several astonishing developments in physics, which have broken the classical Cartesian-Newtonian cosmology. From Planck's quantum theory and Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, to Bohr's, Heisenberg's quantum mechanical equations, the long-established certainty of classical science has been greatly shaken.
Obviously, through the revolution in astronomy, biology, psychology, and the recent revolution in information (network), genetics, and so on, the "torture" of nature by science has broadened the horizon of human thinking and changed the material living conditions of human beings with every step forward that has taken a calm step.
However, since the first half of the last century, the West has once again lost its faith: this time not in religion, but in science, in autonomous human reason.
In the study of modern Western thought, I found that a Western Enlightenment was not only rationalism, but also a side branch: conservatism.
Returning to the bigger picture of Western intellectual history, both Hayek and Popper are actually a side branch of the Enlightenment tradition.
When we talk about the Enlightenment, we all think of the French thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopédians, who represent the mainstream tradition of Enlightenment thought: the belief in the superiority of human reason, the belief that human beings can discover and grasp the truth about nature and society, draw a blueprint for future development, and achieve continuous historical progress.
However, the Enlightenment tradition was not monolithic, and there was also an important branch of the "Scottish Enlightenment" represented by Adam Smith and David Hume.
Their views differ from those of the French Enlightenment thinkers, who also recognize the important role of reason, but oppose the "omnipotence of reason" and the idea that human reason can act as a new god to transform and plan everything in the world.
The Scottish Enlightenment tended to see reason as an ability to doubt, introspection, and criticism, rather than as a capacity to control everything.
If you understand the big picture of this intellectual history, you will understand that Hayek and Popper are not coincidentally similar, they both inherited the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, and questioned the mainstream Enlightenment rationalism with a cautious and critical attitude, especially the absolutism that believes that reason can know everything and plan everything.
Hayek's ideas are very rich and even complex, but we can find one of the most important concepts to start with, and this concept is Hayek's "spontaneous order".
I have talked about this concept many times in previous articles, and it is inextricably linked to complex systems science, Anglo-American particularism, and conservatism.
Hayek said that in addition to artificially designed orders, there are also naturally generated rules, spontaneously evolved orders, which Hayek called spontaneous order.
Hayek not only proposed the concept of spontaneous order, but more importantly, he made it clear that "spontaneous order" is superior to "planned control".
For example, the formation of a country road is, of course, the result of people's conscious choice, but it is formed by the choice of many individuals separately and then naturally superimposed.
It was not consciously designed by any authority, and it was not collectively deliberated and planned.
This path slowly emerges from a multitude of individual choices, and is the result of natural evolution.
So, what do country roads teach us?
That is, even without any comprehensive organization, rational planning, without any power and coercive intervention, order can be spontaneously generated, and this spontaneous order has a distinct advantage, that is, there is no coercion in the whole process of establishing order, and it does not harm any individual freedom.
After reading "The Road to Serfdom", you will know that Hayek regarded spontaneous order as the result of "natural evolution", and he did not reject the human factor, but opposed the over-exaltation of man-made intentions to the overall planning of social order.
In the sense of intellectual history, Adam Smith, Popper, and Hayek all belong to the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, opposing the kind of overly conceited rationalism, and opposing the view of reason as an omnipotent force that can perfectly organize the various orders of human life. This malaise was called "rational conceit" by Hayek.
"Rational conceit" is not just a theoretical concept, in Hayek's view, many disasters in the history of mankind in the 20th century were caused by rational conceit.
In "The Thought of Conservatism", Russell Kirk listed five currents of thought that conservatism opposed: the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the romantic emancipation of Rousseau, the utilitarianism of Bentham, and the positivism of Comte.
There is a scholar of conservatism in China named Liu Junning, who salvaged Lao Tzu's ideological tradition from Chinese culture.
You will find that Lao Tzu's ideological tradition and the conservative ideological tradition are so tacit and consistent.
It shows that as long as he is a human wise man, he thinks about all things in the world, he will naturally come to the same conclusion, although this conclusion is not familiar to us today.
