Li Yousheng

Abstract: The author uses his own experience to demonstrate the essential differences between primary society and secondary society, and the insurmountable gap between these two levels of society.
Author’s Note: This article is from the introduction to my book “Looking at Confucius from a Different Angle,” published by Suzhou University Press in September 2014. Due to editing and revisions, the text differs slightly.

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I. Starting with Confucius

When you stand before a massive painting, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s *The Last Supper*, or a work by Zhang Daqian or Fan Zeng, you are completely immersed in the artistic atmosphere created by the master artist, forgetting yourself and the object, losing the boundary between viewer and object. Have you ever imagined yourself entering the painting and being there? For example, if you imagine yourself as one of the figures in it, do you remain still, or do you exercise your personal freedom, moving around as you please without regard for ruining the overall artistic effect of the painting? According to Hall & Ames, this stillness and personal freedom are neither the ideal state of Confucius. [1] Confucius advocated an aesthetic social order. You need to reach a state of perfect harmony with your world, a state of being completely absorbed in it. Only in this way can you unleash your creativity and make every move of yours add color to the whole masterpiece of art, making it more artistic and exuding harmonious beauty everywhere. For this reason, Confucius often had music accompanying his conversations. When your body and mind move and dance with the beautiful melody, your heartfelt words, whether you are talking eloquently or singing with great passion, will become part of this great ensemble.

Confucius’s *Analects* describes how people should conduct themselves and act within a harmonious, aesthetically pleasing social order, a society free from any artificially manipulated legal system. If modern readers approach the *Analects* like any other book, focusing solely on the literal meaning of its 15,000 characters, they are at best reading a brief introduction to a masterpiece, failing to grasp its true essence. The *Analects* itself is a remarkable work of art, and simultaneously, a part of the panorama of early Chinese social life. Modern readers, both Eastern and Western, similarly pursue only the literal meaning of Confucius’s teachings, ignoring its aesthetic significance and failing to understand the ideal life Confucius strived for throughout his life. I once tried to read a few sentences from the Analects and then recited them silently all day long, trying to understand their deeper meaning, and finally reached a certain state of mind. I believe that this special state of mind is the reaction of ancient people when they heard these words. [2] For us, language is a way to convey information, but for the ancients in Confucius’ time, it was a kind of beauty. All the different states of mind we get from reading the Analects today should point to a kind of tranquil and elegant beauty.

If you find the above passages confusing or difficult to understand because they differ from your preconceived notions of Confucius, don’t worry! Many people feel the same way. One reader told me that there are two great divides: one between ancient and contemporary China, and the other between contemporary China and mainstream world culture. The existence of these two divides prevents China from finding its rightful place in the world of sociology and anthropology. The author urges those readers who feel confused at this point to carefully read this book, and together with me, and many others aspiring to cross these two divides, let us take a firm step, look up at the wondrous landscape on the other side, and contemplate the underlying principles and meanings.

II. Two societies and the insurmountable chasm between them

In 2011, I borrowed a book about Confucius written by Hall and Emmis from the local library. The preface of the book states that “ancient Chinese culture can only be understood from an immanent perspective, in contrast to the Western emphasis on transcendence.” The English word “transcendence” can be translated as transcendence or a priori, but in this book it is translated as transcendence or transcendence, meaning something external to man. Hall and Emmis continue, “In the rational social order of Western culture, many roles of the individual and social life are played by the aesthetic order in Confucian thought. Confucian heroes are aesthetic, without any of the so-called moral meaning in the West, while Western morality refers to a kind of requirement of an extremely standardized rational order on the individual.”[1]

When the rational social order described by Hale and Amis coexists with the aesthetic social order, is there an insurmountable chasm between them? What would happen if a person lived in the border area between these two cultures and social orders? Would they fall into this insurmountable chasm? What kind of world lies at the bottom of this abyss? There, is it a Western rational mind or a Confucian aesthetic mind that sees things more clearly?

Due to a complex situation involving numerous intertwined factors, and a series of extraordinary circumstances, I was ultimately chosen by both the Chinese Heaven and the Western God, granted the qualification to make this declaration: I am someone who has fallen into that bottomless abyss and has lived at its bottom year after year. In utter ignorance and confusion, after years of fruitless and desperate struggle, I turned to Chinese Taoist philosophy for help. Praying for a glimmer of light in the darkness, yearning for a guiding spirit in my bewilderment, I indiscriminately read the ancient classics of China and Greece. I divide human society into genetically encoded primitive society and artificial secondary society, and when I look at how the kinship in primitive society is used to fish for material benefits in secondary society, I unexpectedly find that Chinese civilization began in genetically encoded primitive society while the West began in artificial secondary society. Primitive society and secondary society are at different levels, just like the relationship between Chinese characters and articles, and there may be an insurmountable gap between them. In the years of searching for a suitable word to summarize these two fundamentally different societies, I finally chose to use aesthetics to summarize primitive society. [3] In this way, I reached the same conclusion as them through a mental journey that is completely different from that of Hall and Emis. Hall and Emis pursued their studies through normal academic and professional pursuits, while I was forced by life experiences. It must be pointed out here that, apart from the term “aesthetic order,” their entire book has no other similarities or commonalities with my concept of a two-tiered society.

