In the past two days, the movie "Eliminate the Three Evils Around the World" is being screened, and the film uses historical stories to tell the story of a wanted criminal who thought his life was about to end, so he was determined to get rid of the two criminals in front of him on the wanted list and make a name for himself. It is a good habit to use dictionaries, but the director's understanding of the story of "eliminating the three evils everywhere", which has entered the middle school textbook, actually makes a common mistake that we can easily look at when we read books - it is not actually a story of a rogue youth who reformed his ways. This story was first recorded in "Shishuo Xinyu" and "Book of Jin", and the two stories are similar. It is said that Zhou is the son of Zhou Doi, a famous general of Eastern Wu in the Three Kingdoms era, Zhou Yi died early when he was young, and his mother doted on him, so Zhou Chu "is good at galloping field hunting, not cultivating meticulously, indulging in wanton desires, and the state is in trouble." "Once I chatted with the elders in the township every week, saying that this year's wind and rain are smooth, you have a good life, right? The elders in the township said that there is no good life! There are three evils that have not been eliminated. Zhou asked: What are the three evils? The father said: Nanshan White-fronted Tiger, Changqiao Jiaolong, and you kid. So Zhou went to the mountains to fight tigers and remove Jiao under the bridge, and it took three days and three nights to come back. Because he came back too late, the people in the township thought that he was dead, the three evils were eliminated, overjoyed, and started a celebration party, when he came back around, he saw the villagers in the party, and felt that he was a great evil, so he changed his past wrongs, and finally became a loyal and filial son. 
The story itself is quite simple, but I remember that when I was a child, I had two outstanding impressions after reading it: the first is that I feel that these folks around the world have no conscience, and people around the world have changed their past not to eliminate harm for you, you heard that he sacrificed on the road to eliminate evil, and it doesn't matter if he doesn't shed tears, he actually has a party to celebrate. How can this be justified? The second is strange, because in this story, there is a power that seems to be missing. Whether it is a tiger in the mountains, an underwater evil Jiao, or a bully in the township, the government should take action to get rid of it when it hears it, this is the duty of the public power. How can you sit back and watch the three merge? Later, I studied history in college, and these two questions actually had answers, and in combination with the historical background of the time, it was naturally presented. The first is the question of "where did the public power go", if you understand the special institutional design of the Wu State in the Three Kingdoms era, you will find that it has been present throughout the story, and even plays the leading role - the Zhou place in the story who was scolded by the villagers as the head of the three evils is actually the public power that rules the local area. In fact, the text eye is in the original text of the "Book of Jin", the so-called".The state is in troubleWhat is "state song"? Of course, the state refers to the first-level administrative unit, and the qu refers to the ministry. During the Eastern Han Dynasty, Haoqiang used privileges to annex land, so that the people became their own tenant farmers. Therefore, in the chaotic times of the late Han Dynasty, we can see a large number of characters like Zhang Fei and Zang Ba relying on their "wealth" at home, leading a "volunteer army" (that is, a trilogy) to rise up and become small warlords on one side. And the way the Wei, Shu, and Wu Kingdoms treated these small warlords with private tribes was different. Specific to Eastern Wu, because the Sun family moved from other places and lived in Jiangdong, they did not have the righteous name of "recovering the Han Dynasty" like Shu Han. Therefore, the fait accompli of arming the local private landlords can only adopt a policy of acceptance and softness. As the name suggests, a group of people and their attached lands are attached to the name of a certain military master, who is usually a tenant and a soldier who cultivates for the soldier, and in wartime they are soldiers and go to the battlefield with the soldier. Therefore, under this system, Wu's combat ability is quite restricted, because the army is private, and the army of the soldier master can basically only be received by the clan of the soldier master, and no one else, even Sun Quan, the lord of Wu. Eastern Wu was able to win defensive battles such as the Battle of Chibi and the Battle of Yiting, but once the war was pushed to the outside - for example, Sun Quan often commanded 100,000 people to fight Hefei, but he could not take it. In the final analysis, it is not that Sun Quan cannot fight, but that these soldiers under him belong to various generals. Once the generals fight a war on the outside line, they will inevitably have their own selfish motives, and it will be difficult for the troops to carry out rational coordination according to the strategic planning of the field war, and the combat effectiveness will immediately fail. This is why the Eastern Wu was dominated by either Sun Ce or Sun Quan, so that it was difficult for the Western Jin Dynasty and the Southern Dynasties to go on a northern expedition, but could only sit and wait for death. 
