作者：张兴贵
中国年轻人从读成功学到读毛选。表面看，这只是一次阅读口味的迁移；往深处看，它却可能是一代人认识世界方式的转向。转向本身并不可怕，可怕的是：如果读的方法错了、理解偏了，它带来的后果，可能是非常严重的。
先说原因。第一，成功学破产之后留下的精神真空。过去十多年，成功学给年轻人许下了一个简单公式：努力加方法，等于成功。当就业变难、房价高企、内卷加剧，这个公式被现实反复证伪。一个人拼尽全力却仍然看不到出路时，他必然要去寻找新的解释：到底是我的错，还是这个世界的错？成功学回答不了这个问题，于是许多人转向了能提供宏大解释的文本。毛选恰好给出了一个完整的解释系统：社会是分阶级的，历史是按矛盾运动的，个人的困境可以在结构里找到位置。对迷茫中的年轻人来说，这种确定性本身就有巨大的吸引力。
第二，现实困境的叠加。就业市场的竞争，上升通道的收窄，生活成本的压力，让相当一部分年轻人积累了强烈的挫败感和不公平感。挫败感需要出口，愤懑需要对象。当一种理论告诉你，世间的一切问题都可以归结为某个群体、某种势力的压迫时，它很容易被当成情绪的容器。许多人拿起毛选，读的并不是方法，而是许可——许可自己把全部失败归因于外部，许可自己用最激烈的词汇去命名这个世界。
第三，网络传播的推波助澜。短视频和社交平台擅长传播的，从来不是严谨的分析，而是锋利的句子。毛选中的一些论断被整成金句、做成海报、配上音乐，在算法推荐里层层放大。断章取义之下，复杂的历史文本被简化成了立场标签：你读毛选，你就站在了正确的一边；你不读，你就是麻木、就是帮凶。阅读一旦变成了站队，它离思考就已经很远了。
第四，教育中历史语境的缺失。毛选产生于革命与战争年代，它的许多概念——阶级斗争、无产阶级专政、继续革命——都有其特定的历史条件。今天的年轻人大多不具备辨析这些语境的知识储备，容易把特定历史条件下的结论，当成放之四海皆准的真理，把革命年代的斗争策略，当成处理今天一切问题的现成答案。语境一丢，经典就成了教条。
第五，宏大叙事带来的归属感。当代年轻人的生活高度原子化：独居、独行、在屏幕里社交。成功学是彻底个人主义的，它许诺成功，却不提供归属。而毛选背后的集体叙事不同：它把个人的苦难放进一个宏大的历史进程，给孤独者以“我们”的感觉，给失败者以“不是你一个人的安慰”。人对意义和归属的渴求本无可厚非，但如果这种归属只能靠共同的敌人来维系，它就会从一开始走上歧路。
以下后果，不是对一切阅读者的指控，而是当这种阅读以断章取义、教条化、情绪化的方式展开时，正在显现的危险。第一重后果，是思维方式的敌我化。阶级分析框架一旦被滥用，就会把一切复杂问题简化为敌我问题：企业家天然是剥削者，管理者天然是压迫者，不同意自己的人天然是立场有问题的人。社会问题本来是利益协调问题、制度设计问题、发展阶段问题，需要的是计算、协商与妥协。可一旦被装进敌我框架，协商就成了投降，妥协就成了背叛，理性讨论的空间被彻底堵死。更危险的是主要矛盾的误判：把次要矛盾当成主要矛盾，把个别现象当成普遍规律，把一时一地的具体纠纷上升为你死我活的路线斗争——根源找错，药方必错，而按错误的药方采取的行动，只会让真实的问题更加严重。
第二重后果，是行为方式的斗争化。我们已经在网络上看到太多这样的场景：同学之间、同事之间、师生之间，一旦意见不合，就有人搬出阶级分析的大棒，给对方扣上帽子，组织起声讨与举报。把斗争哲学带进课堂、职场和家庭，结果不是解决了任何问题，而是让信任崩解、让寒蝉效应蔓延：每个人都怕说错话，每个人都学会先表态、先站队、先自证清白。一个社会如果连正常的争论都要以消灭对方为目的，它的活力与创造力将从何谈起？
第三重后果，是对年轻人自身的反噬。用斗争思维看待世界的人，往往同时放弃了对自身的建设：既然一切都是结构与阶级的错，个人努力便失去了意义——这与成功学的努力万能看似相反，实则同病，都是把命运的解释权交了出去。更严重的是情绪的质变：从焦虑、自怜，滑向愤懑、仇恨；从想改变处境，滑向想清算他人。青春本该用来积累知识、锤炼技能、建立真实的人际联结，若耗费在想象的斗争里，损失的是整整一代人的黄金年华。历史早已反复证明：当一代人把解决问题的希望寄托于再来一次彻底的斗争时，等待他们的往往不是解放，而是新的灾难。
还有一重后果，必须借助历史才能看清。二十世纪的人类付出过惨痛的学费：每当一种理论把社会成员划分为天生的敌我两类，并号召用斗争去解决问题时，随之而来的从来不是它所许诺的公正，而是告密、迫害与人人自危；每当破字当头成为时尚，被砸烂的往往首先是学校、医院、工厂这些让普通人安身立命的地方。那些年代留下的创伤，至今仍刻在一代人的记忆里。今天的年轻人没有亲历过那些岁月，容易把书本上描绘的斗争想象得浪漫而痛快，这正是危险所在：对灾难缺乏切肤之痛的人，最容易轻率地呼唤灾难重来。
第四重后果，是社会层面的撕裂与倒退。一个健康的社会，需要在分歧中寻找共识，在法治的框架内调节利益。如果越来越多的人习惯于用革命话语解释现实、用阶级标签划分人群，那么共识的土壤就会持续流失，极端主张就会获得市场，温和、理性、务实的声音就会被斥为软弱与妥协。我们付出几十年努力才建立起来的法治秩序、契约精神和市场规则，都可能在这种氛围里被一点点侵蚀。把二十世纪的某些弯路再走一遍，是我们这个民族无论如何承受不起的代价。
愿我们这一代年轻人，既有直面现实困境的勇气，也有拒绝简单答案的定力；既读历史，更懂历史。唯有如此，阅读才能真正成为成长的阶梯，而不是滑向深渊的斜坡。
编辑：Geoffrey 校对：熊辩 翻译：戈冰
From Reading Successology to Reading the Selected Works of Mao: A Shift for China’s Young Generation
By Zhang Xinggui
From reading successology to reading the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, China’s young people are changing their reading choices. On the surface, this appears to be merely a shift in reading tastes; looking deeper, however, it may signify a turn in how a generation understands the world. The shift itself is not frightening; what is frightening is that if the method of reading is wrong and the understanding is biased, the consequences it brings could be extremely serious.
