Text/Gibb
At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the world was in turmoil, and the princes in various places surged up and developed their forces, attacking each other and competing for supremacy in the world. Among those tyrants, Liu Bei can be said to be well known, although he is a descendant of the imperial family, he is also a downcast, and the people of Pingtou are no different.
Liu Bei did not love to learn when he was young, and it is recorded in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms that he loved gorgeous clothes for fighting, and in today's terms, he was a "street slipper", and later he was fortunate to have the luck to have a strong Guan and Zhang Er before they embarked on the road to prosperity.
Because it was a chaotic world, Liu Bei soon realized his weakness, because objective factors made his ambition large and his capital small, and when he was at his most powerful, he only had a team of hundreds of thousands of people, and he could not withstand the big and small hard battles. Therefore, Liu Bei began to prepare to take the development route of "people".
When Liu Bei was the Commander of Pingyuan County, he shared the hardships with the local people to buy people's hearts, which was really effective, making many pingtou people and even benevolent people feel that he was benevolent and righteous, and his strength had also improved.
After Liu Bei left Pingyuan County, many people were willing to follow him. Therefore, Liu Bei, who tasted the sweetness of "benevolence and righteousness", decided to carry out this name forever in the future. "Only the virtuous can obey people", although it is a mantra, it has become a benchmark for Liu Bei. At least on the surface, Liu Bei's words and deeds were in line with moral requirements at that time.
But is the real Liu Bei really loving the people like a son in essence? One thing you can see is that he's not. In Liu Bei's attitude towards his own woman, Liu Bei's true colors are fully displayed.
People call Liu Bei "love the people like a son", but in the treatment of his wife and children, he is extremely casual and gives up. Throughout Liu Bei's life, the abandonment of his wife and son occurred four times.
In 196, Lü Bu defected to Liu Bei's Xuzhou, and later took advantage of Liu Bei's expedition to take Xuzhou and abduct Liu Bei's family. Liu Bei lost his foundation and had nowhere to go, so he took the initiative to show weakness and ask for peace with Lü Bu, so he wanted to return his wife and children. The official history records that Liu Bei had no sons at this time, only wives and concubines and daughters with unknown names.
In 198, Liu Bei defected to Cao Cao and wanted to take advantage of the situation to retake Xuzhou, but this time, Liu Bei was beaten and suffered heavy losses, and Lü Bu's general Gao Shun took Liu Bei's wife and children captive and sent them to Lü Bu for merit.
In desperation, Liu Bei could only return to Cao Cao's Xu capital, during which time he did not want to redeem his wife and children, because he once said this sentence: "Brothers are like brothers and sisters, wives are like clothes", in Liu Bei's heart, the status of women is far less important than that of his brothers who work for him.
In 200 AD, Liu Bei again wanted to oppose Cao Cao, and there was a great chance that the plan would succeed for a long time, but because of his bad luck, he encountered Yuan Shao's pit cargo on the road, resulting in the failure of the plan of the attack, and Liu Bei had to flee to Jizhou, during which Time Liu Bei fled for his life alone and abandoned the crowd.
Later, Liu Bei recaptured Xuzhou again, because he offended Cao Cao, Cao Cao led a large army to attack Liu Bei, Liu Bei could not defeat Cao Cao, and then took his wife and children captive, and this time his second brother Guan Yu was also captured into Cao's camp.
The last time Liu Bei abandoned his wife and children was in 208 AD, or when Cao Cao was crusading against Liu Bei, Liu Bei was defeated at Changbanpo in Dangyang, and the emperor fled for his life, and the troops were scattered with Liu Bei only Zhuge Liang, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yun and others.
At this time, Liu Bei's two daughters fell into the hands of Cao Cao, if according to the "rules" at that time, Liu Bei's daughter was most likely to be rewarded as a trophy to Cao Jun's sergeant, and the end of the two daughters was self-evident.
From this point of view, Liu Bei's approach can be far contrary to "benevolence and righteousness". Obviously, Liu Bei still treated his wife and children like this, not to mention the people at the bottom of society. Liu Bei's behavior can also be understood as the true color of the tyrant, the so-called "stay in the green mountains, not afraid of no firewood."
From this point of view, Liu Bei is indeed a person who is good at disguise, not a "benevolent" person in the true sense. Let's look at Liu Bei's ancestor Liu Bang, when Liu Bang defeated the battle and ran away, in order to make the carriage run faster, he also personally drove Lü Yan and his son off the car, so that he could survive.
From this point of view, Liu Bei's ultimate success was not all due to his benevolence, but to his determination to abandon good judgment and the true nature of the tyrant. Let's think back to Liu Bei Zhuge Liang's Longzhong pair, Zhuge Liang once suggested that Liu Bei seize the clan relatives' Jingzhou and Yizhou by force, and Liu Bei showed great joy after hearing this, which can also explain Liu Bei's fierceness.
From this we can see that the decisiveness in Liu Beixiong's true colors is an important reason why Zhuge Liang is willing to mix with him, after all, Zhuge Liang is not an idle person, and if he wants to rise and fight for hegemony in the chaotic world, blindly paying attention to "benevolence and righteousness" is bound to be a dead end.
References for this article: "Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Shushu , Biography of the Ancestors", "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Pin Three Kingdoms", "Baidu Encyclopedia Related Entries - Liu Bei, What kind of person Liu Bei is in historical facts" and other related materials