Thanks to the development of technology and the economy all over the world, this may be the age with the strongest urge to express in all of history, and also a "small" age in which anything can bear closely on anyone. Whether you like it or not, unless you are an extreme case who lives by what they believe, a Tao Yuanming or one of the Amish, sooner or later you will be dragged into the whirlpool of public opinion around some event.

If you happen to take an interest in some event and dig deeper, it gets even worse. It is like diving in the open ocean: the sea is both deep and wide. Worse still, 99% of what you can see is second-hand (and "second" is the best case), chewed over by who knows how many people in turn before being fed into your mouth. How much bias is there in all that? If you are lucky, you get the chance to find other sources of information to balance out the taste. But that only solves one problem. There is another that is almost unsolvable: second-hand information is necessarily compressed, simplified information.

People like to put bad things down to human stupidity or malice, but I think we need to add at least one more: laziness. Yes, we are lazy. Laziness is no crime, because laziness is economical; it brings the best value for money, the greatest ROI. Earning a living and staying safe are the problems that a flesh-and-blood upright animal has to solve first, so most of us are willing to accept an ocean of compressed, simplified information that costs only a little effort to get. Every day after a meal, we need only fish around in it, chew a little and share it with our friends, and part of our higher Maslow needs (belonging, esteem and self-actualization) is satisfied. What's not to like?

Only when we find that, hang on, this thing seems to affect my survival, or the survival of people I care about, only then do we summon a great deal of effort to drill through the layers of information to the factual details behind them (who, when, where, what). But sometimes it is too late.

Especially with events as big as an epidemic or a war, it is almost impossible for any person or organization without a God's-eye view to drill all the way down and get every detail, because it is too complex. It involves too many entities, too many topics and angles, a long stretch of time (history). Talking about details means talking about the facts. Collecting first-hand information takes too much effort, and second-hand information is not very credible. More troublesome still is the complexity of the real world itself: all kinds of details are interrelated, entangled, even contradictory, and you cannot easily lay them all out together to hold up a conclusion with a clear direction. There is a great deal of room for thought in between. If you laid it all out and got to the bottom of every point, good grief, you would have a library (the dictionaries of newly coined academic concepts alone would fill a bookshelf).

So when we think about these things and express our thoughts, we have no choice but to try some simplification.

The first tool of simplification is "abstraction", which rises above concrete things. Either we treat a whole complex system as a single individual and give it a name, a country for example; or, like this essay, we discuss conceptual matters and steer clear of concrete details. "Democracy", "freedom", "rights", "morality", "justice" are all highly abstract concepts that you can neither see nor touch. Even with words like "the people" or "society", which seem to point to something concrete, it is hard for us to pin down their scope.

The second tool of simplification is "analogy", which stays down among concrete things. For example, we compare large organizations and countries to individual people, and their stakes, actions and motives in an event to the stakes, actions and motives in everyday dealings between people. Using the everyday experience everyone has, we can understand the whole complex situation more easily.

Let me state my own view at this point: tools are neutral. They only have functions, or affordances; a tool can interact with things and bring about some change. A tool's "neutrality" works on two levels. First, the choice of what it interacts with, that is, where it is used, is decided by its user (usually a person). Second, the change a tool brings about is in itself neutral; good or bad, its value is a judgement made by concrete people with concrete values. Value is subjective. If most people consider something "good" or "just", that can only mean they have reached a consensus on values, not that they have found some objective truth.

The same goes for the two tools of abstraction and analogy. Where they are used, and whether the results are good or bad, is entirely up to us.

As a concrete person with concrete values, I personally think both tools are double-edged swords. I have already explained the good side: the simplification they bring panders to our laziness, which has economic benefits. Now for the bad side.

The drawback of abstraction is that it removes details, whether factual or conceptual.

Without factual details, any argument becomes suspect. Everyone knows this problem, so the more advanced and truly very common move is cherry-picking: showing some of the factual details selectively, the part that supports a given argument, while turning a blind eye to the unreliability of some of that evidence, or to any evidence pointing the other way. Worse still, there is outright fabrication and "creative rewriting". We have all seen far too much of where you sit deciding what you think. Behind it there may be "malice" (conscious, in pursuit of some private gain), but there may also be "stupidity" or "laziness" (unconscious following, amusement, or not bothering to sort the problem out).

Without conceptual details, real communication becomes difficult. When we both claim to support "freedom", you may mean "the freedom to do anything, provided it does not endanger the safety of others", while I mean "X you, you XXXX, I'll do whatever I damn well please". Then what the XX are we even talking about? (Forgive me, playing Cyberpunk 2077 lately has left me with a certain foul-mouthed influence.) These concepts are well worth discussing, but look: research on them has kept at least half of the social sciences in business, and when we talk about them, how far have we understood them, or are we willing to put in the work to understand them?

The drawback of analogy is that it relies on the similarity between things, but similar and identical are mutually exclusive. Can you imagine what 100% similarity would even be? If our analogy is apt, it can save a lot of tedious explanation and even lead to new discoveries. For example, an apple is a sweet and sour fruit that can be made into jam to spread on bread; a cherry is similar to an apple, also sweet and sour, so I conclude that "cherries can be made into jam to spread on bread".

But when you compare relations between countries to relations between people, the jump between fields is rather a big one, and we need to examine it carefully. If what you are saying is that when two countries go to war, a third country should not immediately step in to support one side but should first get the facts straight, because this can be compared to "when two people fight, a third person should not immediately join in on one side, but first find out the cause", then I think that is OK, on one condition: the third party is neutral.

