Chapter 72 1. Friendship is rarer than love

The battle of Jingxing was a sad battle in human history.Zhang Er and Chen Yu, a pair of old buddies, experienced life and death together, and went through adversity together.In the most difficult moment, there was a wanted warrant for the two of them hanging above their heads. They protected each other and loved each other even more than themselves.Later, the two worked together to follow Chen Sheng to revive the Zhao Kingdom, but after the Julu War, the crisis was lifted, and the two suddenly became strangers to each other, and eventually became unending enemies. Why?Why can such a precious friendship start well but not end well?

After deduction, the reason why the two turned against each other is that they intervene too deeply in each other's life, and each regards the other as a part of their own life, and no longer regards the other as an independent individual.Just because the independence of the other party is no longer respected, the independent consciousness and independent choice of the other party cannot be tolerated.In the battle of Jingxing, Chen Yu was not the only one who died.When Zhang Er killed him, he lost his prestige and reputation among the princes because of his personality bankruptcy, and has since become a vassal of Liu Bang, a walking dead without a soul.

Therefore, interpersonal communication must be based on the premise of respecting each other's independent personality, and cannot be infinitely demanding and demanding.Once your demands exceed the psychological capacity of the other party, mutual trust will quickly turn into mutual dissatisfaction and resentment. In fact, same-sex friendship is rarer than heterosexual love.There is a natural attraction between the opposite sex, and there is always the possibility of "cooperation".But between the same sex is more competition, cooperation and friendship can only be produced under extremely special circumstances.If Zhang Er and Chen Yu hadn't been thrown into the trough state of being dependent on each other by the fate of the great era, they might have beaten you to death long ago.And such as Xiang Yu and Han Xin, these losers of the great era have a common characteristic-they live alone and have no friends.

For a person who has no friends, most of the problems are caused by himself, but it is also related to the lack of equality in traditional Chinese culture.For example, Liu Bang, although he is extremely intelligent, has a sinister heart and positions everyone as his servant.Looking back on Liu Bang's life, all the people he met, such as Xia Houying, his sister-in-law, including his wife Lu Zhi, were asked to give infinitely.This kind of unequal friendship, when the Han Dynasty fell, the relationship between Liu Bei, Liu Bang's descendant, and Guan Yu and Zhang Fei was also in this position.The reason why Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are admired forever by future generations and left their names in history is because they recognize this unequal relationship and stick to this social ethics with all their hearts.Those who do not recognize this ethic are considered villains and traitors.Due to the lack of equality awareness and the lack of equality culture, Chinese people cannot find friends.Unless you are willing to call your friend the lord like Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, the lord will not recognize you as a friend!

Zhang Er and Chen Yu are the victims of this unequal culture-the reason for their grievances is that Zhang Er asked Chen Yu to die with him, but Chen Yu refused.This refusal became the turning point in the severing of the friendship between the two parties.The reason why Chinese people can share adversity but not prosperity is precisely because in times of adversity, everyone is equal and there is no need to separate masters and slaves.And once you become rich, there will always be one person trying to ride on the neck of the other person, no matter whether you let him ride or not, the relationship of friendship no longer exists.

Therefore, people who can become long-term friends must be people with a sense of equality.Only with a sense of equality will your independent choices be respected. The Chu-Han era has become the past, but because the same era has circulated in our history for more than two thousand years, this long era has led to many unequal servile factors remaining in our culture, and created many lacks. People with equality concept and equality consciousness.So even in the civilized age, there are still many people who don't know how to make friends, or they still make friends with the concepts of Zhang Er and Chen Yu's era.For all these people, their friendship will eventually break down because of excessive seeking or lack of sufficient personal respect.

Therefore, from the tragedy of Zhang Er and Chen Yu, we can draw the rules of friendship: First, not everyone can be friends, only those who have the concept of equality and awareness of equality can become friends.Because they will not demand infinitely, but respect your independence and dignity. Second, the rules for socializing with friends, pay attention to where the bottom line is.Everyone has a positioning for the people around them.If you don't know this positioning, or don't care, you will definitely violate the other party's bottom line.This is also what the ancients said, the friendship between gentlemen is as light as water, which means that friends must pay attention to reserving private space for each other. If you lose your grasp of this point, you will inevitably lose your friends.

Third, don’t be a person who doesn’t know how to measure—not knowing what to measure means that you don’t know where the bottom line of others is, and if you cross it rashly, it will inevitably cause resentment.At the same time, we should also pay attention to those who don't know how to measure, most of them are immature, give him enough time, wait for his heart to grow up, can accept the basic rules of interpersonal communication, and then it is not too late to become friends with him. In fact, in the era of the Chu-Han struggle for hegemony that we are concerned about, only Zhang Liang had the wisdom to get along with others on an equal footing in this unequal culture.

Zhang Liang is the only wise man of the age who knows the principles and procedures of the friendship between gentlemen as light as water.He knew that he could not survive alone in this era, so he chose to attach himself to Liu Bang, but he always maintained his identity as a guest minister. This identity allowed Zhang Liang to avoid being maliciously humiliated by Liu Bang. And Zhang Er, after killing his old friend Chen Yu, his personality broke down and his psychology tended to collapse.His son Zhang Ao obviously fell into a state of trance, so he married Liu Bang's daughter, but gave his favorite concubine to Liu Bang, and married the daughter born to Liu Bang's daughter to Liu Bang's son. ——The so-called psychological breakdown is actually the breakdown of brain thinking, and it is no longer possible to understand the behavioral laws of normal society, so it does abnormal things that normal people cannot understand.

In short, people who are stuck in the background of unequal culture are bound by the negative factors of unequal culture and feel great pain. For example, Han Xin, he is a typical example of being able to benefit from an egalitarian culture but falling victim to an unequal culture.