It is precisely because of this that after the death of Lu Xun, the general who took the lead in the later period of Eastern Wu, his position and soldiers could only be taken over by his son Lu Kang; After Lu Kang's death, his defense area was to be assigned to his four sons to be commanders respectively - in fact, from the sinister military situation of Eastern Wu at that time, this choice of "all the princes of the building has less strength" greatly weakened the combat effectiveness of the army and doomed the fate of Eastern Wu. However, due to the existence of the institutional basis of the "tenant trilogy system", it was a choice that Soochow had to make. Understanding this historical background, let's go to the story of "Eliminate the Three Evils in Zhou", you can understand what happened in this story - this is actually not a simple story of the evil young people who are rampant in the township to change the evil and return to the right, Zhou is the son of the general of Eastern Wu, Poyang Taishou, and the Hou Zhou Yi of Guannei, and the "state song" in which he lives is actually the fief of their old Zhou family in the real sense. As a "soldier master", Zhou was born with the right and obligation to manage the army and the people. It is precisely for this reason that Zhou will take the initiative to ask the villagers when he becomes an adult, "Why not be happy in the harvest year?" This is not a "meddling" after rehabilitation, but a responsibility that he must assume as a local manager. And from this point of view, the story of the elimination of harm everywhere is quite ironic, and in the end, he found that although the common people hate tigers and dragons, what they hope most is that he, the "master of soldiers", disappears. A few hundred years ago, Confucius said that "harsh government is fiercer than a tiger", and a few hundred years later, Liu Zongyuan said that "the poison of endowment is like a snake", in fact, it also expresses the same meaning. Ancient Chinese dynasties were often happy to prove their legitimacy by "eliminating harm for the people" as Zhou did. At the local level, tigers and dragons may be removed, and it may rise to the imperial level, such as the attack on the Xiongnu in the north and the invasion of Baiyue in the south, as Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty did. But in fact, the common people actually know how to settle accounts, they know that the biggest of the three evils is still Zhou, and hope that as the "master of the army", Zhouzhi will disappear with the tiger and the evil Jiao, so that the people can live a peach blossom paradise life of "not knowing whether there is a Han, regardless of Wei and Jin". This is the reason why the Taoist doctrine of "rule by doing nothing" is always mentioned - there is nothing in the first place, so what is the dust? But this kind of Taoist dream of simplicity and non-spiritualism is always difficult to realize, and there is no peach blossom source without foreign enemies, tigers and evil dragons in reality. So the Confucian scheme came into being. At the end of the story of "Eliminating the Three Evils in Zhou", the author installs an ending with typical Confucian thinking, saying that Zhou has reformed himself after being instructed by a master, studied hard, and became "".Loyal and filial son”。If you don't understand the logic of this story, you will definitely wonder if you read this, how can being a "loyal minister and filial son" be "harmless" to Zhouqu Township? This is actually the Confucian ideal: Confucianism wants public power to govern the country based on a family-like ethic, subject to supporting constraints and disciplines, so that it can both "subdue the dragon and subdue the tiger" and do not harm the common people – or at least, reduce the harm to the common people. As a result, as implied in "Eliminating the Three Evils in the Week", Confucianism became the ultimate antidote to the ancient imperial system. More than 1,000 years later, in 1651, the English political scientist Hobbes told a fable very similar to "The Three Evils of the Week" in "Leviathan". Hobbes believed that human beings live in the world, are inevitably threatened by various hazards, and even in the state of nature, everyone naturally has bad intentions towards others, so we are in a dark forest where "everyone is the enemy" and everyone else is a beast. And in order to get out of this state, people must make a contract and surrender their rights to form public power, and the state is born. 
So Hobbes admits that the state and the monarchy are a kind of monster "Leviathan", which is an evil in itself, but a necessary evil, just as the villagers hate the surrounding area, but without the surrounding place, there is no one to remove the tiger and the evil dragon for them. It is unrealistic to expect that the three evils will be wiped out, and the only feasible way for mankind is to recognize that public power is a beast of prey, and at the same time find a way to use its power to eliminate harm for mankind and restrain it from becoming a disaster. Therefore, it makes sense that Leviathan is regarded as the beginning of modern political science, and it puts forward two original propositions of two political science at the same time: first, public power is a "necessary evil". Second, for it to function properly, it must be "caged". Thus the rule of law has been found in modern society. 
