Chapter 104 ruthless

Maqiao's "ruthless" means capable, capable, and highly skilled.The problem is that "ruthless" also means cruel, vicious, malicious, and malicious.Unifying these two meanings into one word always makes me feel uncomfortable.As I said, my handwriting is not bad. When I was in Maqiao, I was often ordered to make Chairman Mao quotations boards everywhere with red and yellow paint.The farmer watched me write on the wall without drawing grids or sketches, and just climbed the ladder and wrote in a blink of an eye, and praised me: "This is so cruel!" I can't tell how much praise there is, how much blame.

It’s ruthless to write well, it’s ruthless to read well, it’s ruthless to help the team repair the threshing machine, and it’s ruthless to be able to dive and plug the leaks in the pond. Out of chemical fertilizers and plastic film - of course, it is the workers' cleverness, but also the workers' ruthlessness!When Maqiao people said this, they probably didn't realize that they secretly set a morally corrupt position, a vicious position, for all knowledge and skills. I suspect that in their past experience: people with knowledge and skills, for them, naturally have a possibility of encroachment and domination.Just like the rumbling machine they saw for the first time, dropping Japanese bombs from the sky; like the loudspeaker they saw for the first time, cutting off their private land, a kind of "tail of capitalism" .How could they not worry that other high-level people they met in the future would not leave them with the same sadness?

In this case, what is wrong with their use of the word "ruthless"? It wasn't just Maqiao's language that was like this. In many places in Sichuan, "fierce" and "ruthless" are used to describe people with high abilities.They will lament those capable people: "It's so fierce." In many places in the north, people with high abilities are described as "evil", which is also the same as "evil". "Ruthless" is close.They will lament those capable people: "Evil door." The word "力力" that has become popular in Mandarin Chinese indicates the degree of superior ability, and it is also an example of praise mixed with derogation and happiness mixed with worry. "Li" is fierce and serious, and "harm" is an obvious and straightforward warning.In Xiang dialect, there is a saying of "severe code", which refers to a person who is capable but wants to take advantage of everything, a vicious person.

From this point of view, in many Chinese languages, knowledge and skills are always external and internal to evil things (ruthless, fierce, evil, harmful, etc.).Zhuangzi more than 2,000 years ago even expressed anxiety and hatred for all knowledge and skills. "There are few good people in the sky, but there are many bad people. The saints benefit the world less, but harm the world more" (Zhuangzi's "Inner Chapter Ten").He believes that only when knowledge is eliminated, will the robbers be eradicated; Don't care about contention; only by destroying laws and teachings can people comprehend the natural and ultimate way of life... Zhuangzi's resentment has become a distant sound in the modern age of technological advancement, and it is a faint sound beyond the sky Starlight, will not be taken seriously by most people.But in the heritage of the language, at least in the many southern dialects I mentioned above, people still meet people from time to time quietly.