Today, if someone takes the outdated theories of commentaries, dramas and textbooks as the golden rules for viewing the world in reality, he is undoubtedly a neocon living in the present day. There is no need to ridicule the newcomers, for they will be educated by reality in the future.
At present, what is even more puzzling and desperate than the neocons is actually another group of new ignorant people who are highly educated and have a positive outlook. However, if we know more about them, we will find that they have outdated cognition, they cannot explain themselves, and when the society needs to speak out the most, they are either silent or have the following three kinds of performance
Performance one
Not piling up concepts.
It’s just a bunch of concepts.
Nowadays, our society is becoming more and more complex, and there is an explosion of new concepts and sub-disciplines. This is certainly more convenient for us to understand the world and ourselves from multiple perspectives. However, the reality is that more and more people have gone from having a single perspective and a barren conceptualization to piling up concepts without any intention to learn them.
For example, some people interpret the pragmatism popular in the United States as utilitarianism in the Chinese context and criticize it arbitrarily, or apply democracy in politics to business decision-making, not realizing that power cannot be privately owned and property cannot be publicly owned, and that politics and business are two different operating systems.
As we can see, the consequence of piling up concepts is either to apply them in a rigid manner or to interpret them in a literal sense. For this reason, Mr. Qiao Xiaochun has written a book, How far is Chinese social science from science? which popularizes the main thinking of social science disciplines in a colloquial yet rigorous way. But unfortunately, in the new media era, this abuse of language and laziness of thinking has not been improved.
Performance II
the flood of knowledge.
Morality has no voice.
The purpose of any knowledge should be to promote harmony between man and nature, as Kant said that man is the end. However, today there is a lot of anti-human knowledge that continues to be presented as theoretically correct.
For example, some domestic experts say that the subway is overcrowded because of low fares, and that if the fares were increased tenfold, it would not be overcrowded, and that if the people put aside one-third of their savings to buy a house, the problem of the housing slump would be solved, and that by abandoning the 200 cities in the east and fighting with the beautiful countries, we would all go back to the Stone Age, and so on.
The famous philosopher Ayn Rand said that sacrificing the interests of the few for the interests of the many is actually a lie. These experts’ remarks seem to be prescriptions for solving real problems, but in essence, they are pushing the people into the fire under the cloak of knowledge. There is no professionalism, nor can we see the shadow of conscience and morality. However, these appalling remarks have received the greatest number of approvals and appeals in the age of selfmedia.
The same perception is found in many top intellectuals in the West. When you open Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals, similar absurd stories abound. For example, in the 1930s, there was a famine in Ukraine under the Soviet Union, and millions of people starved to death. Jones, a British journalist, went into the field to expose the truth, but was verbally abused by many Western intellectuals at the time, and eventually died of persecution.
In the minds of these intellectuals, the great social experiment of the Soviets was impeccable, and they refused to accept any identification or falsification. When one does not know that one does not know, one is not far from ignoring the truth and even serving the tiger.
Manifestation Three
Simplification of complex issues.
Lack of systems thinking
Lu Xun once said, a Dream of Red Mansions, economists see Yi, Taoists see obscene, talents see lingering, revolutionaries see Manchu, rumor mongers see the palace secrets. We call this “Seeing is believing”.
In fact, the so-called “seeing benevolence and seeing wisdom” is a kind of misperception in the traditional society where knowledge is slow to be updated. Since the Enlightenment and the 20th century, the modern world has become a complex, ever-changing, ambiguous and fluctuating place. Once, single-discipline thinking could only deal with localized and static problems, and could no longer be used to explain the complex world.
Unfortunately, the reality is that many people, having been successful in certain fields, are stuck in a single mindset and find it difficult to think outside the box to explore more possibilities.
For example, in the face of how to build chips? How to develop artificial intelligence and such cutting-edge complex system problems, some experts often ignore the level of development of the country’s basic disciplines, talent density, capital scale and government policy, thinking that as long as the country’s efforts to increase investment, it will certainly be able to bend the road to overtake the later to overtake.
For example, when explaining the rise and fall of the great powers of the modern world, many scholars often ignore geography, culture, beliefs and other influencing factors, and crudely categorize them as a single-variable determinism, and prescribe medicines for China’s problems accordingly. This is the so-called hammer effect, i.e., holding a certain tool in one’s hand, one tends to use that tool to solve all problems.
In the book Why Seeing the Trees but Not the Forest, a general reader on complex subjects, it is written that only by diversifying the tools of thought can biases and limitations be reduced. After all, there is never a simple solution to a complex problem.
These are just some of the most obvious manifestations of the new ignorance at the cognitive level. In addition to the cognitively crude, the new ignorance also manifests itself in a lack of action and a failure to promote collective cooperation and institutional design.
As the economist Sowell put it, it takes a certain wisdom to recognize one’s own ignorance. Those who are truly knowledgeable and penetrating realize their ignorance the more they know, and then follow the clues that lead them to new boundaries of cognition. They know that it’s never what you’re not sure about that kills you, but what you think you’re sure about.
For this reason, the chief book court sincerely recommended by the Chinese social science research masterpiece Chinese social science is still far from the science of the famous historian Paul Johnson to expose the dark side of the intellectuals subversive work of intellectuals and upgrade the complexity of the thinking of the must-read books why only see trees do not see the forest, away from the new ignorance of the composition of the three books. Recognize your own ignorance and broaden the new boundaries of cognition. If you are interested in the book, recognize the QR code in the picture below, then you can bookmark it with one click.
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