In the modern world, there is no longer any original social aesthetic order to speak of, but our biological bodies and brains remain largely unchanged, having undergone few alterations in tens of thousands of years. In real life, it is easy to see who and what are closer to original society, and who and what are closer to secondary society. In these five pairs of people and things—society and family (including relatives and friends), men and women, Westerners and Chinese, adults and children (including young people), secular and religious, and art—the latter pair is closer to the aesthetic order of original society and closer to the natural state of being than the former. Women are more family-oriented, and they are less corrupted by contemporary civilization. A similar difference is also evident in the comparison between Chinese and Westerners. In the modern hospital where the author once worked, there was a sixth pair: medical professionals and administrative staff. The former, through years of rigorous natural science training, tended to be more rational, while the latter, having dealt with diverse individuals for many years, were more inclined towards human emotional considerations. When a medical professional is occasionally forced to perform purely administrative tasks, there is a risk of blurring the lines between these two social classes. Of these six pairs, the secular versus religious/artistic pair is not as clearly defined as the other five. Hospitals typically do not have dedicated religious or artistic staff; it’s merely that some individuals are more enthusiastic about religion and art.

If the distinctions between these six pairs of people or things, and other similar distinctions, are exploited by powerful social forces, a man-made chasm can emerge and be continuously joined and exploited by more people. Here, “man-made” means that the insurmountable chasm between the primary and secondary societies reappears in the present-day secondary society due to the artificial needs of social power, rather than being designed or led by anyone. Generally speaking, those who bear the responsibility for actions and harms mostly come from the latter of the six pairs of people or things mentioned above, while those who bear the responsibility for intentions and benefits mostly come from the former.

III. From Johnny’s Bipolar Disorder to Le Bon’s Motley Crew

Julian Jaynes (1920-1997) believed that language-based human subjectivity emerged in the Mediterranean civilization three thousand years ago, and that for nearly ten thousand years prior (9000-1000 BCE), humans were bipolar, which is today’s mental illness. Jaynes believed that this bipolar mental illness was caused by the sudden expansion of living communities due to the invention of agriculture. [4,5] From the perspective of the author’s two-tier society theory, they have simply fallen into the insurmountable chasm between the primary society and the secondary society. In fact, society at this time was already a secondary society, but it was still far from the perfect secondary society on the other side of the chasm. Humanity had not yet had time to adapt to the society at that time, and it was as if they had fallen into the chasm.

There is a long-standing problem that has troubled the medical community. I wonder if any readers are interested in helping to answer it: Why do humans suffer from mental illness?

Johnny argues that today’s mental illness is a legacy and re-emergence of the bipolar disorder of ancient humans. According to his theory of a two-tiered society, contemporary secondary societies sometimes exhibit localized social conditions similar to those of the ancient Mediterranean civilization between 9000 and 1000 BC, or certain modern social and life experiences create stimuli similar to those of ancient bipolar individuals in vulnerable populations, leading to psychotic effects. In short, Johnny’s account of the past three thousand years of Western civilization only partially separates society and humanity from the society and mentality of the ancient Mediterranean bipolar individuals. Falling into the chasm between the original society and the secondary society remains a real threat and possibility for us living in the 21st century. From the perspective of other animals, the two world wars are a collective mental illness unique to humanity. Only in the distant future, when the perfect secondary society from the other side descends upon the human world, will humanity have the hope of no longer having so many mentally ill patients, just like other animals.

From the author’s personal experience, the chasm between the primary society and the secondary society is neither the aesthetic order of the primary society nor the rationality of the secondary society, but rather a chaotic and abnormal state. The primary society and the secondary society belong to different levels, much like the relationship between Chinese characters and articles, or cells and tissues. An object composed of half a Chinese character and half an article can only be incongruous. This also includes the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the French Revolution, and what Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) called the mob.

Le Bon’s mob refers to a group of people who temporarily gather together for some reason. They do not know each other, but need to act in unison. They are of one mind, blindly follow the temporary leader, listen to suggestions and rumors, and show great heroism and great self-sacrifice, thus also having destructive power. The author has specifically discussed the god-like world effect of secondary society, which has a magical effect on newcomers. [3] This is also similar to the bipolar neurosis phenomenon caused by the sudden expansion of communities 10,000 years ago. The English word “bicameralism” originally referred to the bicameral system of Western parliaments. Although the two houses of parliament have a hierarchy, they discuss the same issues and speak the same language, failing to express the differences between the two societies. The author here tentatively translates it as “bipolar brain.” Of course, the reason for the gathering of a mob can also be understood as a kind of social power.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution was ended by the government. In the 1980s, a nationwide political movement was launched to completely deny the Cultural Revolution, emphasizing that all participants were wrong and that there was no right or wrong among different factions. I believe I experienced a typical Cultural Revolution, lasting over twenty years. Because many uninformed people participated, and some are still continuing their past words and actions, this miniature Cultural Revolution can only be ended by the victims themselves. This article is one of the author’s many efforts in recent years. I hope readers will adopt a similar attitude: not treating participants as right or wrong. Therefore, the words and actions quoted here are all attributed to the chasm effect between these two social strata. The author solemnly declares: I am describing my own experiences here with the mindset of literary creation, and I have not verified them. I hope readers will not try to identify themselves or find other people in the story. Those who do not heed this advice will be responsible for their own consequences, which have nothing to do with the author of this book.

