Why Do Historical Predictions Always Get It Wrong? (Forward)

Outstanding speakers are good at instigating his audience with emotions-even if his theory does not even believe him. The true meaning of speech art is not to persuade others with logic. The only true meaning of speech art is to convey passion.

Reason, desire and passion, Plato made a subtle interpretation more than 2000 years ago. Reason symbolizes wisdom and interprets the nobleness of mankind in the chaotic universe. Desire symbolizes instinct, is the animal side of human beings, and is also a mediocre majority. Only passion is a difficult word.

Most of the purpose of the world comes from desire. Why is the purpose attributed to reason? Passion is not the starting point nor the essence of things. Therefore, people often ignore its power, but at many nodes that change the course of history, only passion is the real connection between purpose and result. key.

Passionate battles need passion, ascending revolutions need passion, and heroes who choose to take justice need passion, but revenge for violence and violence requires passion, rebellion against chaos requires passion, and the robbers of the life of the grass also need passion.

In the vision of philosophers, an ideal society should be led by reason, and then everyone should pursue philosophy, art, purity and essence. But the real world is obviously not like this. Because as a collection of "human beings", reason is the basic attribute of human beings, but as individual people, the lack of reason and the will of desire are the more general reality.

"Our spirit is more inert than our bodies." Most people believe that the earth is a sphere. It is not because they did a voyage around the world like Magellan. Most people believe that the earth is a sphere simply because others told him that the earth is a sphere. . If a traveler two thousand years ago came to the end of the world, the pillar of Hercules in the Strait of Gibraltar, facing the expansive Atlantic Ocean, "the earth is flat", this is the same unbreakable truth for him.

The history of mankind is the history of heroes, but it is the history of human beings. Accurate judgment of history must be based on this basic principle. Heroes can be rational, wise, brave, and decisive. This does not mean that everyone can do the same. Most people are inherently fragile and will not desperately insist on righteousness and truth, and when they see the downright fall, it is inevitable that they will inevitably raise their hearts of indifference. Desire is born instinct, and individual rationality is only limited and incomplete rationality, most of us are separated between the two, and the decisions made are easily dominated by internal or external passions.

Passion is often short-lived and changeable. Even when the same person is on two different days, the passion that leads him to make a decision is exactly the opposite when facing the same choice. Just like the heavy rain in Daze Township inspired Chen Sheng's passion for being king, and the day before he faced the armed and escorted officers and soldiers, perhaps the passion of fear prevailed. But the consequences of passion are continuous and even irreversible. "To die now, to die in a big way, wait for death, what about the dead country?"-Once this sentence is spoken, it will change history forever.

**Most people are inherently vulnerable. This vulnerability comes from fear of the unknown. Fear makes us tend to look for objects we can rely on. **For the public, this reliance on emotions is pinned to "opinion leaders" or "experts", which is the so-called mainstream opinion. For economists, it is very common to think of numbers as beliefs. Because the numbers are concise, intuitive, and quantifiable. In the extremely complex and uncertain process of human social development, for some people, seeing these statistics seems to have seen the only life-saving straw, thus falling into a certain paranoia.

The uncertainty pointed by passion and people's own vulnerability make group decision-making itself not based on objective calm analysis and logical rationality. Although some people may feel that everything will tend to some kind of dynamic balance over a long period of time, and the operation of history has a self-correcting mechanism, but for individuals, such a time span is not always sustainable, how many years are there in life?

It is dangerous to deny reason and logic altogether, but it is more dangerous and less intelligent to rely entirely on self-considered reason and logic and think that the world should operate like this. Most people who talk about predicting the direction of historical and economic activities have to show others various data charts and arguments in order to increase their persuasion. Even if his argument is rigorous and the data is detailed (it is difficult to do this), It's no more accurate than the orangutan's random selection of results. Because some key places are often not quantifiable, and even cannot be placed on the table. For the general public, the most important thing is to instill faith rather than logic. A plausible but simple and intuitive reason is much more contagious than a rigorous but obscure theory.

Those who have not experienced disillusionment do not understand what is called risk. In the past many years, many lies and bubbles have been supported by simple beliefs, and they have always been effective. Some observers who have objectively analyzed and calmly thought have long discovered that they deviate from reasonable values, but are constantly being affected by things. The face was so developed that he had to lament "this world is crazy"-not that this world is crazy, but that this is the way the world is.

Only by recognizing the absurdity and illogical nature of the world itself can we truly see the historical development. History is not guided by data. Data is only an abstract expression of past history. History is guided by the collective unconscious of the masses. This collective unconscious is both greedy and blindly obedience, both emotional and ignorant, both fragile and cruel. Once a person puts himself in a group, what he thinks can easily become just based on animal instincts. The fanaticism is always more fanatical than it should be, and the destruction is always worse than it should be. It is not rationality that converts fanaticism and destruction to one another, it is just the passion for dominating the group to make decisions. Only by thinking away from the mechanical changes of objective things and focusing on the people who exert force on objective things, and understanding the irrationality and weaknesses in the depths of human nature, can we grasp the real clues in the seemingly absurd historical process Make it possible.

Predicting the course of history is a high-risk thing and one that is often falsified. But if you want to ask me, I will say that this is a noisy era, this is a lost era, there will be many noises in the noisy era, and the lost era makes many people stunned by some superficial things. . But in the next few decades, social changes will far exceed many people's imagination, and such changes are by no means only economic and technological. The era of singing and dancing is often the eve of the crisis, but from a larger historical perspective, this will only be a great starting point.

Let us witness.

Source: Zhihu - 关山越过

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