If what you are saying is this: there are countries A, B and C. A and B are enemies, and so are A and C, so although B and C don't quite get along either, they should first team up against A. C has a son, D, a "most filial son" who has already cut off relations with C and now wants to go further and throw in his lot with A and A's gang of underlings {a1, a2...}. Because C is afraid A will use D to come after it, C, pushed past endurance, goes and teaches D a lesson by force. A and {a1, a2...} don't help directly, but quietly work behind the scenes to put a debuff on D, while B declares that for now it takes no one's side and respects everyone's right to protect their own security, but C has its reasons too, having been pushed too far by certain people. In fact, A is doing this to keep down both C and its own underlings {a1, a2...}........

My first question about this analogy is: is this a gangster movie script?

My second is: then how do you explain the problem between a certain region E and B? Isn't E rather like B's "most filial son" too? So should B give E a beating or not? Different people think:

  1. Your own children must be beaten hard, and other people's are none of your business (which seems to conclude that B has double standards?)
  2. E doesn't count as B's child at all, or D doesn't count as C's child at all (question: what makes someone a child, and what doesn't?)
  3. That is what B thinks underneath, but the time for a showdown hasn't come yet; B has to wait until A is a little weaker and B a little stronger before it strikes

I ask again: how does what A is doing keep down C and {a1, a2...}? Someone's explanation might be:

  1. As for C, {a1, a2...} and I now have an excuse to punish it further economically. By the rules of the street, I freeze the money it has deposited in my bank
  2. As for {a1, a2...}, one beating like this and they'll be scared of C, that hard case, and will be all the keener to stay on good terms with me. Day after day they've been scheming to break free of me on their own, and even wanting to do business with D, trying to steal my trade

The discussion extends without end, all built on the analogy between countries and people. As storytelling it is entertaining and eye-catching to the MAX, and both teller and listener have a great time. But pick any strand and think it through, and you find many extra things to consider; the analogy has to be reinterpreted and patched again and again. In reality this analogy ignores too many fundamental things, and sooner or later one of the patches will run into something it cannot explain away.

For example, if B and E can be compared to father and son, then what organ of a person is B's regime or E's regime, this "regime", or the "ruling party" behind it? Also, if B is the father and E the son, why was the latter founded earlier? Indeed, many members of the former's ruling party were once members of the latter's former ruling party. And who is the child's mother? Asexual reproduction? Or, as in myth, a piece of one's own flesh splits off and becomes a child? And how do you explain each of the concrete people in A, B, C, D and E? A cell in a person's body? And these cells actually hold the same or different views on what A, B, C, D and E are doing; do they all have minds of their own? Important entities such as political parties and people are all simplified away in the analogy, and there is no patching that. Yet these entities are the ones that actually carry out every action and bear every consequence.

If we want to use an analogy to help reach some initial understanding, that is good. But if we want to take the thing we compared to as a model for solving real problems, then besides being inefficient, we may be wrong by a mile without even knowing it.

Analogy also brings a fatal problem: it forces us to choose a threshold to separate the "similar" from the "dissimilar". Once this logic is applied to people, concrete people are split into different groups, and the groups automatically repel one another over the "dissimilar" parts, even though they have far more in common (we are all human, at least, right?).

Combined with abstraction, this gets worse still. The group is an abstraction of the individual, leading to overgeneralization and stereotypes, which easily turn difference into opposition and enmity. The abstraction of groups also makes people seem alien and strange. We lose the ability to empathize and no longer try to understand and communicate; we ignore explanations from other angles, choose sides and apply double standards, and the opposition gradually polarizes, with consequences that are hard to calculate (they deserve to be wiped out; how could they possibly be human beings like us, with flesh and blood, with families, with joys and sorrows, with dreams?).

At this point this essay seems to have reached a conclusion. Abstraction and analogy both have some benefits as we try to understand and solve very complex problems such as epidemics and wars, but if we rely on them too much, we can go badly wrong. Some complexity cannot be simplified; we have to concentrate and chew through it. It is the concrete events, the concrete people, the concrete difficulties and suffering; they come first. If we cannot pay attention to the concrete, check it and analyse it, we will be blinded by abstraction and misled by analogy, and what we end up with is a noisy world where everyone is expressing themselves, siding with their own and attacking the rest, sacrificing the concrete for the abstract. Beneath the fine words, people are still bleeding.

Remember that on that building we all know, the words "the great unity of the peoples of the world" are written. What a beautiful vision. I believe no one truly opposes it, but because of differences in subjective factors (culture, values) and objective ones (interests, old scores from history), it is extremely hard to achieve. And behind the abstraction "the peoples of the world", are there not concrete people like you and me?

If we, as concrete people, all blindly seek simplification, if in thinking about problems and expressing opinions we cannot come down to concrete people and events, cannot hold to one standard as we try to understand and communicate, to seek common ground while setting differences aside, to make this abstract vision concrete, then we can expect even less that the world will move in a good direction. We may even see these pointless expressions bring greater division and conflict instead. If that is so, what is all our expression, which fills this whole age, for?

If we have no hope for the world's progress, then expression is a waste, and not in keeping with the essence of "laziness". If it is only to grab a sense of belonging and respect in social life, could we find some more harmless way? If we really do hope for something, then we cannot be lazy: we should do things that actually matter, and if expression is necessary, do our best to make it beneficial and harmless. Whether it is taking sides, promoting, explaining or joking, if we know full well the harm our expression may cause and still insist on squandering the right of free expression, or deliberately push the other way, then we need only remember that things happening can also be put down to human stupidity, or malice, and in this world where everything bears on everything else, you and I cannot always stay out of it.

So many threads, and what made it onto the page is only half-formed. Forgive me.