IV. The bizarre sights I saw in the West

Having said all that, I would like to clarify here: the use of terms such as victim and racial discrimination/traitorous behavior in the following text is purely for the convenience of narration and to allow readers to feel the strength of social power intervention, and does not imply the existence of racists or traitors.

Within this four-tiered social structure—the victim’s own boss and his boss’s boss—there are the six pairs mentioned above and one point of confusion. Adding another crucial element is the presence of a Chinese person in the middle tier who holds leverage over upper-class white individuals, while the highest tier of this structure, including the fourth tier and above, consists of one or more European men. This combination of racial discrimination and traitorous behavior (hereinafter referred to as “this combination”) has caused harm to the victim’s family, resembling the attacks on certain families during the Cultural Revolution, resulting in a series of incidents that severely damage minority groups without seeking redress, characterized by their recurring and escalating nature without any intervention. My boss’s boss’s boss said to me, “So-and-so’s (Chinese) name seems to have greatly alarmed you”; “Didn’t you say we prefer Northern American whites?” This illustrates that this particular social structure has an inherent ability to self-replicate.

The only senior staff member in my department told me that the hospital had given the interview date originally scheduled for me to this Chinese man, which the department claimed was to be considerate of me. After this man’s interview, there was public pressure within the hospital to force me to drop the interview, while my wife, who works in another city, was given the opportunity to go home to visit her. I insisted on the interview, and as far as I remember, my wife was on a plane back to China during my two-day interview period. This was nothing more than an implication to me: we have the ability and skill to attack your family. I was so numb that the interview was a complete success, to the point that many people inside and outside the hospital thought I was about to take the job, and my colleagues in the department were shouting on the phone to him: “He is not in charge.” Years later, this Chinese man privately told me in English, “This position is yours, and I took it from you.” This illustrates that the inherent capacity for self-replication within this particular social structure possesses an overwhelming and irresistible power: it doesn’t need to inform you before it takes action, and you have no way to stop it, because that power comes from different levels.

After retiring, I wrote to the hospital saying: Seventeen years later, you still owe me a reply letter informing me of the results of that job application (and interview).

There’s no need to go into detail about the bizarre spectacle I’ve witnessed over the years, as it bears a striking resemblance to China’s Cultural Revolution. It’s a Canadian-style mini-Cultural Revolution: the number of participants is at most in the thousands, perhaps even just a few hundred, scattered across different countries. During my two and a half years on sick leave, I occasionally used government services, just like other white people. Of the dozen or so people who received me, at least two or three knew my personal story and held prejudices—the extent of this prejudice in a city of three or four hundred thousand people is remarkable. At the same time, I was informed by authority figures that all doctors and lawyers in the city were untrustworthy and that I needed to leave. Fortunately, these authorities were unaware that my case was being handled internationally; otherwise, they would have told me, “For you, all doctors and lawyers on this planet are untrustworthy, and you need to leave this world.”

Nevertheless, I did not include the two or three reception staff members in the list of participants because I had no evidence that they had taken any action.

To outsiders, the Chinese Cultural Revolution appeared to be a period of collective mental illness. Like the Cultural Revolution, it blurred the lines between primary and secondary society. Various social powers and those pursuing social interests skillfully exploited the six pairs of different people and things mentioned above: society and family, men and women, Westerners and Chinese, adults and children (including young people), secular and religious, art, and professionals and administrators. However, the “Westerners and Chinese” in the Cultural Revolution specifically referred to: the dominant ideology of Marxism-Leninism originating from the West; and the targets of the Cultural Revolution—the ruling class following the capitalist path, as well as traitors and collaborators—all pointing to Western culture.

A middle-aged man, showing no signs of mental instability, stood alone, his broad chest exposed, pinning one Mao Zedong badge after another into his pectoral muscles. All that was visible to onlookers was a chest full of badges and the blood and wounds behind them. A colleague who witnessed this firsthand recounted the incident to me multiple times. Each time he spoke, he repeated roughly the same few sentences, followed by the same deep thought and bewilderment. For years, he couldn’t shake the image of that bloodstained chest full of badges, which seemed to hang eternally before him.

Similarly, a Canadian hospital lab director in his fifties, who was also a university professor, told me in English, “Have you ever seen a trial (on television)? That judge (the speaker raised both hands, gesturing to show the judge’s size, and simultaneously striking a judge’s pose), he is the real murderer. The person being tried, the one who will be imprisoned and executed, is an innocent good person just like you. (Meaning: the murderer acts as the judge, trying the murder he committed, and finding an innocent good person to execute.)” The same person said on a different occasion, “What are a few hundred innocent lives? Why kill innocent people? It’s because they are innocent. Innocence is the reason (for being killed). All governments kill innocent people. The American government kills innocent students. Governments are created (specifically) to kill innocent people. (Meaning: guilty people cannot be killed, only innocent people can be killed to maintain social stability.) More than twenty years later, I still cannot get rid of those words; they constantly echo in my ears.

From the perspective of the two-tier society theory, their abnormal behavior and speech are merely the result of the gap between the two-tier society. Their words and actions seem to be emotional and sentimental, but they are neither the aesthetics of the original society nor the rationality of the secondary society. Instead, they are a mismatch between half Chinese characters and half written text.

