I can say unabashedly: "I quite like Xu Zhiyuan."

Although he is always associated with the "bad words" that the self-media of our time abandoned, such as "straight male cancer", "greasy" and "embarrassing public knowledge". It has become an anachronistic and highly consumed symbol.

And more than once, among the people I know, some people will become emotional because of the mention of Xu Zhiyuan.

Once, I had dinner with a few people I knew, and while eating, I talked about Xu Zhiyuan, and one of them angrily said that Xu Zhiyuan was one of the people he hated the most.

I asked him, "Why don't I hate Xu Zhiyuan." ”

He said: "Because you and Xu Zhiyuan are the same kind of people. ”

Xu Zhiyuan and I are indeed the same kind of people, people who are always in an embarrassing situation in this era, the books we like are not read, and the writers and scholars we know are also few people know.

Sometimes, the most common feeling is loneliness, and sometimes, I have the same idea as Xu Zhiyuan, that is, I am extremely nostalgic for the eighties of the last century, the golden age of poetry and reason.

But what makes me different from him is that I miss that era, but I never want to possess it. Maybe it's because I'm still young, and my understanding of that era is all in books, or maybe it's because I'm sadder than Xu Zhiyuan. And Xu Zhiyuan was once extremely close to that era, where he got what he wanted to protect all his life, after the wind and rain, this kind of thing may not shine, but it is stronger.

What is it that is guarding?

Rationality, knowledge, love, classical, beauty, or that stubbornness and loftiness?

I don't think anyone will reject words such as reason, knowledge, art, and beauty, including those who scolded Xu Zhiyuan the most. But they refused to admit that Xu Zhiyuan had these things, because their focus was all on straight male cancer.

I clearly know that many people don't like Xu Zhiyuan, but they are keen on the topic of consumption that appears on Xu Zhiyuan.

Just like what Xu Zhiyuan said, I think I am very clever, looking at the world with prejudice, if you have no prejudice, you will not have a way of looking at the world.

People who have watched the issue of Thirteen Invitations to Yu Feihong should have also seen this sentence, so when they looked at Xu Zhiyuan, did they also have prejudice?

I could have opened up and talked about this mentality, why? Ignorance is one thing, and prejudice is another.

There is another reason, that is, Xu Zhiyuan has become a mirror. It punctures the ideological lies of the new middle class and the new elite shaped by the new media era. They swiped Zhihu and looked at Weibo, and the new media in the first- and second-tier cities gave them the virtues that young people in the new city should have to become a decent person, such as straight men cancer is garbage, don't be greasy middle-aged men, and so on.

But Xu Zhiyuan, an anachronistic person, appeared, and he broke into the beautiful utopia in which they built their own identity, telling them that you are not elites, nor are you the most advanced productive forces of this era, because you have no knowledge, you ignore traditions. The concepts of paying for knowledge and lifelong learning that you are passionate about are just about achieving personal success.

And you don't know anything about civilization.

You follow the latest trendy programs, watch the wonderful debates in the wonderful stories, and you feel that you are a wiser generation than your parents, but you don't read at all, and those so-called wonderful debates are just rotten issues that the philosophers of thousands of years ago have long discussed.

The emergence of Xu Zhiyuan has formed a new identity anxiety of this generation, so it is better to hang Xu Zhiyuan high and become a target.

Therefore, Xu Zhiyuan's weaknesses have become a symbol that can be highly consumed, this is a problem of our time, we consume the phenomenon, but never care about the logic behind it, which makes our thinking ability more and more degraded, and we will only think about problems with emotions.

In fact, through the acquisition of knowledge, we humans can do much more than that, for example, our ears can hear not only sound, but also silence.

Silence is golden, we heard Xu Zhiyuan's voice, but we didn't hear Xu Zhiyuan's silence.

Xu Zhiyuan's voice may be awkward and out of place, but his silence is rational, classical, and elegant.

He is a Chinese literati who has inherited the tradition of Western intellectuals, and has both the traditional ideal of Chinese literati helping the world and the intellectual stance of Western leftist literati.

And every time we enter a period of noise and impetuousness, there is an angry intellectual, although their fate is ultimately similar, that is, they are rapidly marginalized.

Being marginalized, forgotten, and stigmatized seems to have become the fate of intellectuals, and this fate is called exile. When we want to talk seriously about intellectuals, we can never avoid a word.

Exile usually has two meanings, one is the loss of land and identity, and the other is the flight of the heart and spirit.

Said, who wrote "On Intellectuals" and was born in Pakistan and grew up in the United States, devoted "The Exile of Intellectuals" as a chapter. There were a large number of intellectuals who fled to Nazi Germany in World War II, and there are many people in modern Russian history who were persecuted by the autocracy and turned from the status of the intellectual elite to the exiles.

However, rather than physical escape, spiritual exile is the norm for intellectuals.

Here, exile is not a real situation, but a "metaphor", a "state of mind". In Said's definition, these people are out of step with society, in a perpetual state of inadequacy, as if they are out of this world, endlessly running around, hoping that this exile will allow them to find a suitable home for them, but sadly they will never be able to reach it.

The eighties were a feast for intellectual escape, carnival, avant-garde, lower body, hazy poetry. And Xu Zhiyuan is a person who misses that era very much.

