好
"GO DO GOOD" or "GOD'O'GOOD" was a famous mural in Chicago loop. It had been replaced by blues singer Muddy Waters. I wonder where the design ended up at. The artist was Kay Rose, but it was not featured on her website. I like that simple and powerful sign, I like the rhythm of it.
Last night there was some protest in WeChat and Twitter using the Chinese character "好" for good reason. The triggering event was a fire that took 3h to put out, and costed 10 lives. It was in a big city I imagine, and the building was like 20 levels above. To be honest all my imagination can only be based on either Wuhai or Shenzhen. Wuhai is in northwestern China and is a small city, with 1/5 the population of Urumqi. Shenzhen is in Southeastern China, population was dense. In either case, a fire is not uncommon, right? And seldomly did I see a firetruck. Maybe it just eluded me, when I was full of myself. The imagination thus can only be based on the last fire - that famous fire in a nearby city that killed ~300 kids, and gave a well known phrase 让领导先走 (let the leaders leave first). I believe most people are like me, drawing associations to one's hometown, to one's neighborhood, to that particular event. Would it be wise to compare to similar cities or what might have happened in a well governed city? The incompetency of people caused 10 death, I was surprised that even made into news. And certainly I was not expecting any ripples in social media.
At least I didn't see any "western major newsmedia" touched upon it. No one cared about a little fire. Anything upscale was among the Chinese people, the world did not care about a little fire. Even though it might have caused some people to do something making some other people uncomfortable in China, it was totally within China's tightly controlled environment.
Recently there was a webinar about the process of doing optimization with D-Wave QA, and I cannot help but wonder if the COVID problems can be converted to an optimization one. There are multiple problems that everyone does care about: economy, healthcare, safety. And there is the control problem. I wonder what is the "lowest energy state" of each. Even without COVID, it is hard to imagine what is optimal state. By changing the conditions, one country can have its own optimal state. By changing policy, the country can move from one state to another. Giving enough energy, people can move the state too, but the mechanism may not give them enough control. There might have other "low energy state" that collectively people have not yet found. And the social experiment "摸着石头过河" can be understood like that - maybe applying all the best practices, one would not reach that state, then why not break out from existing rules of the world, and create new rules, add energy to force the moves?
Thus I am excited to see what can happen. There is always a low energy state when old people dies and economy enters stasis. There is also the one that is determined by people's will (economy or market's power). By escaping the two, the Chinese society created a miracle. Facing a pandemic, China was able to "flatten the curve" to the extreme. For that I forgive ye for the inconvenience of lock down. My position is so contrary to what I would like to believe or others may accept amid the tragic. It feels as if the tragic means nothing for me, or the lock down, or the tight control means nothing to me. I guess it is out of practical concern, what to do about it? "GO DO GOOD" would mean to move to a optimal "low energy state. And I would choose whatever path to reach there, either market power or political power, i.e. more control is acceptable. As long as the goal is noble, it is fine to do evil. It did not bother god when he wiped out the sin from the earth. During that stop second guessing whether the control is loosen or tighten, or if capitalism is born with market crisis.