After another few hundred years, Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa filmed "Seven Samurai", this story is told from beginning to end, in fact, it is also a remake of "Eliminate the Three Evils in the Week". In the movie, in order to protect their villages from the looting after the autumn harvest, farmers in Japan's Warring States period had to pay to hire wandering samurai to "eliminate harm" for them. However, after the battle, the "Seven Samurai", who had suffered heavy casualties, found that the peasants they were protecting did not feel much gratitude or nostalgia for their sacrifices, and the surviving samurai saw the joyful peasants as they did when they returned, so the surviving samurai sighed: ".This time it can be regarded as a defeat, and it is the peasants who win. Many people say that Kurosawa is here criticizing "peasant cunning" or ingratitude. I don't think so, as in the Book of Jin, what he wants to reflect is such an eternal contradiction in human nature that cannot be reconciled - between the samurai and the peasant, one side must lose and the other side win. In that case, it is better to let the farmers win, which is more like a comedy. In fact, whether it is the story of "Seven Samurai" or "Removing the Three Evils Around the Corner", when it comes to the end, it has come to a node full of dramatic tension-What if the Seven Samurai, who had defended the peasants, or the surrounding people who had returned from the eradication, were indignant at the "ingratitude" of the peasants, and were determined to teach them a lesson, so as to torture and even **? Then it became a tragedy of "a dragon slayer boy eventually became an evil dragon". In contrast, I think it's better to make the villagers "ungrateful" - after all, the money for employment has been given, and it is not good for everyone to live in peace. In that story, he described the protagonist Luo Ji's conscientious efforts to protect human civilization and "hold the sword", but after stepping down as the "sword bearer", instead of being thanked by all mankind, he encountered group indifference, and some people even wanted to sue him. Teacher Liu Cixin said: "Human beings don't thank Luo Ji." I know that this plot has made many Three-Body Fans and Da Liu indignant, and feel that the human beings in the story are too despicable, Luo Ji is such a great "sword bearer" who has saved the entire human civilization, you should bow and worship! How can you not thank him? This actually reflects the kind of contradiction presented in the story of "Removing the Three Evils Around the World", but Da Liu pushed it to a certain extreme, so the "ingratitude" of human beings in the story is also particularly strong and infuriating. But to be honest, I don't like Da Liu's storytelling like this, because the crises facing the world he fantasizes about are too extreme, either the sun wants to **, the Trisolarans want to invade, or the universe dark forest battle royale. Under these extreme conditions, it is indeed difficult for people to maintain normal humanity. One could even say,This bit of humanity and common sense accumulated by human civilization for thousands of years looks like a "virgin" and neurotic in the kind of extreme stories told by Da Liu Ai. Teacher Liu Cixin wrote like this**, and also chatted with people like this. I remember that in a three-person conversation, he pointed to the beautiful host next to him and asked Jiang Xiaoyuan, a historian of science, and said, "If the earth is on the verge of extinction, there are only three of us left in the world, and what we have is the remaining civilization of the entire human race, and we must eat her to survive, will you choose to eat her?" Teacher Jiang Xiaoyuan replied to him at the time: ".I'm not going to eat her. What humanity do we have to speak of after eating her? What is the need to save a civilization that does not even have humanity? ”I think that although Mr. Jiang's answer is very correct, it can't help but fall into the trap, because he admits the extreme assumption of Da Liu, if it were me, I would definitely reply to him like this:"Your assumption is too extremeWhy is the earth on the verge of extinction? If we are really on the verge of extinction, why are we all left? How can the remaining three people continue human civilization? If you want to live, what is it bad to eat, why do you have to eat people? If you really want to eat people, why don't you eat her and not you? If I really want to eat you, will you? ”Russell once said that any bullshit conclusion can be drawn from a false premise. So a lot of the assumptions and final conclusions in Da Liu**, it's good to listen to it, but it's boring to take it too seriously. So I think that whether it is "Leviathan", "Seven Samurai" or "Everywhere to Eliminate the Three Evils", they are all good books, good movies, and good stories. At least their three views are normal. Although human beings have different expressions on how to build a peaceful society and live at ease, they will still end up in the same way - in order to prevent the dragon slayer boy from becoming an evil dragon in the end, we would rather accept the "ingratitude" of the villagers. 