Lying Flat: The "Back Wave" Culture under Intergenerational Conflict
Xu Jilin | East China Normal University
This article was originally published in Exploration and Controversy, No. 12, 2021
Transferred from "Learning Club"
As a landmark phenomenon of social culture, lying flat has become one of the hot topics of public opinion in 2021. For lying flat, there can be a multi-dimensional interpretation, in my opinion, the most exemplary lying flat, is a special phenomenon belonging to the post-90s generation, is a manifestation of the "back wave" culture.
The analysis of Chinese social phenomena can have three different perspectives and angles, named after "left and right", "up and down" and "front and back". The so-called "left and right" is to analyze the difference between ideological and political positions among young people from an ideological point of view. This method of analysis has been very effective since the great controversy between liberalism and the New Left in the 1990s. However, in the past few years, this method of analysis based on ideological lines has shown its inherent limitations to some extent. The post-90s generation, growing up in an era of "depoliticization", most of them are indifferent to various grand narratives, and they lack interest in the ideology of the left or right, and it is somewhat wrong to understand the post-90s from a traditional "left-right" position, not to mention that the complexity of the social problems facing China today may not be covered by "left and right". Secondly, the analysis method of "up and down", with the two-level differentiation of social wealth, the intensification of involution and the solidification of social mobility, has increasingly become a topic of concern to public opinion, and today's China lying flat, similar to the "low society" that appeared in Japanese society at the beginning of this century, is the lower class of the middle class, despairing of upward mobility, active or forced to make life choices. From the "up-down" relationship of social structure, the sociological origin behind the phenomenon of lying flat can be found.
What I want to focus on today is to examine the phenomenon of lying flat as a model form of the post-90s generation from the perspective of the third dimension of "before and after", that is, from the perspective of generational change. Regarding the generational replacement in contemporary China, I have a basic analytical framework, in simple terms, in today's China, the post-50s and post-60s (births) are the old generation, belonging to the pre-wave of the model, the generation of the new human beings after the 90s and 00s, which belongs to the post-model post-wave, and the post-70s and post-80s generations between the two generations belong to the less typical transitional generation, which has the characteristics of both the pre-wave and the post-wave generation. As the post-50s and post-60s generations of the former wave, they formed a personality in the atmosphere of enlightenment at the end of the last century, with the spirit of post-idealism, for them, there is no faith, no ideals, no poetry and far away, how to talk about life. However, as the post-90s and post-00s generations, they grew up in the secular atmosphere after the 1990s, and the strengthening of school exam-taking education, the edification of the utilitarian outlook on life that only recognizes success and does not recognize values, has caused many post-wave youth (not all) and their parents' generation, whether in values, outlook on life, or thinking methods, aesthetic tastes, a huge, even insurmountable gap. The so-called lying flat is produced in the context of such intergenerational conflicts.
The previous generation, no matter how tired and tired, always believe in the value and meaning of struggle, as long as through personal efforts, there is always hope and future. If it ultimately fails, it will also admit its fate. The older generation has a deep-rooted feeling of home and country, they have experienced the major events and ups and downs of history, and believe that the fate of the individual and the future of the country are embedded in each other and must not be separated. They are keen to talk about the great affairs of the country, the grand future of the country, is their own future destiny. However, if the parent generation is the "egg under the red flag", then the children's generation is the "egg under the flag". After the 90s generation, growing up in the environment of China's rise, there is a natural love for the motherland and the country, there is a "natural red" feeling, the motherland is their natural identity of the homeland, the country has self-evident ethnic legitimacy. However, the paradox is that for the older generation, the self and the home country cannot be separated, but for the younger generation, the self is the self, the country is the country, it seems to be two unrelated skins, so there will be a special psychological phenomenon of the post-90s generation that the parents cannot understand at all.
The back wave and the front wave are relative. It is interesting to compare the post-80s with the post-90s here. Last year's "Back Wave" promotional film launched on the Bilibili website May Fourth Youth Day caused a huge sensation, however, the real sensation was mainly caused by the post-80s generation. "Free to learn a language, learn a craft, enjoy a movie, travel to distant places", so full of confidence, proud of the world, with this kind of confidence, it is those who have encountered a good era of economic development after the 80s, everywhere is a good career of free choice, housing prices are also within the affordable range of family down payments and personal loans. However, according to my observation, the post-90s generation of working youth generally have no feeling for this "After the Wave", and even a little contempt, the opening of the Sino-US trade war, the difficulty of workplace employment and the soaring housing prices, so that the post-90s who left the campus and just stepped into the workplace no longer have the feeling of success and inflated self-confidence of the post-80s who are ten years older than them, on the contrary, trapped in the involution, 996 and various systems, they feel that no matter how hard they try, they still can't see a vague future, promotion, marriage, and childbirth. All of them have become unattainable dreams, so lying flat has become a new way of life and a new attitude of life.