V. The Great Barrier Effect 1: Twelve repetitions

The first victim was a middle-aged Indian woman who had completed three years of postdoctoral research in another city before coming to work at this syndicate. After six months, she was so tormented that she spent all her time sitting in the lab crying, requiring her and her boss to see a (psychological) doctor, and was eventually sent back to India. This brutal six-month process repeated itself in me at least four times, each time more severe than the last. There were two other, less typical repetitions, plus five minor repetitions. Including that Indian woman, over a period of ten years, there were twelve repetitions, occurring in three different workplaces and involving three different people: this is direct evidence of the chasm effect. Minor repetitions refer to professionals betraying their professional knowledge to curry favor with those in power within the same background and similar social circumstances.

Due to persistent late-night harassing phone calls, my family doctor gave me a two-week sick leave certificate, after which I was unable to return to work and remained on sick leave for over two years. During this period, the powerful European men in the hospital communicated with me through 1) doctors employed by the hospital, then 3) the doctor who treated me, and finally 4) me, forming a four-tiered social structure of victim’s boss’s boss, as mentioned above, although not a strict hierarchical relationship. Each key doctor treated me and followed up with me for roughly six months, but there were gaps and overlaps between different doctors.

During my sick leave, I saw four white doctors and four Chinese and Indian medical staff. In stark contrast, the Chinese doctor told me I was hallucinating on the phone in the middle of the night and advised me to look for work during my sick leave. A few months later, when I drove to another city to see this Chinese doctor, he greeted me with displeasure and asked, “Why did you come to see me? Have you found another job?” I told him I had found two volunteer positions and successfully passed the interviews for both. However, the employers backed out a month or two later; they didn’t explicitly refuse, but simply stopped replying, letting the matter drop. I suspect that when they finally contacted my hospital, they didn’t support them hiring me. As I recall, I also told him, “The person who told you to find me a job is from my hospital; the person who told those two employers not to hire me even if they didn’t want a salary is also from my hospital. They are different people (I didn’t say: based on the Great Gap effect, one should be white and the other Chinese).” The Chinese doctor merely gasped in surprise, then stood up and left. I was left there alone, and could only go home. For the next three months, my family doctor and my hospital kept calling and emailing this Chinese doctor to request the diagnostic report, but he neither answered the phone nor replied to the email. Clearly, the hospital leadership, through the different statements made by the hospital’s white doctors and Chinese doctors and nurses, demonstrated that the presence or absence of Chinese people in the middle class is crucial within the upper four social strata.

After I became aware of this issue, it just so happened that my insurance company was paying for doctors to treat me. I made a written request: the proportion of Chinese people among the medical staff treating me should not exceed the proportion of Chinese people in the Canadian population, otherwise it would be considered racial discrimination. My income during my sick leave was paid by the insurance company, so they were constantly urging me to return to work. I don’t know what they said to the white doctor who treated me this time, making him so uncomfortable: he wrote a 19-page report, subtly advising me not to return to work. This doctor’s professional ethics deeply moved me and I will never forget it. The other three white doctors said that I wasn’t sick, that the hospital was playing politics on me, and that they would try their best to help me. A doctor volunteered to inform me of what he had heard about me from the hospital. I learned from him that it wasn’t my department or faculty that was preventing me from returning to work, but the hospital.

I worked in Chinese hospitals for over ten years and had direct contact with no fewer than dozens of doctors. They were all like the white doctors who treated me during my sick leave: they stayed away from social conflicts, and when conditions allowed, they did not forget to make small gestures of resisting social power to flaunt their own value.

I suspect that, under the combined influence of this arrangement, the Chinese medical staff probably felt: this is a matter for the social authorities to handle; there’s no need to tell the patient, just write a few words in his medical record saying his midnight phone call was a hallucination. If problems arise, the social authorities will handle them; what does it have to do with us? At most, it’s just a misdiagnosis or negligence on our part. But the white doctor, wanting to challenge the social authorities, used nineteen pages to list every reason he could think of.

VI. The Great Barrier Effect II: The breadth of involvement when looking at one event

If the twelve repetitions mentioned above are temporal, let me describe one event to demonstrate spatial breadth. When I left the first hospital that employed me, I voluntarily relinquished my right to pursue legal action for my unlawful dismissal in exchange for them not using their social influence to continue stalking and persecuting me. They readily agreed, and five or six people came to comfort me, telling me not to worry about the future. More than twenty years later, I still believe in their sincerity. It is rare for them not to have a sufficient understanding of the chasm between the two social classes.

Years later, after confirming they hadn’t kept their verbal promises, I wrote to them demanding $27,000 in compensation. A little over a month later, I began receiving harassing phone calls in the middle of the night, a practice that continued for eight years. A few months after these late-night calls began, I started preparing for my professional exams. My wife and I were working in two cities over a thousand miles apart: one in a hospital, the other in a hotel. A plan to fire us simultaneously began to take shape. I overheard someone mention my name in the distance in the crowded, noisy hospital cafeteria, saying, “He’s about to be fired. He won’t be here for long.”

Because of my unease, I worked exceptionally hard for many years, to the point that I caught the attention of my boss’s boss’s boss. This important figure told me personally, “You are the best in that group, and you work very hard.”

