Q&A:How can I be confident and humble at the same time?

From Day Lesson: You Can’t Hide from Politics and Power

Reader Qi Zhiguang: Wan Sir, is there a correspondence between power and responsibility? My simple understanding is that the greater the power, the greater the responsibility, and one must assume the corresponding responsibility to be worthy of the power one possesses. But in reality there are indeed people who use their power for personal gain, flinging their responsibilities far away from them, and still manage to occupy power in this way for a long time.

Reply from Wan Wanguang -

You are quite right. There are two meanings of “responsibility”, one is responsibility, which means that you are in charge of this matter, and the result of the matter, whether good or bad, is mainly caused by you, and you should feel guilty if the matter is done badly - here we are talking about natural responsibility. It is true that the greater the power, the greater the responsibility.

Another layer of responsibility is “accountability”, is accountability, is out of the matter to take you is to ask, to pursue your responsibility. This, not necessarily the greater the power the greater the responsibility. Because those in power can use the power to shirk their responsibilities, let others as a scapegoat, with the credit to themselves, with the error to subordinates, often can be the more power, the smaller the responsibility.

This is why a mature system must have a mechanism for pursuing responsibility. Such a mechanism must be additive, a manifestation of the power of the bottom, rather than endogenous to power.

But where are all the mature systems? So the seventh rule of the rule of power is precisely that power can exempt you from responsibility. We’ll go into more detail on that in due course.

Reader Time Migrant: Mr. Wan, is it true that power can only be gained from personnel struggles? Are there other ways? For example, technology.

Mr. Wan Wan Gang replied-

Personnel struggles often involve direct conflict and create clear hostilities, which is indeed not good. As we’ll talk about later, many times you don’t need to be in direct confrontation with someone to get power. For example, you are in a key position, your work performance can be seen by the leadership, your competitors, although the ability is very strong, but his performance is not seen by the crowd, then you naturally win. Here you did not give the opponent to cause direct pain, you can say: Oops you say how to do, I also know that man your ability is better than me, but the above must let me do, really can not help!

Granted, but please note: power is always a zero-sum game at all times, and it’s always an item that fights with people, not machines or test questions. If you go up, that means no one else can go up, and others would love to go up. So you always need to actively fight. Your fighting moves can be to do work upwards rather than to suppress your opponents …… But we should never be under the illusion that there will never be a need for direct personnel struggles. The higher up you go, the more you have to deal with personnel struggles, including direct suppression of opponents. That’s a very unattractive game, and we’ll talk about it later.

From Day Lesson: Overcoming the Submissive Mentality

Reader: Self-Mastery: The only thing that a man can do is not to fight, so there is nothing under the sun that he can fight with. Is this famous quote from Lao Tzu self-deception?

Reply from Wan Wan Gang -

This quote has been misinterpreted by many people. What Lao Tzu said about not competing is that “rivers and seas” do not compete with small streams, and “sages” do not compete with the common people - the reason why they do not compete is because they are not on the same level.

Simply put, those who run the platform should not compete with those who participate in the platform. Would Jack Ma let his wife open a Taobao store and then give his wife’s store more homepage recommendations? No. Jack Ma’s game is Taobao as a platform, not opening a store on Taobao. Tang Taizong saw so many readers to participate in the imperial examinations, happy to say “all the world’s heroes into my enough! Then you say he will let his sons also take the test, after the examiner to take care of more care, give his son to test a scholar? Of course not.

If someone is operating the platform while playing with the players in the platform, and when the referee and when the athlete, the platform must be unfair, others will naturally have to challenge your authority; if you have a sense of boundaries, know what they can not fight, platform players will not naturally compete with you.

However, if a reader misread this sentence of Laozi, said to participate in the imperial examinations to compete for the place to be an official look too ugly, I’m so learned people do not care to fight with ordinary people, Tang Taizong see me so modest nature will ask me to come out of the mountain …… this is not sick?

Reader Wu Xia A Meng: Modesty has always been considered one of the most valuable qualities, is it a natural contradiction between a leader and modesty? Or can a strong man be both confident and humble only after he has fully demonstrated his abilities?

Reply from Wan Wan Gang -

We can roughly categorize ‘humility’ into three kinds.

• The first kind is humility towards ‘others’. * Although I am very powerful, I am polite to everyone, always respect each other, and never fly off the handle. Einstein was this kind of humble, but not Newton, who often looked down on other scientists.

• The second kind is the humility towards the ‘unknown’. * Although I have experienced a lot of things and read a lot of books, I admit that my cognition is limited, this new situation in front of me is very strange to me, I can not copy the old experience, I have to learn more. People who do great things should have this kind of humility. Newton had this kind of humility, but Einstein did not. Einstein was bent on unifying physics.

Both kinds of humility are right at all times, no problem.

*The third kind of humility is the humility of “self”: I can’t, I won’t, I think I’m bound to fail …… This is a lack of self-confidence and must be avoided by those who want to compete for power.

