Chapter 51 <The old man lost his horse>

The ancient Chinese book "Huainanzi" tells a story about a lost horse: An old man who lived on the frontier raised a horse. One day, the horse ran away, and his neighbors felt sorry for him. Not blessed?After some days, the horse that ran away brought another horse back.The neighbors all came to congratulate him, but the old man said disapprovingly, "You know it's not a disaster if you lose a horse and get a horse?" Sure enough, the old man's son broke his leg while riding that horse. The neighbor expressed sympathy for this, and the old man said: From now on, I may be able to be happy.Soon, a war broke out on the border. All the able-bodied young people in the village were conscripted to join the war. As a result, nine out of ten of them died in the battle. The old man's son survived because he had a broken leg and was not sent to fight.

The objective basis of the law of non-contradiction is the qualitative difference among things.Although objective things are interrelated and mutually transformed, before transformation, this thing is not that thing, and that thing is not this thing. There is a qualitative difference between the two, and they cannot be treated as the same.In addition, the transformation of things must meet certain conditions, otherwise it cannot be transformed.The same is true for the relationship between blessings and disasters, good things and bad things. Only when sufficient subjective and objective conditions are met, can they be transformed into each other.Transformation without conditional empty talk is an important feature of relativist sophistry.

The sophistry of relativism denies the difference between the two sides of the contradiction, denies the conditions for the transformation of things from one to the other, and unconditionally says that everything is either this or that.The old man in the story is like this.When he encountered misfortune, he said it was also a blessing, and when he encountered blessing, he said it was also a misfortune, completely ignoring the conditions for the mutual transformation of misfortune and blessing, thus falling into sophistry. From the perspective of formal logic, it violates the law of non-contradiction.Although the words of the old man in the story are true, but that is just a coincidence, not an inevitability.Because I am afraid that there are more people in the world who lost their horses and did not get them again. After breaking their legs, there was no war.

The positive significance of the story of "A Good Fortune" is to see that opposites can be transformed into each other. Its serious mistake is to obliterate the subjective and objective conditions for transformation.Therefore, if this story is used to comfort some unfortunate people or warn some happy people, it may have a temporary positive effect, but it is very deceptive after all.