Preface
"At the beginning of man, nature is good and ......" I believe everyone has heard this sentence, which is from the beginning of the "Three Character Classic", which has an important document in China, which means that people are born to be kind.
But I don't think so, people should be evil at the beginning, but in the follow-up education, the evil of human nature is corrected little by little, which is easily reflected in children's ordinary play.
However, it is difficult to see the evil of human nature when you grow up, but there is an exception to this, that is, a person who does not have any rights, if he has the right to control the lives of others, then there is a high probability that this person will show the evil of human nature.
This can be seen in the many peasant uprisings in history, but why is this situation so be? Then we must first understand what kind of creature man is.
1. What is human nature?
Man is a very complex creature, and when he is good, he is kinder than anything else, but when he is cruel, all the creatures in this world are not as cruel as humans.
They will let the geese walk on the red-hot iron plate in order to eat the iron plate goose paws, listening to the screams of the geese, but what they think about is what the goose paws will taste like for a while.
However, when they are kind, when they see a stray kitten and puppy on the side of the road, they will buy some food to feed them, and some even take them to the pet hospital for treatment when they see these kittens and puppies sick or injured.
Man is such a creature where evil and good coexist, evil and good are all determined by their own mood that day, even the most vicious villains have that piece of goodness in their hearts.
On the contrary, even saints cannot maintain kindness to others all the time, and bad thoughts arise in their hearts when they are upset or disturbed.
In Taoism, Tai Chi is the beginning of the universe, and the chaos of the universe has not yet been separated, so there is also a saying that you have me and I have you.
The black and white on the Taiji diagram also clearly illustrates this point, which is the same as the character of people, sometimes very gentle and kind, but there are also times when they are very irritable and cruel, this is what a normal person should be.
But if a person has no status, is at the bottom of society, and has been in a state of oppression for a long time, what will happen to this person?
The first is irritability, which is also the case with many domestic violence, and the second is that the whole person's personality will become dull, not like to communicate with other people, and have violent tendencies, which can also be seen in some cases.
However, the most representative is every peasant uprising in ancient times, the peasant uprising was originally a touching story of the weak who could not stand the oppression of the strong, and finally united with other weak people to resist the strong.
But who would have thought that this weak versus strong would turn into weak versus strong and weaker?
2. The tragedy of the peasant uprising
Let's start with the recent Jintian Uprising, speaking of the Jintian Uprising, I believe many people are not familiar with it, but if you replace the Jintian Uprising with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, do you know more?
The Jintian Uprising, also known as the Taiping Rebellion, was led by Hong Xiuquan, who was known to have occupied Nanjing, the mainland, in late 1937 and carried out a months-long massacre there.
In the end, one-third of the houses in Nanjing were destroyed, and almost all the belongings were looted by the Japanese army, and 300,000 people died.
You must know that these are unarmed people, but the brutal Japanese still waved their butcher's knives even in the face of unarmed people.
But who would have thought that before Japan, Nanjing experienced a massacre, which was caused by us Chinese ourselves, and this massacre took place during the Taiping Rebellion.
At that time, Hong Xiuquan, who was born as a peasant, had become the leader of the entire Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, so he had unlimited rights, and after the rebel army broke through Nanjing, they did not extend their help to the people of Nanjing, who were also in dire straits, but waved their butcher knives at them.
The rebel army carried out the same behavior in Nanjing as the subsequent Japanese invaders, the city of Nanjing, which had a population of 200,000 or 300,000, was indiscriminately slaughtered by the rebel army, only tens of thousands of people remained, and almost all the houses were burned down, and this Nanjing Massacre was not inferior to the subsequent Japanese invaders.
In addition to this peasant uprising, if you push forward another two hundred years, the Li Zicheng uprising during the Ming Dynasty is not far behind the final result of the Jintian uprising.
The initiator of this uprising, Li Zicheng, was also a peasant, and after he could not stand the oppression of the Ming Dynasty, he united with peasants who thought the same as him to launch the uprising.
The original intention of this uprising was good, and the final result also made considerable progress in history, but the behavior of the rebel army made the people very cold.
After they conquered Beijing, Li Zicheng established himself as king, and then he slackened, indulging in beauty and wine every day, as did the other generals of the rebel army, and their arrival not only did not free the people from the sea of suffering, but plunged them into another sea of suffering.
In the end, Li Zicheng was defeated by the Manchu army, and the dynasty he established lasted only a year before it finally perished due to a new round of oppression of the common people.
3. Why is this happening?
It is not difficult to see from the above two peasant uprisings that although they were also born from ordinary peasants, they did not sympathize with other peasants just because they had power.
The dragon slaying boy will become a dragon after all, they will not sympathize with the weak because they were weak before, they will bully the weak first after becoming the strong, or even the weaker.
There is a good saying, "The strong will swing the sword at the stronger, and the weak will swing the knife at the weaker," which also makes it very clear that the attitude between the weak and the strong towards other relationships.
If you push forward a little further, it is the Fangla Rebellion, they are also a rebel army of peasants, but although they have advanced the development of history, they have also left their evil deeds in history.
During the Fangla Uprising, they attacked very quickly, breaking through 52 counties in the Northern Song Dynasty in only half a year of the uprising, but during this period they also killed many people, most of whom were ordinary people, and the total death toll reached more than 2 million.
After capturing a county, the rebel army burned, killed, looted and did all kinds of evil in the county town, and there was no appearance of standing up for the common people at all.
If you want to say that the most cruel thing has to be the Huangchao Uprising, not only did they kill a lot of people along the way, but at the moment of the final defeat, they had no food to eat, so they used living people as food.
Cannibalism is a thing that can not be reconciled in the eyes of others, or in their own morality, and only the primitive people in that ancient era who had no moral bottom line would eat people, which is enough to prove that they have abandoned the moral bottom line.
epilogue
Why are the peasant uprisings so cruel? In the final analysis, it is still a revenge mentality; those who were once bullied too harshly, but now that they have the power of life and death in their own hands, they naturally have a sense of domination.
Now that they are the masters, they will definitely vent their previous anger on others, which is why they have caused these tragedies.
However, this does not mean that the people who rebelled in the peasants were all murderous people, such as Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, although he also had a lot of blood on his hands, but his behavior was more than several times better than the above.
And the disciples of the rich family also have extremely cruel people, such as Dong Zhuo, his family status is not simple, but he is also very cruel to the people, so the cruelty of human nature has nothing to do with status.