Chapter 64 Chapter 17 The simplicity and cruelty of the peasants

Because the backbone of the team is composed of marginal elements of the peasant class, "rebels, fugitives, postmen, hungry people, thieves, and refugees", Zhang Xianzhong's troops showed the personality defects of the peasantry most obviously in the armies at the end of the Ming Dynasty.In other words, the Zhang Department is the one most affected by the negative factors of the bottom culture. When mentioning farmers, the image of suffering, kindness and perseverance in Luo Zhongli's oil paintings immediately comes to mind.In our mindset, the word "peasant" is always associated with beautiful words such as "sincerity", "hard work" and "benevolence and righteousness".On the contrary, the words closest to the word "wealthy" are "hypocrisy", "cruelty" and "unkindness for the sake of wealth".

With the in-depth interpretation of the catastrophe in Sichuan in the late Ming Dynasty, the stereotypes of thinking were gradually broken, and it became clearer and clearer that the bottom-level social culture composed of farmers as the main body was not only "simple" and "natural" that we are familiar with, but also There is also another side of "rough", "shallow", and even "brutal", "ugly" and "dark".Peasants were shackled by poverty and despotism.In a certain sense, they were a group of "incomplete people", and Zhang Xianzhong's department showed this "incompleteness" vividly.