Original link: https://lawrenceli.me/blog/makeshift-troupe
Those social dramas that Lu Xun watched in his childhood were also called grass stage operas, and the grass stage crew got their name from this. Usually three or five people set up a simple tent in the open area of the countryside. Opera performers of different levels sing some operas that the masses like to see and hear. When it gets dark, they will dismantle the stage and collect things to continue to the next performance. When I was very young, I was fortunate enough to listen to it once at my grandmother’s house. It was an old man and a child who went to listen to the play, and I didn’t remember the content at all.
Later, I saw a netizen have the following vivid summary:
It was only after I started working that I found out that everyone is a grass-roots team. XX grass platform, enterprise grass platform, I also grass platform, everyone is grass platform, make do with money to live. An enterprise looks like a luxury car running on the highway, but inside it is actually a few people riding bicycles. Cars on the road are like this, and no one punctures them.
When we watch adults do things and participate in various social activities in our childhood, we may always feel that they should clearly and clearly know what they are doing, and why they do it, and even build scientific and rational decisions based on this. Many years after graduation, combined with some of the jobs I have experienced (in the Yangtze River Delta region, including listed companies, foreign companies, small workshops, entrepreneurial teams, and medium-sized private companies), and the experience of working in many industries, many enterprises and institutions, I have become more and more familiar. affirm the above point of view.
Ma ‘s speech at a summit last year was exactly what inspired me to find a similar view: “There is no systemic risk in China’s finance, because China’s finance basically has no system.”
What is his so-called “system”? Will it be a series of consensus protocols? Or the law? Or is it multi-level government departments from top to bottom? Or some kind of highly complex centralized organization? … I don’t know, neither does the audience, and maybe Ma doesn’t know either. We have no way of knowing what this system is, but the only certainty is that it must not be grass.
I have always believed that people will make mistakes; and often due to the influence of selfishness, they will form a misjudgment of the status quo. Systems thinking can help reduce these kinds of situations, no matter what the status quo is. There are always so few people with systems thinking. You can’t have a comprehensive, overall, and profound insight into a thing or event that you haven’t experienced. This way of looking at things is often described as “God’s perspective”. The question is, how can there be systematic cognition without God? Modern industry offers a possibility, the machine. Machines will never deceive us. We can use computer software, according to the established domain (Domain) rules, and use appropriate computer language to build a real system that runs on physical hardware devices and has practical significance – as long as it has certain rules and inputs.
Except in the computer field, I have not seen a so-called similar system. Software engineering has taught us to use scientific methodology to control computer science, but there are always some examples of grass-roots groups in human society:
- 2021.1 Dalian Depot will make every effort to tackle key problems all day and night
- 2022.2 A Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s comment before the start of the Russian-Ukrainian War: The intelligence of M country is a joke
- 2022.6 Civil servants of an island country: U disk containing 460,000 citizens’ information was lost due to drunkenness
- 2022.7 A public authority somewhere: a billion citizens’ data leaked
- 2022.8 Big data center somewhere: 48.5 million data breaches
- …
People are willing to believe that the data presented by using computer technology brings people a sense of security, an illusion of “ah, it’s all in the system”, an illusion that is not so grassy. Of course, although the above grass stage case seems to be closely related to technology, it has little to do with it. For the data breach incident, they will never admit it, and will even take censorship measures to prevent the incident from amplifying, at least the protagonist of the incident in the neighboring country will pretend to bow to the public.
In addition to the above areas, there are similar grass-stage teams in all aspects. “Weibo case handling”, the Suzhou kimono incident, and “experts’ advice” all show the grassroots of justice or public opinion. The road to the rule of law still has a long way to go, and the dream of constitutional government ten years ago is still not allowed.
The history of the development of modern society is also the history of Gecaotaiming. One might be complacent about the achievements of industrialization, but in a disjointed country I would rather have more imposter syndrome sufferers. After joining the foreign company for more than a year, I feel that the infrastructure investment made by the company in M country for Business Continuity is much higher than that of domestic grassroots, and it also makes employees feel that “you are in our system”. Fantasy, but we can’t guarantee that none of this infrastructure is grass, as supply chain attacks are common. A proper meme:
Most of the people may not have grass stage originally. When they join a grass stage group, they will be forced to grass stage or leave because of the grass stage of the group. The Dead Sea effect is the best example. Western also has a similar view:
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
It is undeniable that all places with people will have the shadow of the grass stage team, from the real grass stage drama to Silicon Valley Wall Street, from the police station to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Chairman Mao said:
…it’s just an empty shelf with nothing in it… It’s been living for more than 4,000 years, and I don’t know what to do? There is no organization at all, an organized society cannot be seen, an organized place cannot be seen… Without scientific brains, there is no understanding of the relationship between analysis and generalization, there are small cells to have large organisms, and molecules with molecules have groups. ——Excerpted from “Early Manuscripts of Mao Zedong”
Some people may say that this society needs grass platforms, because if grass platforms are short of opera singers, they may starve to death. Social Darwin is not a joke. But more often, this will make you realize that you need to maintain humility and empathy at all times, lower your expectations of the group, and clarify the boundaries of the group’s own authority, so as to reconcile with this grass-top world—a quality that machines never possess.
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