First, let us examine the causes. The primary reason is the spiritual vacuum left behind after the bankruptcy of successology. Over the past decade and more, successology promised young people a simple formula: hard work plus methods equals success. As employment became increasingly difficult, housing prices soared, and “involution” (internal competition) intensified, this formula was repeatedly disproven by reality. When a person gives their all yet still sees no way out, they inevitably seek a new explanation: Is it my fault, or is it the fault of the world? Successology could not answer this question, so many turned to texts capable of offering grand explanations. The Selected Works of Mao happens to provide a complete explanatory system: society is divided into classes, history moves according to contradictions, and personal dilemmas can find their place within the overarching structure. To bewildered young people, this certainty itself possesses immense appeal.
Second, the compounding of real-world dilemmas. Competition in the job market, the narrowing of channels for upward mobility, and the pressure of living costs have caused a considerable number of young people to accumulate a strong sense of frustration and injustice. Frustration needs an outlet, and resentment requires a target. When a theory tells you that every problem in the world can be attributed to the oppression of a certain group or force, it easily becomes a container for emotions. Many pick up the Selected Works of Mao not to read its methods, but to look for permission—permission to attribute all their failures to external factors, and permission to use the most aggressive vocabulary to label the world.
Third, the fuel added by internet dissemination. Short videos and social media platforms excel at spreading sharp slogans rather than rigorous analyses. Certain assertions from the Selected Works of Mao are turned into golden quotes, made into posters, paired with background music, and amplified layer by layer by recommendation algorithms. Taken out of context, complex historical texts are simplified into ideological labels: if you read Mao, you stand on the correct side; if you do not, you are numb or an accomplice. Once reading becomes an act of taking sides, it strays far from critical thinking.
Fourth, the absence of historical context in education. The Selected Works of Mao emerged during an era of revolution and war, and many of its concepts—such as class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and continuing the revolution—have their specific historical conditions. Most of today’s young people lack the knowledge base required to analyze these contexts; they easily mistake conclusions tied to specific historical circumstances for universally applicable truths, and apply the struggle strategies of a revolutionary era as ready-made answers to solve all modern problems. Once context is lost, the classics degenerate into dogma.