He not only became a typical person who was marginalized and excluded under the mainstream media and the public opinion of the times, but also took the initiative to choose his own marginalization.

This is a painful fruit, but awkward intellectuals such as Xu Zhiyuan are proud of this unhappiness, because their dissatisfaction with this era, which is almost like indigestion, has not only become their way of thinking, but also their way of life.

Just as Ma Dong commented on Xu Zhiyuan, your background color is anger, and the 18th-century British satirist Swift also took "indignation" as his epitaph, and it is the attitude of anger and dissatisfaction that intellectuals will always maintain that will allow them to maintain their sober thinking and independent judgment in this long-term spiritual pain.

But some people will ask, is it worth it?

Yes, they can embrace the world and choose to be a social and economic success, even if it makes them owe themselves a political and moral position.

Why not? Although I chose to ignore the crying in this world, wouldn't it be nice that I gained personal happiness?

But for intellectuals, knowledge and ideas give them the greatest courage and dignity, which gives them their own values and missions, and also lays the direction of their lives.

However, in this era of extreme utilitarianism, no one will understand, only be ridiculed.

For most people, life is functional, I learn one thing, it has to be useful to me, philosophy, history, literature, can I gain financial freedom in life? If not, then why should I learn it?

But they will never understand that it is precisely because of the brilliant human civilization built by countless people who do not ask for anything in return that they have the soil to achieve personal success. Did intellectuals go to overthrow capitalism when they couldn't eat on their own? Marx and Engels wanted to help the proletariat, are they proletariats?

Of course they are not, they don't choose the path to personal wealth and status success, but they just choose what they think is right.

Just as protecting the giant pandas will not let me buy a house in Beijing, but protecting the giant pandas is the right thing for me to do.

The development of human survival needs to do things that are beneficial to oneself, but the development of human civilization is not to choose things that are beneficial to oneself, but to choose to do what one thinks is right.

And the person who tells mankind what is right and what is wrong is an intellectual.

I like Gao Xiaosong's speech very much in a strange speech, he said that the country supports you people from Tsinghua University and Peking University, what is it for?

It is to convince the country of the truth.

And intellectuals, in all ages, must be dissidents, and they must conceive of themselves as non-coercive knowledge for the purpose of the advancement of life, and their goal is to promote human freedom. Therefore, they need to distance themselves from reality and maintain an uncompromising attitude of questioning and a critical spirit.

And Xu Zhiyuan did the same, he opened a new show "Encounter Library" on Dragonfly FM.

The name sounds like a girl in the library. But in reality, he was in love with a book and a great author.

He met Milan Kundera in Prague, Bai Xianyong in Taipei, and Borges in Buenos Aires.

This untimely middle-aged man has opened another anachronistic show.

After all, according to the current direction, you should meet Jack Ma in Hangzhou, Zuckerberg in California, and Cook at Apple to get more eyeballs.

The person he met in the first issue was Milan Kundera, and the book of his affair was "The Unbearable Lightness of Life".

I'm sure there should be no one who doesn't know the names of these two, but when it comes to this book, I would like to mention one word, which is "kitsch".

"Kitsch" comes from a mistranslation of the word Kitsch in Kundera's book, but our current use of the word "kitsch" can still explain many of the social ills of our time.

It refers to a kind of mediocre emotion that many people give up their independent judgment and thoughts and follow the mentality of the masses.

I will talk about what the public wants to hear, completely giving up knowledge, reason and morality, which is also the general phenomenon of self-media in our time.

The reason why our Xu Zhiyuan has become a greasy middle-aged man in mainstream public opinion is precisely because of the inappropriateness of his speech, how incompatible his thinking and his behavior are with the public.

And now, Xu Zhiyuan specifically uses Mira Kundera as his first episode, and the idea behind this is also very interesting, although there is no emphasis on "kitsch" and "Keqi" in the show. But this kind of behavior is a silent emphasis on Xu Zhiyuan's position.

That is, he adhered to the position of reason and the spirit of literature and art, and expressed his dissent and values as an intellectual with his actions.

In our time, one of the most precious qualities is uncompromising, and we need this kind of uncompromising person, although what he may say, we don't like to hear, maybe the story he tells, does not give us the same direct pleasure and emotion as reading chicken soup and the Internet.

However, he can sober us up, let us know that we still have shortcomings, and let us know that we can still choose another way of living.

There is much more to this world than meets our eyes.

Although, voices like Xu Zhiyuan, intellectuals who hover on the fringes of the mainstream, their power is too weak, so weak that we can't hear it, and we don't even want to listen to it.

I don't feel sad about this, because I know one thing very well, that is, these voices, the power of these books, may become weak in the noise of our time, but they will never be eliminated, as Xu Zhiyuan said, in any era, in fact, the voice of knowledge is weak, but they have a temporal intensity, which will not fade away after thousands of years, and the dignity of human reason and civilization will achieve the final victory.

And I still won't shy away from expressing my good opinion of Xu Zhiyuan in the crowd, even if this group of people are all people who got 100,000 plus by scolding Xu Zhiyuan, because Xu Zhiyuan's position is also my position.