"Giant Infants" And The True Fall From Eden
I attempted to write this blog post multiple times but still can't quite do it properly due to the reductionist nature of the idea I'm about to propose.
In 2017, the Chinese psychologist Wu Zhihong published a book titled A Country of Giant Infants, which subsequently was banned from further printing due to some stupid controversies I can't remember. Within this book Wu propsed an idea: all (if not most) of the psychological problems presenting in the psyche of the Chinese people can be explained by a stun in their mental development process; they have grown up physically, but their mind were stuck in the state of an infant, hence "giant infants". Infants, according to Wu, holds the illusion of omnipotence due to the early upbringing, since from the viewpoint of the infant, whatever they want or need (e.g. food, drink, playing time, etc.) are unconditionally granted by their parents; under this illusion, they consider the entire world as an extension of their will. Wu argued, that all the ridiculous behaviour (e.g. asking for special treatment on a plane solely because "they are Chinese") are due to their fundamental failure of recognizing the fact that the world around them is its own separate thing that has no obligations to fold under their will.
Via the Nth-hand Winnicott (who Wu probably got his idea from) theory I got from Wikipedia, this kind of things should be brought down by the disillusionment of life (i.e. the non-existence of this omnipotence) with the help of a pair of "good enough" parents during a kid's childhood, and regardless of that actually happening or not, the state of illusion is not something that one ought to lightly joke about - we should never excuse any regression or retardation of the mind like this, no matter what kind of reason we might come up to justify it. All kinds of higher-level interactions, e.g. observation, examination, study, analyzation, negotiation, working with/against, and having compromise with, requires the thing you're doing them with to be truly objective (by "objective" here and in most of the rest of this blog post I mean "to be truly outside of you"); if one only think the world is just a part of their will, the only truly available interactions between the subject and the object would just be "I think of things and things are" and "I think of things but they didn't be so I'm angry/sad".
I believe that the only correct thing to do when people are stuck in this state is to forcefully bring them out of it no matter what - we cannot have such people as the main demographic if we want whatever good life we're having to continue; we must collectively become the "good-enough parents" and remove said illusion with the disillusionment of life. This is why now I'm almost completely tired with making comments on how "wokeness" and "identity politics" has ruined a generation, since despite similar words have been thrown around in the public discourse for so many years, other than getting a few game companies into deep trouble or into ruins by people who'd buy games not buying their games, there's no fundamental change in the psyche of the public. I've read about the "The Great Feminization" - it's a good theory because it's consistent and it explains things, but of what use is to blame women because of their sex for everything? There is inherent virtue to be emphathetic, there is inherent virtue to be emotional and other things that may be classified as "female mode of communication", and it's for those reasons I'd argue that there's a much deeper reason why things have became this far on the lunatic end other than "we shouldn't but we let women out of the kitchen and into the voting booth".
I'd like to propose an idea here: certain traits that people normally (and/or intuitively) classify as first-class atomic traits are secretly not very first-class and not very atomic; they're essentially the manifestation of the (remaining) illusion of omnipotence, more specifically, the implicit deep belief that the world is simply an extension of their will instead of a proper object outside of the subject's control; or to put it this way: sometimes what's considered a "woke" thing or a "women" thing is actually a "fundamentally immature" thing, and this immaturity allows (or forces, if you don't believe in Original Sin like I do) the grave misunderstandings of the objective world and the fundamental situation of human to exist and grow, which eventually leads to the lunacy we're seeing. If we have to give this idea a name, I suppose it can be called "The Great Infantilization Theory". One may suspect this theory is too reductionist from being actually useful, but after careful thinking it seems to me that that there's still a good amount of explaining power remaining. For example:
- The reason why so many "if every one could just be nice" ideology exists is that sometimes people do believe that other people are an extension of their will and thus should think like they do (i.e. "nice", because of course people are gonna think of themselves as "nice" regardless).
- The reason why "leftists" seems to care more about strangers than their own families and friends is not whatever virtue they're claiming themselves to have but rather that strangers, by the utter lack of interactions with the person, bring much less disillusionment of life (which, if you didn't know yet, do bring forth a certain degree of mental pain) than family members and friends.
- In a metaphysical sense, they love illegal immigrants or the minorities or China's communist government the same way they love the concept of their limbs; it's not a love that springs from being benelovent and thinking "they're just like us", but from the illusion-induced idea of "they're a part of my self". This is the reason why when you examine their arguments that contains these words it always feels extremely symbolic and slogan-like - the words themselves in this context actually are not referring to the things they're supposed to be referring to, they simply are symbols that these people believe they can freely use and designate as whatever things they wish in the realm of their mind, all with an awfully intense ignorance about its real form and the associated reality. I've seen people online who praises CCP's very authoritarian zero-COVID policy despite claiming to be "anarchist"; they obviously gave no fuck to the fact that the policy has led to people dying inside of their houses because within their mind China must be this symbolic plaything they can use to complain about the free western world they're living in.
- The reason why words (e.g. "nazi", "incel", "chud", etc.) seem to have no any fixed meanings to some of these people is simply because they're not used to refer to things or to invoke a concept; they're simply magic spells used to oppress and explain away objectivities from their world, because the existence of people thinking in a different way they do naturally implies there's an objective world outside of their will. "Good" (in this case, "me") and "bad" (in this case, "things that upsets me") are easy to understand for such a mind, but "objectivity" isn't because nothing should be objective within it.
- It's not limited to "leftists" only. It's such a common phenomenon among kids in China that the word we were using to describe it gets out-of-fashion itself (I myself haven't heard it being used in ages, possibly because people knew this was happening and changed their ways promptly). And it's not just a "kid" thing - adults slip back into this behaviour pattern occasionally (or, in unfortunate cases, it's the default setting), as shown by so many Karen stories retail workers and baristas have to share on the Internet and of course Coraline Ehmke complaining about social community building isn't as relevant as tech content in a tech conference.
If you are familiar with the Garden of Eden story, wouldn't it be somewhat convincing when I say there's some kind of similarities between the Fall of Man and the disillusionment of life? If we were to believe in the bicameral mind theory this seems to be even more convincing: if viewed outside of Christianity (because I'm pretty sure it will be treated as heretical inside it), I would argue that the Fall from Eden can be simply seen as a metaphor for the breakdown of the bicameral mind, which introduces introspection and consciousness and left the mind to fend for itself in an objective world filled with objective things.
Now that I've written that much I really have to admit that I don't have a good conclusion to this blog post; it's just something I've noticed online that more and more people are suffering from. Do you know how the "modern western audience" perceive and judge Japanese anime? A good part of it almost always boils down to "it's problematic, thus its author is morally corrupt, thus they should listen to me and do whatever I want them to do in their work". It's almost the same as their perception of the zero-COVID policy - because they want to be a part of a popular work (which they have no business to be in) without effort, the work's author must allow themselves to be compromised so that they can get in, much like the situation that because they want to be angry with the United States and the entire Free World, China must be this people-caring paradise they can use as an ideological weapon regardless of how many people were starving in Shanghai during COVID lockdowns. Don't you feel that simple words like "woke" and "leftists" really can't capture how ridiculous and stupid this is like "giant infants" do?
Last update: 2026.6.30