As this synchronized dismissal plan was initiated, I received a formal warning letter demanding I improve my work quality within a specified period. At the normal pace, I would be dismissed within three or four months. I asked what “work quality” meant, and whether it conflicted with what my boss’s boss’s boss had said, but no one answered me. At a hospital hearing attended by six or seven people, after all the hospital leaders had arrived, I was told that everyone except me needed to go to another room next to the meeting room to speak. I sat there alone, waiting and waiting, until finally they returned; then, a top leader, essentially the hospital’s vice president, announced the meeting adjourned. A few days later, I received a formal letter from the hospital supporting the department’s position.

Reading this strongly worded yet simply succinctly written letter, it dawned on me: this dismissal plan had been arranged six months prior and had the support of hospital leadership at all levels. At that time, the department suddenly divided all staff into pairs to check each other’s reports for minor, insignificant errors, such as spelling mistakes. My partner was clearly carefully chosen and tasked with this mission. I took detailed notes; she had far more errors than I did. Yet, she submitted both of my draft reports directly, using them as grounds for my dismissal. I brought her record of far more errors than mine, along with supporting evidence, to the hospital hearing. The hospital, of course, forbade me to speak, to avoid an awkward situation. As long as I don’t have a chance to speak, the dismissal can proceed as planned.

While I was despairingly awaiting my dismissal, I never dreamed that one day my boss would be fired. The announcement came in the afternoon. Like the reaction of a king suddenly falling from power, my department immediately decided to hold a celebration that evening. I was the only one told, “You are not coming!” That night, as I imagined my colleagues’ revelry at home, I received a call from my wife, crying and telling me how she had been suddenly fired. It then dawned on me that my wife’s dismissal had also begun four months earlier due to an unusual argument, likely on the same day as mine. When I went to work the next day, I told my colleagues, “My wife was fired yesterday too.” The only response I received was a blank, expressionless silence. My explanation was that they knew about my wife’s dismissal beforehand. The original plan was to fire both my wife and me on the same day, but my boss failed to handle things properly, so he changed the plan at the last minute: she would replace me.

Like my dismissal, my wife’s dismissal was also due to a minor, everyday problem, which allowed for a pre-arranged dismissal time. After being dismissed, my wife applied for unemployment benefits at the government employment center. The staff there were shocked and angry after hearing her tearful account, saying, “How can you dismiss someone over two candles? Is a person not even worth the price of two candles? (Government employment) We’re here to handle these kinds of things!” In addition to the four medical personnel mentioned above, the fifth person who betrayed professional knowledge and pandered to societal power was a Chinese lawyer. He used all sorts of deception and threats to force my wife to withdraw her unemployment benefit application to avoid a government investigation.

The police station made me ask questions one by one, “Have you called me in the middle of the night in the past few years?” Only then did I call my former boss, whom I had fired. After hearing my question, she immediately laughed and said, “Why do you think I don’t have anything better to do?” It was under these circumstances that I reminisced with her on the phone about the past. She was unaware of my wife’s dismissal and the harassing phone calls in the middle of the night. She said, “I was carrying out orders (to fire you).” As I understand it, my boss was deceived by both her superiors and subordinates. This kind of deception doesn’t hold anyone specifically accountable, as it could also be a mutual misunderstanding. Actually, the beginning of the whole incident I’m describing here might just be: a woman actively promoting her male boss’s dubious wishes based on a temporary misconception. It’s also the power of the chasm effect, quite like the bipolar human hearing the voice of God three thousand years ago and carrying out God’s commands.

This simultaneous expulsion, accompanied by harassing phone calls in the middle of the night, happened within four months of my professional exams. My exam results: I passed one subject and scored 65 in another, while the only passing score I knew of was 72. So I probably failed by only one or two points. On the other hand, the fact that I scored 65 also shows how numb I was at the time, and it illustrates that a normal person caught in the chasm between primary and secondary societies won’t understand their situation in a short time. Afterwards, I immediately wrote to the headquarters of the American Medical Association, saying: I was a victim of the conflict between the Canadian and American associations; if I were in the United States, the harassing phone calls in the middle of the night and the simultaneous expulsion of both husband and wife would never have happened.

During this simultaneous dismissal event, which occurred over a thousand miles apart, I, living amidst a maddening, chaotic spectacle, began taking steps to prevent being killed. Later, the large, European men at the hospital ridiculed my behavior. In their view, only at high-level hospital meetings, which solemnly opened with the announcement of adjournment, could one suppress the deep-seated absurdity without revealing a single smile, thus radiating the light of reason.

7. Eight years of harassing phone calls in the middle of the night

During my sick leave, I wrote to the hospital security department stating that over the past four years and seven months, I had received countless harassing late-night phone calls. Statistically, the probability that these calls were made by hospital employees was 99.999…%, with a margin of error of less than one in a billion. Because I mentioned someone anonymously, I added the following: “To avoid further complicating matters, and in line with my personal view that everyone is a good person, just behaving differently, if you find any hospital employees involved in those late-night calls, I appreciate your help and trust your careful handling.”