Fifth, the sense of belonging brought by grand narratives. The lives of contemporary young people are highly atomized: living alone, traveling alone, and socializing behind screens. Successology is thoroughly individualistic; it promises success, but fails to provide a sense of belonging. The collective narrative behind the Selected Works of Mao, however, is different: it places individual suffering within a grand historical process, giving the lonely a sense of “us” and offering the failed the comfort that “you are not alone.” Human longing for meaning and belonging is inherently unobjectionable, but if this belonging can only be sustained by a common enemy, it strays onto a wrong path from the very beginning.
The following consequences are not an accusation against all readers, but rather the dangers that are manifesting when such reading unfolds in a decontextualized, dogmatic, and emotional manner. The first consequence is the division of thinking into friend-versus-foe. Once the framework of class analysis is abused, it simplifies all complex issues into binary friend-or-foe questions: entrepreneurs are naturally exploiters, managers are naturally oppressors, and whoever disagrees with oneself is naturally someone with ideological position issues. Social problems are fundamentally matters of interest coordination, institutional design, and stages of development, requiring calculation, negotiation, and compromise. Yet once jammed into a friend-or-foe framework, negotiation becomes surrender, compromise becomes betrayal, and the space for rational discussion is thoroughly blocked. Even more dangerous is the misjudgment of the principal contradiction: mistaking secondary contradictions for the principal contradiction, taking isolated phenomena as universal laws, and escalating concrete disputes of a specific time and place into life-or-death line struggles—when the root cause is wrongly identified, the prescription is bound to be wrong, and actions taken according to a wrong prescription will only make the real problems far more severe.
The second consequence is the struggle-orientation of behavioral patterns. We have already seen too many such scenes on the internet: among classmates, colleagues, and between teachers and students, once a disagreement arises, someone pulls out the heavy club of class analysis, slaps a label on the opposing party, and organizes public denunciations and reporting. Bringing the philosophy of struggle into classrooms, workplaces, and families does not result in solving any problems; instead, it causes trust to disintegrate and the chilling effect to spread: everyone fears saying the wrong thing, and everyone learns to first state their stance, take sides, and prove their own innocence. If a society cannot even engage in normal debate without aiming to destroy the other side, where can its vitality and creativity possibly come from?
The third consequence is the backlash against the young people themselves. Those who view the world through a mindset of struggle often simultaneously abandon their own self-construction: since everything is the fault of structure and class, personal effort loses its meaning—this appears to be the opposite of successology’s belief in the omnipotence of hard work, but in reality, they suffer from the same affliction, both surrendering the right to explain one’s own destiny. Even more serious is the qualitative mutation of emotions: sliding from anxiety and self-pity into resentment and hatred; shifting from wanting to improve one’s circumstances to wanting to settle accounts with others. Youth should naturally be spent accumulating knowledge, honing skills, and building real interpersonal connections; if wasted in imagined struggles, what is lost is the golden years of an entire generation. History has repeatedly proven long ago: when a generation pins its hopes of solving problems on launching another thorough struggle, what awaits them is often not liberation, but new disasters.
There is another consequence that must be viewed through the lens of history to be seen clearly. In the twentieth century, humanity paid a painful tuition fee: whenever a theory divided members of society into two inherent categories of friends and foes and called for resolving problems through struggle, what followed was never the justice it had promised, but rather informing, persecution, and a state of universal insecurity; whenever “destruction comes first” became the fashion, what were smashed were often first and foremost the schools, hospitals, and factories—the very places where ordinary people built their livelihoods and settled down. The trauma left behind by those eras remains etched in the memory of a generation to this day. Today’s young people have not lived through those years, making it easy for them to imagine the struggle depicted in books as romantic and exhilarating. This is precisely where the danger lies: those who lack a visceral pain of disaster are the most likely to rashly call for disaster to return.
The fourth consequence is tearing and regression at the societal level. A healthy society needs to seek consensus amid differences and adjust interests within the framework of the rule of law. If more and more people grow accustomed to explaining reality with revolutionary discourse and dividing people with class labels, then the soil for consensus will continue to erode, extreme views will gain a market, and gentle, rational, and pragmatic voices will be denounced as weak and compromising. The order of the rule of law, the spirit of contract, and the market rules that we expended decades of effort to establish could all be eroded bit by bit in such an atmosphere. Walking down certain detours of the twentieth century once again is a cost that our nation can by no means afford to bear.
May the young people of our generation possess both the courage to face real-world dilemmas head-on and the composure to reject simple answers; may they not only read history, but even more so understand history. Only in this way can reading truly become a ladder for growth, rather than a slope sliding toward an abyss.
Editor: Geoffrey Proofreader: Xiong Bian Translator: Ge Bing
