Rubbish from High School Days

Today I finally decided to attend Cao Jüdong’s class. Cao Jüdong, this person is indeed excellent in organic chemistry, but this is still related to his study time, just like the phrase “only hand familiarity” in the story of the oil seller. If I were to learn from him, I would definitely achieve more than him. Previously, I always thought that he, Yan Xuanshen, and Wu Guoqing were just a trio of swindlers, and my sister and I even jokingly referred to them as the “trio of swindlers.” However, recently I have changed my opinion. It is said that during the Cultural Revolution, Cao Jüdong and others were moving radioactive elements, which resulted in a leak. He evacuated everyone else and alone went to clean up the mess, afterwards suffering from optic nerve atrophy and hair loss, and to this day, one of his eyes is still blind. From this incident, it can be seen that he is indeed great, just not intelligent enough. But sometimes people don’t need to be that intelligent. During the class, he also shared his feelings with us, saying: “People, sometimes you still need to humble yourself. When I was young, I suffered because I refused to humble myself.” In my opinion, this sentence is extremely correct. Nowadays, education always emphasizes that we should not bow our heads like enemies, and learn from Liu Hulan. But what is an enemy, and how do we define bowing our heads? We should distinguish between these and not act impulsively.

A while ago, I often heard reports from XX magazine about XX fighting against nature and finally conquering it… This is extremely foolish. Imagine an ant climbing onto an elephant’s back, saying “I have conquered this elephant.” We are the same. This is called overestimating oneself. But from another perspective, this is also because we cannot distinguish what our enemies are. Nature should be humanity’s mother, not our enemy. We always say that nature nurtures us, so why do we want to conquer our own mother?! Recently, I discovered that human development and our own growth are similar. Now, humans are in the late adolescence stage, with some rebellious psychology, and when we grow up, we will naturally understand.

Furthermore, when dealing with enemies, how do we define not bowing our heads? We are always taught to have backbone, but this doesn’t mean we should be foolish enough to sacrifice ourselves. We should learn to humble ourselves and preserve our strength, especially when the opponent is stronger than us. The final boss in FF6 was initially just a minor character with extremely weak strength, but this guy persisted with a cockroach-like strong life force until the end. The prince of Troy in the movie “Troy” was the same, with absolutely no outstanding martial arts skills, yet he persisted until the end. Many people who watched the movie thought that his sneak attack on others was very disgraceful, but I think that to defeat someone stronger than you, you must learn to seize their weaknesses and strike with all your might when they reveal their soft spot. For example, that Al… was too focused on emotions and trapped in a woman’s feelings, unable to extricate himself, and was finally killed when he was indulging in his emotions. This was also inevitable. Therefore, sneak attacks are a good thing, and “a soldier is not afraid of tricks.” It’s just that those damn complicated rituals make us have to stand up straight and fight, which is also due to the deep constraints of traditional morality on our thinking. However, if the Japanese ask you to be a traitor, that is absolutely unacceptable. Of course, you can also agree, and maybe even kill more Japanese by infiltrating their army. This would be clever. If you just die like that, wouldn’t it be a waste of life? As the saying goes, “as long as the green hills remain, there will be no lack of firewood.”

So, we need to learn to bow our heads to others, but never forget our ultimate goal. Chiang Kai-shek’s philosophy of “retreating to advance” is precisely this principle.