The person I anonymously mentioned has no grudge against me, and our relationship is at least as good as anyone else’s. This person tirelessly calls me in the middle of the night, day after day, for years. Her sleep deprivation at night is probably no less than mine, the one answering the phone. This harassing call started, clearly related to my demand for 27,000 Canadian dollars from my former employer, the hospital. At the time, she was a temporary worker. Presumably as compensation for her late-night calls, the department wanted to fire the only other Chinese person there to create a permanent position for her, but the hospital rejected this, saying they had no precedent for firing a permanent employee to create a position for a temporary worker. The plan was to simultaneously fire my wife and me. Once my boss was unexpectedly fired, this person would get a permanent position. I continued making those phone calls for several years afterward, in order to carry out this commitment. I once wrote to government departments saying, “No one, except hospitals, has any personal interest or need to make me harassing phone calls in the middle of the night for four or five years.”

Unfortunately, the person I anonymously mentioned left Canada within a few months, and then the hospital held a joint meeting with several parties, including myself, to sign various conditions for my return to work. These conditions included that I was not allowed to speak to my boss’s boss (whose name was not mentioned, but who was Chinese at the time); if I did, I would be automatically dismissed. After that, the number of late-night phone calls increased dramatically, including death threats. They were also trying to enforce this collusion, so the late-night calls only finally stopped after the middle Chinese person in this four-layered social structure of the victim’s boss’s boss’s boss left. In these times of utter isolation, I can only pray before the heavens of China and the gods of the West for those driven by this union, especially for those forced to leave Canada and their homes, and for all my colleagues caught in this chasm, regardless of their position or faction within this miniature cultural revolution. I also hope that my colleagues in this chasm will, like myself, recount their experiences truthfully, resolutely resisting the practice of fabricating facts to defame others. Only in this way can misunderstandings and misinformation be eliminated, and only then can we collectively weave a true and complete story for future generations with similar experiences to learn from. Finally, the author has a good and legitimate personal wish: that only in this way can the rumors and unnecessary actions arising from misunderstandings and misinformation be finally eliminated. As a lesson for future generations, in all fairness: harassing phone calls in the middle of the night should not exceed two years, the Cultural Revolution should not exceed ten years, and attacks on a family should not exceed two years. Otherwise, like the beatings in the early stages of China’s Cultural Revolution, people would have been beaten to death long ago, without anyone knowing, and the beatings would continue day and night.

After receiving harassing phone calls late at night for over a year, I developed a lifelong habit of waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to fall back asleep. Later, when I started working, I had to work two shifts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and go home for a nap at noon. For twenty years, our family has become a real-life Canadian version of the movie “Coming Home,” not suffering from amnesia, but from becoming the target and punching bag for a collective mental breakdown involving hundreds of people. This also includes the rumors that still exist today, using gossip about our family as a pretext to sow discord within the family through coordinated and overlapping statements. Two or more rumors need to be combined to work, so that the rumor-mongers are unaware and unaccountable. Over the years, I have consulted many books on the subject and realized that this is based on a deep understanding of our family and profound psychological knowledge, demonstrating the designer’s painstaking efforts. The hearts of parents everywhere are filled with sorrow, and I feel deeply ashamed. With tears in my eyes, I plead and cry out for the descendants of those who have suffered similar fates: kill the victims within the first two years, or force them to commit suicide within the first two years. This cannot be mere talk; action is necessary. The victims should be willing to exchange their deaths for the normal lives of the rest of their families—the lives of ordinary people. For the first five years, these harassing phone calls at night were silent, occurring between 1 AM and 5 AM. Awakened by the ringing, I would answer the phone, but no matter how much the other person remained silent, they would call back half an hour after I hung up. If I didn’t answer, the phone could ring for half an hour. I would receive four or five such calls a night. For the last three nights, the other person would speak. Judging from the voices, at least twenty or thirty people, all young men and women, made harassing phone calls to me late at night. This matches what was mentioned in Section 2 above: “The perpetrators of the actions and harms mostly come from the latter of the six pairs of people and things mentioned above.” These harassing phone callers were white, and I still don’t understand: why white people made the calls, and then let unsuspecting Chinese people say the calls were hallucinations; why Chinese lawyers were used to obstruct the government’s investigation into the dismissal incident. What happened in this divide is beyond the comprehension of normal people.

After retiring, I spoke with many white Canadians about these late-night harassing phone calls, and not one of them told me they had ever received one. Only one person said his girlfriend sometimes called him in the middle of the night. So they were all quite surprised and willing to listen to my explanation of how this could happen. I suspect someone was paying: twenty dollars per call, five calls a night for a hundred dollars, not much, but enough for a day’s expenses. If the caller said, “We are going to kill you!” they would receive two hundred dollars. I also speculate that each of the two cities spent a million dollars to promote the Cultural Revolution. But most of the money probably ended up in the hands of two or three people, like in China’s Cultural Revolution, with very few beneficiaries. Don’t forget, this is just my guess, and a speculation from the perspective of an ordinary person.

8. Social classifications that overlook the unique characteristics of Chinese civilization are smacks of Eurocentrism.

Marxism, focusing on socio-economic aspects, divides human society into five stages: primitive, slave, feudal, capitalist, and communist. Morgan, focusing on the technological level, divides human society into three stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization, represented by the invention of fire, agriculture, and writing, respectively. The author read the Wikipedia entry on “sociocultural evolution,” which lists dozens of similar social classifications, leaving an impression that has lingered in my mind for many years: none of the authors of these social classifications are Chinese, and most of them view the world through a Western lens, exhibiting a clear Eurocentric tendency. This is not uncommon. Since the Renaissance, Europe has undergone a series of major transformations, including the Religious Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Philosophical Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution. Both society and people’s ideologies have undergone radical changes. These major transformations were accompanied by escalating wars, culminating in the two World Wars, which brought all six continents into today’s so-called modern world, dominated by European civilization. Therefore, it is not surprising that most scholars of social taxonomy are Westerners and hold Western perspectives.

