Chapter 11 4. The Law of the Great Era: Subversion of Ethics, Prompting the Fragmentation of Interpersonal Relationships

In the modern commercial society, it is the greed of human nature that has become the main driving force of economic development, and our desire for money constitutes the fuel for the advancement of this society. When this kind of greed enters the room in the name of aggressiveness and professionalism, our ethical concepts will be shaken and finally subverted. Topic Introduction: Gray Business Age - Civil Disobedience - New Ethics, New Beliefs - Pack of Wolves We are in a gray business age. The so-called gray does not refer to economic depression, nor is it the retrogression of material life. These negative phenomena have not occurred in the past 10 years, and will never occur in the next 10 years.

The meaning of gray lies in its obscurity, that we have experienced and will go through an unspeakable gray process, and that we have done and will do some unspeakable gray behaviors. At the moment when we are moving from a planned economy to a market economy, and at the moment when the system is gradually changing, any breaking of the old system, any innovation of the old ideas, any departure from the old ideas, any disregard of the old ethics, All mean the emergence of conflicts and contradictions. Because of this, no matter whether it is an enterprise or an individual, in the stage of primitive accumulation and in the stage of career breakthrough, there are all kinds of deviant behaviors.

An extreme case occurred in October 2003. At an entrepreneur forum, when the moderator asked the question "If you have never paid a bribe, please raise your hand", hundreds of entrepreneurs present looked at each other in blank dismay, and finally raised their hands hesitantly. Yes, only a handful of five or six. An obvious fact is that when the minds of these entrepreneurs have acquiesced in one point-it is normal to have gray behaviors, but it is not normal to not have them. Another typical case happens to us all the time, maybe you have also experienced this kind of experience: when we have to participate in various examinations and selections for the sake of rice beams, maybe we already have the qualifications to get the opportunity, but In order to pass the so-called selection mechanism, he finally had to use various cheating methods to attack the city.

We go through this process and behave like this, yet so few of us feel ashamed of it, why are we? Because everyone around us is doing it. Because even if we don't do it, someone else will. Because if we don't, then others will lose out. This herd mentality and the desire to tease the future constitute one of the most interesting landscapes in this era. This is an inevitable phenomenon in an era of change. When our era is in transition, any adherence to conventions means future backwardness, and any attempt and change means challenges to existing rules and systems with breakthrough.

When the vast majority of social members deliberately break through the system and challenge the rules, it actually means that such systems and rules have been flawed. The so-called gray behavior is not just a problem of social members, but It can be said to be a question of the times. An extreme case in this regard is related to bicycles. At an intersection in Shanghai that should not have traffic lights, traffic lights were set up for some reason. Therefore, when many citizens go here, they often use violations to exchange time. For this reason, they would rather accept Traffic police punishment.

This is actually a typical phenomenon of "civil disobedience" in sociology. When a certain law or administrative order is unreasonable, members of society take the initiative to refuse to abide by or implement the "illegal" behavior of the current law or policy. It can be said that our so-called "grey behavior" is actually another sign of this phenomenon. We have no intention of evaluating whether this phenomenon itself is reasonable or not. However, what we need to understand is that the reason behind this phenomenon is the reflection of political thinking in Chinese culture.

Just as a writer observed about Chinese history—our history is too long, our strategy is too deep, our art of war is too big, our black box is too big, our inside story is too thick, our tongue is too greedy, our vision is too mixed, and our predictions are too dangerous. There will be all kinds of delusions and guesswork. When we no longer trust everything, there will naturally be no simple and universal business logic, no fair and transparent rules of the game, no human business ethics. It is because of this that we, in our moment-to-moment activities, cast a pall of gray over our time.

In this sense, the existence of the "grey age" has certainly become the dark side of China's growth. However, when we make choices, it means that we have to give up some things. It is an inevitable price of growth. We used to have our own ethical standards, but now we seem to have abandoned it. We never had national faith, but now we seem to have found it. In the past 10 years, when the tide of free economics began to hit our old system, it also made a social problem that has plagued us for millennia more serious, which is the infinity of human desires. The so-called unlimited desire is based on the dissatisfaction generated by the sharing of social resources.If a person lives in a rich society with extremely rich resources and wealth, even if he has a relatively large share, as long as he sees that other people are also sharing the resources and he does not have all the resources, then he will inevitably have a strong dissatisfaction. Thinking your life isn't good enough.

Desires and dissatisfaction are endless. This is the most basic aspect of human nature. When you have a few resources, you want to have more resources. When you have a lot of resources, you want to have all the resources. However, in the modern commercial society, it is the greed of human nature that has become the main driving force of economic development, and our desire for money constitutes the fuel for the advancement of this society. When this kind of greed enters the room in the name of aggressiveness and professionalism, our ethical concepts will be shaken and finally subverted. As we said before, we live in an era where wealth is accumulated. This does not mean that we only have money in our eyes, but that all aspects of our lives are inseparably linked to money.

We rely on money to feed, we rely on money to dress, we rely on money to move, we rely on money to stay, no money is not enough to keep warm, no money is not at ease, relying on the services and materials exchanged by one piece of money Supply, we sustain ourselves. It is conceivable that if we become penniless tomorrow, then in this highly commercialized society, it is tantamount to blocking the way to survive. Because of this, we try our best to seek money, and we position the success of our life in the amount of income, and work is the only factor that determines our income, which means that our achievements in the workplace represent the wealth of life. indicators of success.

When we get promotion and salary increase, when we succeed in starting a business, it means that we have lived a worthwhile life; conversely, when we get demoted, lowered salary, lose jobs and leave, it means that we are losers in social competition. Life has become meaningless. Only success in career can bring us a sense of happiness and accomplishment. Only our career is the only object that needs to be exhausted. Under this logic, the old ethical standards have been subverted quietly and replaced by It is a new social morality with career as its core. Career means everything, wealth means belief, work defines life, and job defines living environment. When our ethics and morals are changing in this direction, it means that the ethics that have limited us for thousands of years will collapse. In the legends of any country, wolves are portrayed as cunning, ferocious, and greedy. This result is certainly related to the writer's efforts to exaggerate. However, what ultimately determines all this is still due to the nature of wolves. Wolves are not solitary animals. The viability of a lone wolf is limited. When hunting prey, wolves show a high degree of cooperation, which can only be compared with bees and ants in nature. The wolves know how to take care of the weak and the most reasonable division of labor. In the process of fighting against powerful enemies and resisting natural disasters, the collective consciousness of the wolves is amazing.However, wolves are cruel animals. This does not refer to their attitude towards their prey, but the cruelty and cruelty they show when they treat their companions. In the novel, when there are victims among the wolves that collectively attack humans, the first thing the wolves do is to eat up the corpses of their companions; When the leader of the wolf pack is old and weak and is replaced by a newcomer, the wolf pack always allows him to fall out of the pack and die in poverty. This seemingly cruel wolf culture is actually no different from our ethics. When we ignore family affection, when we regard survival as the main body of material life as the goal of life, when we define personal career growth as everything, it means that the era of profit-seeking for the whole society is coming, and the final result is It is nothing more than the mutual crushing of members of the whole society, which eventually makes social concepts deviate from human moral sentiments. In the second half of 2020, this situation may not change much. This is not a pessimistic judgment, but because we have been immersed in the civilization of commercial society for too long, and the impact of new ethical standards is too great. It is absolutely impossible to complete the recasting of ethics in 10 years. This is a long process, and when our thinking cannot accelerate the transformation, we must entrust this task to time to complete.