This society is probably just like this title suggests—evil and uncontrollable. Yet in such an environment, most people still cling to ideals about society, fantasies about their dreams, and grand ambitions for the world. They believe that enduring enough suffering will inevitably lead to success, or that if they work quietly, the company will notice, or if they give silently, the other person will understand their sincerity. So they remain quiet and say nothing. Then when the time comes to seize an opportunity, you're too slow to reach for it, and the chance slips away before your eyes. By the time you regret it and try to grasp the next opportunity tightly, you discover that every opportunity you hold comes from trampling on others—no matter what it is, no matter how big or small, whether you realize it or not. Believe me, it's all achieved by stepping on everything others possess.
So, in order to conform to this society's values and obtain what you want, I'm sorry to say: stop living in ideals, stop living in utopia. Sometimes you simply have to abandon kindness. But sometimes you can also choose kindness—it's just that what gets trampled is yourself.
Around August, I participated in a cross-strait journalism training program. Among the participants were many university students, some perhaps only in their first or second year. They were full of ideals about society, believing that journalism is a noble profession dedicated to pursuing truth. Honestly, they weren't wrong—except that in the pursuit of truth, it's often not just a sense of justice that gets you the truth and response you seek. More often, you have to set time limits, telling the other party they must respond by a specific time; you have to inform them that you must get a response by a certain moment, or else you won't include their statement; you also have to ask them seriously when they can resolve the issue. But these time frames are typically just thirty minutes, an hour, and so on—very short periods.
Are you driven by a sense of justice? Or are you demanding these responses because you don't want to be fined or criticized for lacking both sides of the story? Perhaps the interviewee does have an obligation to respond, but because of how media operates—whether it's demanding exclusives or imposing time constraints—the timeframe for the interviewee to respond is compressed, cutting into their time to gather sufficient information. You might think that's their problem, but this constraint from the journalist actually originates from the media itself. When a journalist doesn't get a response, superiors will hold them accountable. So the journalist becomes a tool, and they have no choice but to demand responses from PR managers or corporations. How else would they explain it?
Take other professions as an example. When vendors collaborate, Vendor A doesn't know your cost price, so they pay above market rate for your service. But perhaps there are some things you can't do, so you outsource them to downstream vendors. However, the money you give those downstream vendors might be only 1% of what you collected. You pocket the rest of the profit. And the downstream vendors won't know that they're receiving an unequal price. It sounds unfair, but this is the game of commerce—this is how things actually operate. In business, you must continue to make money to survive. So meeting the other party's needs while ensuring your own profit margins—that's what's correct. Maybe you'd say, "Why don't you share some of those earnings with me?" But why would others help you for free? If you have the ability to build a system and create passive income, go ahead and work for it. This world has never obligated anyone to help you.
No matter what you want to do, even if your starting point is well-intentioned, as you integrate into society, remember this: whatever decision you make, however much you want to protect yourself, however much you want to maintain an atmosphere of innocence, at the same time, someone will definitely get hurt. But in order to keep improving, you can't stop and dwell on the harm you've caused. You can only let it go and move forward, finding better ways to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Through this process, you will inevitably come to understand yourself better—not just accommodating others, not becoming someone lost and ignorant. You will only sharpen yourself into a better person through repeated acts of letting go and filtering, again and again.
