After I posted the article "Are you suffering from the disease of self-impression and self-compassion" a few days ago, I received many feedbacks and exchanges from readers. Some friends felt that it was very alarming. Some friends felt that what I said was too absolute, and they had an in-depth discussion with me about whether self-compassion and self-motivation are good or not.

Actually, I have already made it very clear in my article. Appropriate self-compassion and self-movation are the needs of the soul for self-comfort. However, if you have not made any real efforts, you will fall into the trap of self-compassion and self-movement. In the illusion, it is easy to form a cowardly mentality. Because self-impressed efforts often make people slack off, and busyness in action cannot cover up laziness in thought.

I am a person who likes to get to the bottom of things. This issue has caused so much discussion. It is impossible that people in the past have not encountered this kind of trouble. Therefore, I think it is necessary to study "self-compassion and The logic behind "self-moved". Through online searches, I found a word "Kitsch", which is translated as Kitsch in Chinese. This word can not only explain why people easily fall into self-pity, but also explain many social phenomena. Today I will learn the former with you. For the latter, you can check out the recommended reading given at the end of my article.

In fact, I have come across the word "Keqi" a long time ago, but I did not study it in depth at that time. I read a lot of articles and information today, which was very rewarding and interesting, so I will collect it Write down the materials you received plus some personal understandings and share them with everyone.

What is kitsch? This word first appeared in Milan Kundera's book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Its precise meaning is "self-flattery", that is, to please oneself and cater to oneself. After continuous explanation, the connotation of "keqi" is now Already quite rich.

Kitsch has an important characteristic: its sensibility is absolute and cannot be doubted or denied, which itself has a kind of authoritarianism. As long as you pursue a meaning, it is impossible not to fall into kitsch. But the key is moderation. Kitsch should be personal, not collective. One person's self-deception can be called hypocrisy, while a group of people's self-deception can only be explained by kitsch. For example, "light candles on Weibo to pray for blessings", "if you don't retweet, you are not Chinese", "repost to spread positive energy" and other common words on social networks can all be explained with kitsch.

So what are the common manifestations and psychological processes of kitsch?

This is a process that is advanced layer by layer, which is summarized from Kundera's bits and pieces - "the swollen disease of the soul", "a person is in front of a beautifying mirror" , looking at oneself with excited satisfaction", "disguise the ignorance of the established pattern with beautiful language, and even shed tears for such mediocre thoughts and feelings" and so on.

Here, the swollen disease of the soul is talking about self-motivation and self-compassion. This symptom generally has the following characteristics and processes: It is difficult to refuse to be moved and sentimental; it is difficult to refuse to share self-movation and sentimentality with others; it is difficult to tolerate others not to join in the self-movation and sentimentality.

Self-compassion and self-movement also follow such an emotional mechanism: Sentiment - being aware of one's own sentimentality - being moved by one's own sentimentality - rising to self-sublime - trying to impress others with sublimity . People who fall into kitsch often make themselves moved to the point of being unable to extricate themselves by fooling their emotions, through unrestrained associations and affection. The most important thing is that you will never allow others to be happy when you are sentimental; when you are angry, others will be indifferent. If you don't agree with me, you are cold-blooded and unkind.

This disease used to be the exclusive domain of artists and was called "kitsch", but now it is an inevitable mental state of our modern people. We are used to making everything tragic in order to achieve self-incitement and tear-jerking. We never calm down and let our brains think carefully, just because everyone does it.

Kundera’s metaphor about the two running tears in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is very interesting: the U.S. senator watched his children running on the grass, which made him in a I felt extremely happy and moved in front of the refugees. I shed my first tear and said, look at the children running on the lawn, how beautiful they are! The second tear said, How wonderful it is to be with all human beings and be moved by the children running on the grass! Here, the first tear is kitsch, and the second drop is kitsch. The first tear is unavoidable. Human beings always have feelings. The second drop is worthy of our vigilance.

The first line of tears a person sheds is not only because of the scene in front of him, but because he is moved by this scene. From this emotion, he realized that he turned out to be a person with an unyielding conscience. While crying, he said to himself: Look, I am still a good person, I still have feelings in my heart. Someone once said that I am cold or lacking in humanity, but that is all nonsense.

The second line of tears made this man stand taller and taller: he turned out to be not only a helpless person, but when his raging tears were shed with others, he experienced that he was a member of the human race. That feeling where he joined the crowd and felt accepted. Not only did he regain his sense of security, but he also felt that his life was shining and moving towards light and a way out.

Kitsch is always accompanied by an illusory quality, and is a means for a person to get rid of his low opinion of himself. Kitsch arises more from objects of misery than objects of happiness, because an originally miserable mood needs the misery of others to feed itself. Being immersed in the misery of others will cause more pain than sharing the happiness of others.

People always want to give themselves a reason to burst into tears, always want to use certain behaviors to make themselves look like they have good qualities, always want to show that they are kind enough but don’t want to pay too much, always You want to flaunt yourself as being very noble but don't want to sacrifice too much, so it's easy to fall into the "kitsch" mentality.

To avoid this situation, I think there are two important points: one is to maintain an independent and free thinking spirit, and the other is to respect and understand what others say, especially people whose values ??are different from yours . Because being completely anti-kitsch is itself a kind of kitsch, because kitsch means absoluteness. Judge Hand said, "Freedom is a spirit that is not so sure about what is right." In the spiritual and ideological realm, one should adhere to one's own values ??and respect the values ??of others.

Finally, I end with a story told by Mo Yan in his Nobel Prize speech:

In the 1960s, when I was in the third grade of elementary school, the school organized us to visit a suffering During the exhibition, we cried loudly under the guidance of the teacher. I saw among the students who were really crying and pretending to cry, there was one classmate who didn’t have a single tear on his face. He looked at us with a look of surprise or confusion in his eyes. Afterwards, I reported this classmate’s behavior to the teacher. The school gave the student a warning. Many years later, when I confessed to my teacher, he said that more than a dozen classmates came to him that day to talk about this. This classmate passed away more than ten years ago. Whenever I think of him, I feel deeply guilty. This incident made me realize a truth, that is: when everyone is crying, some people should be allowed not to cry. When crying becomes a performance, some people should be allowed not to cry.

2016-1-24 1:23

by Dawild