In fact, before the appearance of lying flat, there was also a hot word that was also popular, that is, the so-called "Buddhist youth" or "Buddhist living method". On the surface, lying flat and Buddhism seem to be the same thing, the same kind of life posture, in fact, the internal difference is very large. First of all, the choice of Buddhist youth for Buddhist life is conscious. In the fiercely competitive workplace, they begin to rethink and position the value of life, is it necessary to work so hard? How can people live to be happy and live? As a result, a small number of young people have changed their way of life, taking a step back from a positive life that can only be won by working hard, to a Zhuangzi-style and Zen-style pursuit of inner freedom and a life of leisure. In contrast, lying flat young people are mostly forced, they do not have the inner self-consciousness of Buddhist youth, let alone voluntary choice. Lying flat is forced by the reality of helplessness, and it is a reluctant expedient measure. The Buddhist system has both rational self-consciousness and voluntary will, and lying flat is neither conscious nor voluntary, and deep inside there is the resentment that I will discuss next.
Secondly, as a model, Buddhism belongs to the post-80s generation, and lying flat is a special cultural phenomenon of the post-90s. Buddhist life, need to have a certain survival security and wealth accumulation, there is a dashing capital, which only the post-80s youth can do, for the post-90s youth who have suffered setbacks in the workplace, it is inevitable that it is too luxurious, they can only take the "five noes" (do not buy a car, do not buy a house, do not fall in love, do not marry, do not have children) to cope with the embarrassment of life, this is the embarrassing connotation of lying flat, and the dashing And free Buddhist youth naturally belong to two different levels, and there is a world of difference in the realm.
When lying flat as a trend comes to the fore, it is the subtle differences that need to be distinguished. I have found that there are at least three different forms of people in China today who will shout flat on the ground: false lying flat, positive lying flat, and negative lying flat.
The false lying-downist is the winner of the competitive arena of our time, and you can also call him a lying-win-winner. They have either achieved financial freedom and can be willfully dashing; or "my dad is Li Gang", with a strong backer behind them, lying down, and can also earn money. There is a saying circulating on the Internet: "Those who reach out are alone, and those who are poor have no choice." The real lay-offs are the helpless poor, but these pseudo-lying-flat-mindedists belong to the masters who are alone. The solitude pursued by these masters is only to obtain the peace of life and the quiet of the years with a lying posture. They do not have any tragic overtones in society, but they are the winners or lucky ones that everyone envies. Everyone wants to lie and win, but you don't have enough capital and luck yet.
The second is the active lying flat. These people have a more or less conscious consciousness, sublimating the helpless life of lying flat into a conscious "ism", a beautiful spiritual utopia, and lying flat has been elevated to ideological lying flatism. The earliest online post that opened the topic, "Lying Flat is Justice", is a metaphysical spiritual declaration, declaring that "I can be like Diogenes who only sleeps in his own barrel to bask in the sun, or like Heraclitus living in a cave and thinking about 'Logos', since this land has never really existed to exalt human subjectivity, then I can make it myself, lying flat is my wise activity, only lying flat, talent is the scale of all things." In this sense, you can understand them as the Chinese Diogenes, the Chinese spiritual cynics. Adorno said. You can't live the right life in the wrong world. So these active lying averageists quit the fiercely competitive Vanity Fair and looked for a definite self in the spiritual world.
However, this self, unlike the cynics of ancient Greece, has modern characteristics, that is, de-valued. When they say, "Man is the measure of all things only when he lies flat," this "man" is not a person with a capital letter of universal humanity, but only a person who has been hollowed out of the lowercase of universal value. The post-90s generation, mostly value nihilists, when they claim self-worth, that self is just a self full of personal desires and personal wills. In this world of nihilistic values, what is the only thing worth believing? It's just a choice of self-will. Man is the measure of all things, his will is the world, and his choice is to provide the scale of all things in the world. You can say that "man is the measure of all things" shows the subjectivity of "me", but this subject is not necessarily a rational subject, a subject with self-reflection, an enlightened subject who openly uses his own reason, more of a subject of will, a subject of desire that is withdrawn from the definite value. Above the self, above the world, there is no more god, no more absolute, no more transcendent absolute existence. The only real thing in the world is the will of the self, the absolute will. It requires no argument, no reflection, no past or future, only the present.
