Noble "despicable" and clean "depraved"

The thinker Gu Zhun, in his "Shangcheng Diary" (the diary when he was sent to Henan Shangcheng to supervise labor from October 1959 to January 1960), talked about stealing food due to hunger.

He wrote: "Have I become despicable? I steal food, I steal food, I am not as dedicated as young people? No. Just as Fadeyev described two men fighting guerrilla warfare in the forests of the Far East, I will describe myself truthfully in the future. ”

Of course, Gu Zhun did not become despicable--if a person would starve to death if he did not steal food, stealing food was not only not despicable, but should be regarded as his noble right. The so-called "wise people do not drink the stolen springs, and the incorruptible people are not allowed to eat" is actually a corrupt view in traditional culture. And Gu Zhun is not a corrupt Confucian, he is a modern thinker with a liberal soul.

In the era called "catastrophe", the so-called "bad things" and "despicable things" that good people do to survive and feed themselves are very common social phenomena:

In order to prevent themselves and their families from starving, the peasants stole the grain of the production team and the immature crops in the field, which was entirely out of the instinct of survival, and even if they were caught, they would not be looked down upon by the villagers.

In state-owned factories, what products are produced, what means of production are available; in addition to the machines that cannot be transported, the workers' brothers generally have them in their homes—of course, they steal them from the factories—and the Beijing dialect is not called stealing, it is called "Shun" or "rectification."

Under the system of "planning and control", almost all ordinary people will do something that is very "disgraceful", that is, "laziness", "grinding foreign workers", or "not contributing to work".

Many young people who have grown up in the environment of reform and opening up today do not understand how "gray" and "sad" our "past" is not far away -- because they can only see the beautiful scenes of "pastoral pastoral songs" and "song and swallow dance" from books and textbooks.

In this way, good people become bad, not necessarily really bad, there are problems of our understanding of "bad" and problems of our understanding and understanding of "good".

First of all, we must admit that good people will always be the majority of society – including those who have been judged by the system to be class enemies (i.e., those who were once called "the rich against the bad right").

Personally, I think that as long as people who have good intentions and conscience in their hearts and do not take the initiative to do things that harm nature and reason are good people; even if they have passively done things that hurt nature and reason, but have really repented and really changed, they can be reclassified into the ranks of "good people".

But, at the same time, it must be acknowledged that there are really "bad people", "wicked people" and "villains" in society – they not only do bad things, but they do bad things whenever they have the opportunity.

Let's talk about the past —

In that particular age, when the whole people lied and the whole people were lazy, if measured by holy moral standards, there really were no good people -- but it was obvious that everyone was a good person; it was the environment that forced people to lie, to be lazy, to criticize others, because in fact, the so-called "runaways" and "neutrals" were not allowed to exist at all.

But taking the lead in raiding other people's homes, fighting others, going to sue for black, or participating in "smashing and robbing" is to do absolute evil and do bad things, no matter how many years have passed, it is a shameful act and it is difficult to be forgiven.

Nor can we easily push any kind of bad things to the environment and push them on others.

Of course, we must also acknowledge a basic historical fact: has there ever been an environment of "forcing good people into prostitution"? Have you ever been in the predicament of "forcing up Liangshan"?

In the "Diary of Gu Zhun", there is a record of this text: "Young women, who cannot tell whether they are girls or daughters-in-law, as long as they have food, they voluntarily stay there to be women-in-law." Although these young women are not prostitutes, they are really the fate of "forcing good people into prostitution".

A few years ago, the Shanxi writer Cao Naiqian wrote in his collection of novels "To the Night To Think You Can't Do Anything", wrote about the tragic story of his hometown of Wenjiayao in the countryside of Yanbei in 1973 and 1974. There is a story about a peasant woman who took the initiative to have an affair with the cadres in the countryside in order to change her son's fate. On the surface, the peasant woman took the initiative to "dedicate herself", so why is it not because of the environment of "forcing the good to become a prostitute"?

So is it also possible to think that women who are "degenerate" in the environment of "forcing good people into prostitution" should not be considered "bad women" who are "depraved"; in fact, they are still pure "good women"?

Therefore we can know and conclude that in this world there has not only existed, but will continue to exist, a noble "meanness" in a different sense from the vile; a pure "degeneration" that has nothing to do with the fall.

(Revised on October 9, 2021)