The author has been fortunate enough to live for many years in Canada, a country with a rich multiculturalism. Canada’s southern neighbor is the flagship of the capitalist world, the United States. Yet, Canada is often referred to as a semi-socialist country. My daughter, a medical student, heard in the hospital that there are only three countries in the world with universal healthcare: Cuba, North Korea, and Canada. Several Hong Kong people told me they came to Canada to escape the Communist Party, only to find it even more communist-ized. The job security of hospital staff in Canada is no less than that in China. Canada has millions of French people. While the French are known for the French Revolution and Napoleonic romance, Canada is closely associated with the conservative and sophisticated British, taking pride in being subjects of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Near my city are First Nations reserves and Amish villages that refuse all modern technology and insist on using oxen and horses for farming. Whenever I visit their settlements, I think of the lives of Chinese farmers in Confucius’ time. Of course, there are also over a million Chinese people in Canada. Coincidentally, I’ve worked in a hospital for many years: large hospitals have all kinds of patients; even those who reject modernization and live in isolation have to come to the hospital when they fall ill. I remember when I was young and studying at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, a classmate wisely said, “Peking Union Medical College Hospital is like the Grand View Garden; you should read it like a Dream of the Red Chamber.” A senior leader at my Canadian hospital bluntly told me, “A hospital is like a small city; anything can happen.”

Canada’s multicultural tradition is flourishing to the point that some are starting to object. I attended a lecture where the speaker said that our culture is singular: democracy, freedom, and human rights. He cited the discrimination against women by some Muslims, arguing that we cannot tolerate anyone using multiculturalism as an excuse to infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. I was prepared to stand up and point out his misunderstanding if he mentioned Confucius’s saying, “Only women and petty men are difficult to deal with,” saying that Confucius’s philosophy of benevolence is most deeply rooted in a woman’s perspective and most advocates freedom and equality. Unfortunately, he didn’t mention anything about Chinese culture afterward. His lecture, however, raised an important question: can differences between cultures be exploited? Given the secure job in a semi-socialist hospital and the intermingling of various cultures, my experience of a miniature cultural revolution in Canada is not surprising.

In the Middle East, the Arab world, constantly clashing with the West, adheres to Islam, which shares the same God and origins as Judaism and Christianity. Early ancient Indian civilization had frequent maritime exchanges with Middle Eastern civilizations, and even ancient Greece, a significant source of Western thought, was influenced by Indian thought. Only Chinese civilization developed independently and was able to rival Western civilization. Although Westerners consider the Middle East and India to be part of the East, many Western scholars’ use of the term “East” and “West” merely refers to the differences between Chinese and Western civilizations. Let’s look back at the sociology scholars in the Wikipedia entry on “Social and Cultural Evolution”—how many of them possess a comprehensive and profound understanding of ancient Chinese civilization, rather than just a superficial impression? How many of them have thoroughly studied pre-Qin Chinese literature and possess unique insights into ancient Chinese history? Probably none. In this light, it’s not surprising that the author, in the unique environment of a Canadian hospital and due to a particular life experience, when rethinking Eastern and Western societies, raised a completely new social hierarchy issue—the genetically encoded primitive society and the artificial secondary society—completely exceeding the scope of all sociology scholars in the Wikipedia entry on “Social and Cultural Evolution.”

IX. Fukuyama’s End of History Theory and Two-Tier Society Theory

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese Francis Fukuyama (1952-) proposed the conclusion of “the end of history” in the United States, believing that the Western liberal democratic system is “the end point of the development of human ideology” and “the last form of human rule”. [6,7] From the perspective of the two-tier society theory, the Western democracy is just a struggle and self-adjustment of humankind falling into the gap between the original society and the second-tier society. The final ideal society should be similar to the human body managing trillions of cells, divided into upper and lower isolated levels. Apart from the balance feedback mechanism, there is no meaningful management, which is the Taoist concept of non-action.

Now, doctors use computers to assist them in diagnosing and treating patients. The author once wrote, “If well-trained state administrators were to use large computers to manage the country and society, decision-making would be quick and cost-effective. The wishes of the people could be simultaneously input into the computer and considered. Such a system would be more like the human body’s management system for its own cells, tissues, and physiological and biochemical processes.” [8,3] Initially, these professional state administrators, like doctors, used their professional knowledge to perform their state management duties. Once everything was in place, these personnel only needed to manage the national computer system. During this period, it was necessary to vigorously develop community diversity and establish numerous different cultural and value systems to reflect the multi-directional and multi-form nature of secondary society. Citizens have the freedom to choose and move between these different communities. Data on citizens’ activities in these communities—including the number of participants in various social activities and data on citizens’ sentiments and intentions analyzed through audio and video recordings—is input into a nationally unified computer system for balancing and feedback. Such a computer management system will ultimately replace industrial and service sector companies, so these ideas are still far removed from current social reality.