When Hamlet asks himself, "Life or death," is a question, he is rationally self-reflective. But the absolute will of the self does not require reflection, because reflection needs to have definite values as theoretical presuppositions, but the modern human self is only a choice of free will. This free will, because it has been hollowed out of its intrinsic value, becomes an empty subject of will. Although "I want" is a free choice of personal will, the force that governs this free will is not mine, and it comes from various opinions, fashions, and trends in the market. The human will is only an empty vessel containing only the dominant ideology of everyday life. Many post-90s young people look very individualistic, but behind their will, they worship stars, idols and Internet celebrities, and there is an invisible hand in the market that manipulates their will and dominates their subjectivity.
Although the best of them will be transformed into spiritual cynics with a conscious sense of reflection or Buddhist youth with clear values of life, or even a dynamic lay-flat-lying person who is radically revolted, the active lying-downists are, after all, a minority. For most lay-flat people, there is only the third type: the negative lying-flat-lying. Lying flat negatively, it is not that you do not do any work, become an old man, or eat low-security otaku. No, they are just a low-desire group similar to Japan, and they still have a job, but they are no longer attentive, no longer working hard, they have cut off the desire to flow upwards, and they are no longer willing to fight for 996. The Internet describes that this lying flat is a bit like a sea spider. Sea spiders eat seabed garbage to grow up, except for the feet is a head, the whole body has no meat to eat, so in the food chain, but it seems very safe. As long as you become a waste, no one can use you, capital cannot be used, friends cannot be used, and lying flat brings a sense of security of low-quality life. It is recorded in the "Zhuangzi" that Keiko said to Zhuangzi: There is a ailanthus tree in the forest, the trunk is bloated, the pole is bent, and the craftsmen who go to cut down the trees do not even look at it, which is really big and useless. Zhuangzi replied: Why should you worry about whether it is useful or not? Useful trees, which have long been cut down by people, have ended their lives early. It is precisely the uselessness of the Ailanthus tree that saves life and allows for a long life. The sense of security sought by the negative laypeople is the "useless use" that Zhuangzi admired.
Some people criticize those who lie flat, saying: "You can lie on the first day of the first year, and you can't lie down for fifteen!" ”。 In fact, the negative lying flat is not the moonlight tribe that has eaten the last meal and not the next meal, what they choose, or are chosen, is a helpless low-desire way to live. This is also more in line with the "post-materialistic" outlook on life of the post-90s generation. The parent generation grew up in an era of material scarcity, had a natural sense of insecurity, and paid more attention to the accumulation of wealth and the value of money. On the contrary, the younger generation was born and raised in the era of material abundance, but did not pay much attention to money and wealth, especially the children of the urban middle class, and did not have the anxiety of material scarcity, material is not unnecessary, but not the most important, not his only pursuit, he is not willing to grievance himself for five buckets of rice, look at the boss's face, listen to the nagging of his parents. What they want is the freedom of individuality, to live a free life of arbitrariness, which is definitely not a right in the legal sense, the so-called external freedom that is not enforced, but a typical Chinese freedom, willfulness in the sense of Zhuangzi. In the past, the boss fired employees, and now it is often young employees who fire the boss, and when they don't agree, they resign and leave, and in today's workplace, the boss complains that today's post-90s employees are too difficult to serve, and they have to see their faces. This is the characteristic of the new human beings in the post-materialist era, even if they resign and live a "low society" life.
Young people who lie flat negatively have no past, no future, only the present. The past means being responsible and responsible for parents and families, and the future means various small goals, step by step towards the life of buying a house, getting married, and having children that society expects. No, the lying man cuts off the past and the future, he only has the present, only the pursuit of the present to live freely and freely. Lying flat is a kind of spontaneity, and lying flat means freedom. But lying flat must also give up, give up life that meets the expectations of society. After giving up, you can lie down, and you can have a limited degree of arbitrariness, although the price is not cheap.