When we talked about Grant’s Rethinking, we said [1] that there are two kinds of self-confidence: self-confidence in one’s own ability, and self-confidence in the tools at one’s disposal. * The ideal humility is to be confident in one’s abilities while suspecting that one may not, for the moment, have the most appropriate tools for solving a problem, and being willing to explore a bit to do so. *

From Day Lesson: Don’t Follow the Rules

Reader Idle Fishing: Mr. Wan, then by extension when the subject of action is the state, how is this balance of following the rules and not following the rules to be grasped?

Mr. Wan Wan Gang replied-

The difference between state-to-state and individual-to-individual is that the international community lacks effective means of recourse for non-compliance, especially if you’re a big country, which, to be blunt, means that no one can control you. To say that I follow the rules when someone is in charge and I don’t follow the rules when no one is in charge is not power thinking - especially not the kind of power thinking that a great power should have.

In a situation where no one is in charge, the rules are agreements - or “treaties” to put it mildly - signed between countries. For a country, whether or not it abides by a treaty is not a question of whether or not you are strong, but whether or not you have any credibility.

Since the Song Dynasty, when China signed the “Stillwater Alliance” with Liao, it has recognized that “barbarians” are also equal nations, and has become internationally aware. However, since the Song Dynasty, China has been reluctant to honor international treaties. Whether it was to Liao or Jin, including the Qing Dynasty, China did not intend to comply with international treaties from the moment they were signed. The Qing Emperor had no intention of abiding by the agreement, and even the ministers wrote to the Emperor directly saying that we signed the agreement to cheat each other for a while.

Some people may feel that this is very strong, we Chinese just do not want to abide by the rules of the barbarians! But in the international community’s point of view, this is the same as you have no credibility, it is no fun to deal with you, we never expect long-term cooperation.

What’s more, Song and Qing’s attitude toward treaties has always been I can’t beat you, I sign, I don’t abide by it, and if I don’t abide by it, I’ll be beaten again, and I’ll sign again after the beating……. This image is also too unpleasant to be true.

In my opinion, it’s really strong to be able to actively uphold the rules when no one is in charge, and even prefer to give up a little short-term gain for the sake of credibility.

The sun is nothing but mediocrity

Reader Perseus: If Liu Cixin constructs scenarios that don’t in fact exist and don’t make logical sense, is the “trolley problem” also a non-issue?

Reader Bonnie: If there’s a big problem with collectivist aesthetics of rationality, may I ask Wan Sir, if there is a sudden human crisis, should we abandon collectivism as well?

Wan Sir replied-

These two questions are talking about two sides of the same coin - thought experiments - and it’s right to consider them together.

If you have to implement collectivist aesthetics, you have to envision a very, very extreme scenario, because collectivist aesthetics have never won in known human history.

Is China’s war against Japan considered a major crisis? After the Lugouqiao Incident, Chiang Kai-shek issued a statement calling “If the war begins, it will be a war that will divide the land into north and south, and the people into young and old, no matter who they are, all of them will have the responsibility of defending the land and resisting the war, and all of them will hold the determination of sacrificing everything. ……” Did the people of the whole country sacrifice everything, as he said? No. Farmers are still farming, workers are still producing, students are still studying, scientists are still doing research, Eileen Chang is still writing novels, and the people are still living their lives.

Lovers of collectivist aesthetics might say, Ha! Chinese people are just unpatriotic! If every Chinese had taken to the streets to launch suicide attacks on the Japanese, the Japanese would have been driven away long ago! Well, then you’re just plain stupid. It’s not that the Chinese people are unpatriotic, it’s that the Chinese people understand that there are some more basic things in the world that are more important than taking out the Japanese.

In contrast to Chiang Kai-shek’s collectivist ideals, Mao Zedong’s “On the Long War” precisely rejects the theory of quick victory, opposes the war of attrition and the war of positions, emphasizes these factors of economy, politics and culture, and believes that “preserving oneself” is more important than “eliminating the enemy”. In particular, Mao emphasized the importance of the international situation, stressing that Japan’s model of forcing the entire population to serve the war effort would inevitably lead to its economic collapse.

This is to be able to identify and utilize favorable external conditions in the midst of a crisis, to know that there are many friends out there besides the enemy, and not to advocate that there is a crisis out there and that we have to sacrifice half of the Chinese people and all the soldiers over 50 years of age in order to have a way out.

Mao was talking about lasting coexistence with the aggressive situation, not about zeroing out the Japanese army.

If that’s true of the Resistance, what kind of crisis would mobilize everyone? It would have to be a sky-is-falling situation like the one in Wandering Earth.

And that kind of situation only exists in fantasy. That’s the problem with thought experiments: they envision extreme situations that don’t exist in fact, that don’t hold up logically.

“So it is with the Trolley Problem. If there were only six people left in the world, would you save five or one? It would probably be “rational” to sacrifice one to save five.

But there are not only six people left in the world! If we can just sacrifice one person in order to save others while the world is still alive and well, then everyone will be in danger, and they will be sacrificed even if they have done nothing wrong, and isn’t that human mining?

In the real world we can’t consider five people and one person in the abstract, we have to consider the people behind those people, the examples and expectations those people set for society. Why are those five people in danger? If it was their own fault, why should they sacrifice others? Even if it was not their own fault, can innocent people be sacrificed for nothing?

Commentary

[1] Elite Day Lessons, Season 4, Rethink 2: Admitting Mistakes While Maintaining Confidence

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