The school and the society always teach us to study/work hard so that we can become successful, rich and famous. It gives us the impression that anything less means we don’t have a life worth living. We are told that we will have no job if we are unable to provide more values than Artificial Intelligence (AI); hence, the academic pressure and economic pressure. Our parents and teachers/bosses would love us more if we perform better and lesser otherwise. We learn that honor is everything, anything else is a disgrace.
I always tell my children not to think about competing with anyone but themselves. Learn to become a better self than yesterday. Learn as they should, to become intelligent. The purpose of learning must be for the well-being of us, and not for the benefit of anyone else. Spiritual and mental improvement is like making the inner-self more beautiful/healthy, the same way we eat well and exercise to make the external-self more beautiful/healthy. Unfortunately, the school and the society still manage to brainwash them, make them want to compete with classmates although they don’t like the stress which comes with it, because they see honor as a precious thing. They like the praise and the special attention. The classmates also see honor as a precious thing, but they feel envy because they couldn’t get it although they also experience the stress of the competition. They hate the negative notions about them. The desire for honor and the disappointment created a negative impact to their mental health.
Many people want precious things (success, wealth, and fame) but dislike the amount of efforts they need to put in. The society measure the worth of a person based on the precious things he has. The end justifies the mean. Hence, the never-ending scams, cronyism, nepotism, and corruption. How is competing for honor a good thing? Although the school also teach morals and ethics, but actions speak louder than words. The worst get on top, instead of people with high morals and ethics. People love morals and ethics in words rather than deeds. Hence, morals and ethics become nothing but tools to rally for support.
Killing and stealing are the greatest crimes. If you kill a person, the government will use force to take away your life. If you steal a cow, the government will use force to put you in jail. When a leader kills a million civilians and steal a country, in the name of morals and ethics (or race and religion), he becomes a king and he can proudly tell his children and grandchildren about the killing and stealing. The future generations will visit his shrine and remember him as a hero.
A thug leader, Dao Zhi (盗跖), has many followers because he has morals and ethics. His prior homework and intelligence enables him to predict the wealth and its location within a house. His courage to enter the house first is an inspiration. After the heist, he is the last one to leave so that his followers can flee safely; he shows great brotherhood righteousness. He has the intelligence to make the right decision on the time and place to make the heist. After each job, he has the compassion to divide the heist equally with his followers. If he didn’t have the morals of knowledge, courage, righteous, intelligent and compassion, he wouldn’t have so many followers and he wouldn’t become a big thug leader. He would be just a small thief. The morals and ethics he learned from school make him a great leader.
Morals and ethics are not necessarily good. The man-made division of “good” and “bad” is inaccurate and unreliable. In reality, they are just tools which can be useful as much as harmful to the society.
An expert was hired by a king to train a selected fighting cock. Ten days later, the king asked: “Is the cock ready to fight?” The trainer said: “Not yet. It is enthusiastic to fight on seeing other cocks.” After the next ten days, the king asked the same question again. The trainer said: “Not yet. It gets excited on seeing the shadows or hearing the sound of other cocks.” After another ten days, the question came again. The trainer said: “Not yet. It often puts on an angry look because of overconfidence with its fighting power.” After another ten days, the king came to visit. The trainer said: “It is ready. It has no more response to the sound of other cocks. It looks like a wooden cock. His emotion is no longer influenced by the surrounding.” The king could not wait to send the cock for a fighting match. Other cocks were frightened off on seeing its static posture. No other cock dared to challenge it for a fight.” A good leader must have a convincing and stable manner. The fine quality must come from a kind of philosophical-intelligent which makes him not influenced by desire for honors. He is confident but not eager to do something for the sake of honors. He doesn’t feel excited with the shadow of honors; not enthusiastic even when the prospect of honors is presented in front of his eyes. If a person loves honors so much, how do you know he doesn’t love money and fame? Could he be a self-serving person who would do anything and everything (including bad things) simply because he wants his medals (success, wealth, and fame) and not really for the benefit of the society?
If you don’t think of your self-interest when you do something, it doesn’t mean you won’t get it. Most of the time, you will still be rewarded although sometime it comes in a roundabout way. You don’t have to think about how good you did compare to others, so long as you have done your best. You will get what you deserve. It doesn’t matter whether you are the best or mediocre. Desire for honor will make you stressful, and depression is bad for health. It can cause the body’s hormone system to go haywire, and the whole body-functions become sluggish; it can even cause cancer. Competing for honor is a very unwise endeavor.
Whatever matter to you is you live your life happily. Honor is not essential. Most people can’t be successful, rich and famous. If honor is something you must have in order to make life meaningful, does that means most people should be ashamed to live? The advocacy by the school and the society to make people compete for honor is clearly a misguided dogma. Unfortunately, you can’t change how people think, but you can change yourself. You can choose not to be insane in an insane world. You are intelligent if you know not only the usefulness of being useful, but also the usefulness of being useless. You are intelligent if you can see that honor and humiliation are one; honor and humiliation are manmade binary division; honor cannot exist without humiliation; if you adopt the binary division, your emotion will be negatively affected by humiliation as well as honor; if you want honor, you must be prepared to receive humiliation.
When Hui Shi (惠施) became the chief minister of Wei state, Zhuang Zi went to visit him. Someone told Hui Shi: “Zhuang Zi may be pretending to visit you but his real intention is to impress the king with his knowledge and replace you as the chief minister.” When Hui Shi met Zhuang Zi, he asked: “What is your hidden agenda to visit me?” Zhuang Zi said: “In the Southern area, there is an extraordinary type of bird which looks like the phoenix. When it flies from the Southern sea to the Northern Sea, it will not rest if there isn’t a phoenix tree although the journey is very long. It will not eat anything but bamboo shoots. It will not drink unless there is a mountain spring. One day, it flies over a crow which is eating a dead mouse. The crow is afraid that the phoenix will steal the dead mouse, so it “yells” to chase away the phoenix. Are you trying to “yell” at me like the crow?” Honor is precious to some people, but to a person with high spiritual intelligence, it is undesirable like the dead mouse.
Honor is not a good thing to have, although it is also not a bad thing. Why stress yourself to compete with others for this junk? You win, so what? You have so many medals at home that you struggle to find enough space to display them, you don’t have enough space for yourself, and you feel so painful that you have to throw away the medals or hide them in a non-obstructing place. Rare things are not necessarily precious things. Diamond is considered precious simply because people condition their mind to see it as precious. Bitcoin is considered precious simply because some people condition their mind to see it as precious; therefore they push the price up, to satisfy themselves and to validate their view. They make it happens to see what they wanted to see, i.e. the price keeps going up, until it doesn’t. Most people only like to hear what they wanted to hear, and see what they wanted to see. In the end, the greater fools will be left to hold the bags.
RESILIENT KID 