For the passive lay-offists, this choice is helpless, a rebellion against the "merit system" of the mainstream system of today's society. Meritocracy, which can be translated as elitism or meritocracy, but in today's world, it has a new meaning, the so-called "IQ + effort", and even very inspirational: as long as you work hard, you must succeed. The "merit system" offers a beautiful utopian outlook: it is a world of equal opportunity, and love to fight to win! The older generation has gone through an era in which everyone has a share of the cake when it is enlarged, and they are indeed superstitious about the dogma of the "merit system". Today's world, however, has become a zero-sum game, and the success of the few is accompanied by the frustration of the majority, becoming a cold reality. Even if you have a high IQ, even if you try harder, you may not have the future you are looking forward to. Harvard University Internet celebrity professor Sandel called it a "merit system of tyranny", arguing that this "merit system" only puts the majority at a disadvantage economically and deprives them of their social dignity as human beings. Severe frustration has led more and more young people to believe that effort is useless and that everything can only be blamed on the fate of the individual and on the injustice of society. On the Internet, a young post-90s workplace angrily asked: I am from a school of 985, 996 all day, or can not afford to buy a house in the north, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, why is the old uncle in the urban village, almost illiterate, after demolition can be divided into several houses, the monthly rent of the house is higher than my income. Isn't his extremely poor rent the result of our efforts? Why can he sit back and enjoy it, and no matter how hard I try, I still have no hope of buying a house?
Similar sentiments on the Internet can be said to be quite common. From this I observed a profound phenomenon that described negative lying flats as "lying flat on the body" and "lying flat on the body". Lying down is just an illusion, and their hearts are actually full of dissatisfaction and resentment. Unlike the false lying flatism and the positive lying flatness, and even more different from the Buddhist youth, once you enter the heart of the negative lying flat people, you will find that there is a nameless resentment, and this resentment is aimed at the target of capital, the second is the elite, and the third is the "merit system" that forces them to constantly strive. On the Internet, the sentiment of hating the rich and the elite is pervasive among some losers, and various "trapped in the system" statements also reflect strong dissatisfaction with the "merit system".
Even for college students and graduate students who have not yet entered the workplace, their excitement is changing with the changes in society. The graduate students I have supervised are mostly engaged in the study of modern and contemporary Chinese intellectuals, and the themes chosen in the past twenty years are mostly abstract intellectual history themes at the turn of the century, and ten years ago they began to turn to social and cultural history, concerned about the "transfer of power" and the problem of social mobility, in recent years, many graduate students are more interested in the bitterness and anxiety in the spiritual world of the May Fourth youth, and examine how they have gone from anxiety to dissatisfaction and finally to revolution. The direction of academic research in the ivory tower is closely related to social reality. From the pursuit of abstract concepts, landing into a real social mobility problem, and finally turning to the anxiety and dissatisfaction of the inner world, the change of this research context is also the evolution of the social mentality of young people in the workplace in the past two decades.
The resentment behind "lying in the heart" is a very noteworthy psychological phenomenon. The German sociologist Scheler, who once studied resentment specifically, pointed out that this is a product of modern democratic society. The democratic society he spoke of, in contrast to the hierarchical society of the European Middle Ages, was a democratic society in the sense of Tocqueville, a modern society in which the upper and lower classes could move freely. In the hierarchical society of the Middle Ages, everyone took their place and kept their own duties, there was no excessive desire and ambition, and therefore there was no social psychological soil for resentment. However, in the modern democratic society, the ceiling of the class is broken, as long as you work hard, it is possible to be a superior person, so all kinds of yulian figures have appeared, however, the pyramid to success is only the patent of a few people, the desires of the majority of the people are released by the mobile democratic society, but the possibility of finally satisfying the desires is very small, so there are all kinds of resentment accumulated psychologically, resenting people of the same class who are luckier than themselves, resenting the rich and the elite.
The historical traditions of China and Europe are different, as I analyzed in "Pulse China: Xu Jilin's 50 Traditional Culture Lessons", China has been a "mobile hierarchical society" since ancient times, and there have always been channels and spaces for free movement between the nobles and the commoners, between the upper and lower levels, but the society still has a strict hierarchy, according to power, wealth and culture to distribute the status between the upper and lower levels. Inferiority to the upper and arrogance to the lower, forming a deformed social personality. Only by desperately moving to the upper end of the pyramid can everyone gain more social respect. In the field of examination, the desire of "earth pig arch cabbage" abounds, in order to squeeze into high society and be looked up to. However, for most people, even if they work hard, there is still no hope of upward mobility, and the resentment in their hearts accumulates day by day, and at a certain point in time, it will be transformed into a subversive destructive energy. This is an "unorganized force" that challenges order. Organized power is not terrible, because you can make rational profit deals with it, but the resentful "unorganized force" is undoubtedly powerful and difficult to channel like a flood. We must attach great importance to this.
To be kind to the post-90s generation is to be kind to China's future. What is the path to common prosperity? How to let more lay people regain confidence and see hope again is indeed a heavy topic that China needs to take seriously at present.
This article was originally published in Exploration and Controversy, No. 12, 2021, transferred from the "Learning Club". The image comes from the Internet. Welcome to share personally, media reprint please contact the copyright owner.