Once, at a small meeting where everyone except me was white, I said, “Some people say that if everyone lived like Americans, we would need five Earths. Currently, the Earth can only hold about 1.5 billion people, and at the current rate, the global population is expected to reach 7.5 billion soon. Therefore, the death toll in World War III would be 6 billion.” I continued, “We should be thankful that with the United Nations mediating, the world situation has changed, and we won’t have to experience World War III.” What I still find unforgettable is that about a dozen white people unanimously opposed my view, believing that World War III was inevitable. Their reasoning was simple: otherwise, where would the extra 6 billion people go? In this light, ordinary pure-blooded white people seem to have a clearer understanding of the direction and future of Western democratic politics than Japanese-American scholars like Fukuyama. In their view, even under a democratic system, the direction of society as a whole is neither determined by the good wishes of ordinary people nor by a few leaders and their political groups.

10. Finally, upon returning to our own understanding, we discover that Confucius resides deep within our hearts.

At this small meeting, why was I the only one who failed to feel the power behind the six billion people dealing with the problem? Why was I the only one still somewhat obstinate, bound by seemingly good intentions? Based on this, I deduce that among the six pairs of people and things mentioned above, I am undoubtedly closer to the latter than the others. What is the reason behind this? In the pair of East and West, they are the former, and I am the latter; but I am the only one with a background in natural sciences, and they all have a stronger religious consciousness than I do, and most of them are women. The only thing that made me ponder for a long time was art, especially literature with a strong humanistic spirit, which made it difficult to suppress my compassion. When I started junior high school, I began living at school instead of living at home. It was a crucial moment for me to transition from the quasi-primitive society of rural China to the secondary society. I remember that among the sixty students in my first year of junior high, I was the only one who received a perfect score of 5 on all the student essays throughout the year. With one essay per week, I had to write more than forty essays a year.

According to the prevailing belief among overseas Chinese families today that children who study humanities will have difficulty finding jobs, I later studied medicine and didn’t need to put in much effort on literature and composition in my first year of junior high. Similarly, in Western white families today, children are encouraged to study what they enjoy, with future livelihoods being considered by society. I didn’t have the slightest preference for humanities, because I also enjoyed science. My mistake was neither following the Chinese family’s approach of shifting my energy from humanities to science, nor following the white family’s approach of using some of that energy for personal hobbies and play. I recall my elementary school principal’s words, which I still remember vividly: “If you don’t work hard when you’re young, you’ll regret it when you’re old.” This saying must have occupied too much of my subconscious during my middle school years, leading me to foolishly put in so much effort in literature. My loving parents never said anything like that to me; I guess they couldn’t bear to say it to their innocent and carefree children.

If Chinese primary school teachers back then had learned some of the Lao-Zhu and Confucius philosophy of non-action (wuwei), and understood the complexity and unmanageability of secondary societies, then blindly working hard might not have been a good thing. Perhaps they should have learned from their playful students. If I had followed the Taoist approach of valuing children’s natural inclinations and pursued my hobbies and play from a young age, like white children, I wouldn’t have gotten all fives on my first-year junior high essays. And those fives on my first-year junior high essays are definitely one of the key factors that have contributed to my experiences over the past twenty-odd years. Secondary societies are so complex and unmanageable. Thinking of my own childhood innocence and naivety, I feel a deep pain in my heart and sigh: “A youthful effort is wasted, an old age brings only regret!”

Artificial secondary societies possess the power to force the alienation of humanity, even putting illiterate rural women in China under pressure, who exclaim: “The human heart is made of flesh!” This is not much different from Confucius’s concept of benevolence, “Benevolence is humanity”: a cry in the face of a powerful tide of human alienation: “We are human!” Of the six pairs of people and things mentioned above, the latter is closer to the original society and closer to the unalienated, natural human being. The chasm effect experienced by the author ravaged precisely the flesh of the human heart, and also Confucius’s benevolent heart. The book’s conclusion emphasizes that Confucius’s concept of benevolence is not primarily found in scholars’ interpretations, but rather in the hearts of ordinary people who are largely illiterate. Like the author’s own experiences in Honggou, these ordinary people have blood and tears in their hearts, but we can see the beauty and charm of humanity in the color of blood and the glitter of tears, and also understand the true meaning of Confucius’s philosophy of benevolence.

Documents

[1]David L. Hall & Roger T. Ames (1987): Thinking Through Confucius. New York: State University of New York Press.

[2]Li, You-Sheng(2010)﹕The Ancient Chinese Super State of Primary Societies. Bloomington, USA: Author House. p190.

[3] Li Yousheng (2006): A New Interpretation of Chinese Taoism. London, Canada: Taoist Rehabilitation Centre. pp. 272-3, 335, 363, 54.

[4] Julian Jaynes (1976): The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

[5] Julian Jaynes (1986): Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind, Canadian Psychology, April 1986, Vol. 27(2).

[6] Francis Fukuyama (1989): The End of History? The National Interest (Summer 1989).

[7] Francis Fukuyama (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press.

[8] You-Sheng Li (2005): A new interpretation of Chinese Taoist philosophy: an anthropological/psychological view. Canada, London,: Taoist Recovery Centre.

author By Dr. You-Sheng Li

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