Lao Tzu has some social theories, which everyone thinks are simply incredible.
For example, Lao Tzu said: Absolute sainthood and abandonment of wisdom, the people benefit a hundred times; Absolute benevolence and abandonment of righteousness, and the people restore filial piety.
That is, as long as there are no saints and wise men in the world, the common people will benefit greatly;
If there is no benevolence and righteousness in the world, then the common people can return to the state of filial piety and love.
But today, after we see the great disasters and difficulties caused by science and reason, we need to re-examine these words of Lao Tzu.
Lao Tzu is a spiritual treasure left to us by our ancestors, but he has been sealed in the dust for a long time, and it is worthy of our descendants to read him again.
Lao Tzu said two words: Wu Wei.
Don't interfere with the affairs of the people, and let the natural order grow savagely and grow freely.
Is this "inaction" like Hayek's "spontaneous order"?
In the scientifically developed "materialized" modern industrial society, there is no shortage of materials, but people are lost, and they have lost their spiritual home to return to - they have become "microorganisms" under the microscope!
The concept of "the unity of heaven and man" is just like the feeling overflowing in Tao Yuanming's poems - "picking chrysanthemums under the east fence and leisurely seeing Nanshan", this concept is not only manifested in traditional Chinese philosophy, literature, art, etc., it is also the cornerstone of traditional Chinese medicine and numerology that are most closely related to human beings.
There is a particularly strange thing in Lao Tzu's thoughts, called Bu Shangxian, what does it mean?
Just don't respect the sages.
Doesn't that sound weird, you see? Quite the opposite, actually.
What is Sanghyun called? Sang-hyun is, oops, you're amazing, I respect you.
For example, as soon as we talk about respecting intellectuals, building you a Kochi building, and giving intellectuals *** subsidies, what kind of scholar are you who are respected by the state, you can't see this system when you go to the United States.
Where are there any professors in the United States, and what extra respect is there for intellectuals?
You're just an ordinary profession, and you're doing a good job.
So why would Lao Tzu say such a thing?
Mr. Liu Junning explained clearly in "Heavenly Tea Talk", the reason is very simple, what is Shangxian?
If you define a kind of person as virtuous, this is to set a standard, and you don't know whether this standard is right or wrong.
It is equivalent to discussing right and wrong first, and setting a standard first, but once the thing of "right and wrong" is introduced, those coercive logic evolved from "rationalism" will appear.
Therefore, not Shangxian is precisely to protect the sage, and the so-called Shangxian is precisely to hurt the sage, the injury that hurts, Shangxian, and the sage.
Lao Tzu is known as the grandmaster of Taoism and the leader of Taoism.
Taoism is one of the mainstream of Chinese culture, and whenever people mention Taoism, they must talk about Lao Tzu, but most of them only talk about Lao Tzu, and at most they are called "Lao Zhuang".
In fact, the "giants" of Taoism, not only these two people, Nan Huaijin once joked with a friend: Taoism has three generations of characters, Lao Tzu, son (Ni Zi), grandson.
I have mentioned many times in previous articles that the ideas of "The Art of War" are strikingly similar to the conservative school of thought!
In the Spring and Autumn Period, Sun Wu, a native of Qi State, had his military philosophical ideas that came from Taoist thoughts, and his thirteen articles on the Art of War showed Taoist philosophy everywhere.
He once helped King Wu to defeat Qiang Chu and dominate the princes, which fully demonstrated the greatness of Taoist thought in deeds;
The military philosophical ideas in the thirteen articles can be said to transcend time and space, until thousands of years later, in modern times, when mankind has landed on the moon, has developed into space, and has developed to biochemical warfare, and is still inseparable from the scope of his military philosophy.
Ni Zi, whose surname is Ni, and the original meaning of the word Ni is a child. Some people say that he is Fan Li's teacher.
Fan Li helped King Goujian of Yue to restore the country, using the doctrine of Taoism, and after Goujian restored the country, he could naturally get the best of God, but he didn't care about wealth and nobility, and took Xi Shi, a flat boat, floating on Taihu Lake.
This is exactly the Taoist style of "success, fame, retirement, and the way of heaven".
Therefore, the jokes of Lao Tzu, sons, and grandsons, although they are game words, are not fictional out of thin air.
In fact, if the writings and ideas of Lao Tzu, Ni Zi, and Sun Tzu are thoroughly studied, almost the essence of "governing the Tao" in Chinese culture can be grasped in our own hands, which is worth noting.
In ancient times, all Confucian people who came and went in and out of the same way, after reading the Four Books and the Five Classics, they would first become a nerd, and they must go through the stage of "enlightenment" before they could "unite knowledge and action".
Pure Confucianism cannot do administrative work, and must join Taoist thinking, as is the case with Wang Yangming's "Longchang Enlightenment" in the Ming Dynasty, Zhang Ju is exactly like this, and the same is true of Zeng Guofan, a famous minister in Zhongxing in the Qing Dynasty.
Later generations said that he had made great achievements and had a total of thirteen sets of skills, but eleven of them had never been handed down, and only two sets of skills were left for future generations.
One of them is the author of "Bing Jian", which is the art of meeting people and knowing people.
Another set of skills is his diary and family letters.
If we further analyze the achievements of Zeng Guofan and Zeng Guoquan brothers at that time, the environment, the political background of the times, and the trajectory of history, we can understand that Zeng Guofan was involved in these trivial matters, and in fact he was deeply using the way of Lao Zhuang.
Lao Zhuang's way was also realized by Zeng Guofan when he temporarily fell out of favor and during the "Ding Worry" period in his hometown.
Chinese Eastern philosophy, such as Taoism, Yixue and Chinese medicine, is a typical mystical transcendent thing, but it does not mean that it is useless and superstitious, it is more subtle and systematic than Freud's theory, you must know that Leibniz, who invented calculus, found inspiration in the sixty-four hexagrams.
Perhaps, modern Chinese people can find meaning in Chinese culture, just as people in English-speaking countries hope to find salvation from ** teaching.
Those who hold high the banner of science and oppose Taoist culture actually do not understand the boundaries of science, which has been done many times in previous articles.
Also, what you think is useless, what you think is bad, does it have a right to exist?
Conservatives believe that choices that are harmless to others should be respected.
Berlin has a typical fox conclusion: "No abstract point of view can exist independently of the historical and personal dimension." Moreover, ideas must also exist in relation to other ideas. ”
"Harmless to others" is an Isaiah Berlin concept of "negative freedom," which is, in a vulgar phrase, "your business."
We put the power to define stupidity and the power to eliminate stupidity in the hands of elites, and the result was the largest totalitarian movement in human history, such as the Nazis.
We have also put in the hands of the masses the power to define stupidity and eliminate stupidity, which has led to the regression and collapse of civilizations, such as the French Revolution.
Scientific rationality has broken the traditional value norms, but it has not established new value standards.
Pluralistic values give us more room for choice and allow individuals to gain more freedom, but they also create a "value vacuum", and this empty uncertainty makes it easy for modern people to be troubled by anxiety and meaninglessness.
In the future, I personally believe that "creating meaning", "creating symbols", and "poetry and distance" are very important spiritual consumption for modern people.
Poetry and Distance" brings us something that cannot be replaced by money.
People from different cultural backgrounds have different answers to what kind of meaning human beings need to seek, but I think it is necessary to look for the answer from the "cultural matrix".
I found a "conservatism" in Western thought, and a "taoism" in Chinese culture, and then I found their similarities.
These two major ideas of the East and the West have one thing in common: they are both side branches, and neither of them has been the mainstream in history.
But they grew in the cracks with tenacious vitality, producing great thinkers such as Hayek, Popper, and Berlin in the West, and a small number of people in China began to awaken.
Taoist culture is the temple in my heart.
The philosophy of the Book of Changes, about the meaning of life, about the daily use of the people but do not know, all exist in the word "Tao".
3. Action. 
Peng Zhuang 20240227