Emperor: Your Beggar Gang has tens of millions of disciples! If you don’t disband for a single day, how can I be at ease?
Su Can: How many disciples the Beggar Gang has isn’t decided by me—it’s decided by you!
Emperor: Me?
Su Can: If you were truly wise and mighty and made the country prosperous and the people content, who the hell would want to be a beggar!
This line of dialogue is the finishing touch of the film—on the surface a reply to the emperor, but in reality an implicit satire of social reality. When a country is in misery and its people displaced, only then do large numbers of beggars appear; if politics were clear and the country prosperous and the people content, no one would want to become a beggar.
Su Can became a beggar not because he was born to love begging, but because the larger environment deprived him of the chance to “make an honest living.” Young people “lying flat” aren’t born loving to give up either—they’ve just seen the reality that “hard work doesn’t necessarily change your situation.”
When the ladder up is sealed off and the cost-benefit ratio of effort is absurdly low, one voluntarily quits the “rat race” and stops desperately following the rules laid down by others.
If the world truly left people hope, no one would want to be a beggar, and no one would want to lie flat.
Today a certain department published an article, and I sent it to Doubao to analyze. Doubao said: combined with that viral WeChat article you just sent, I’ll go through it point by point—core logical flaws, concept-swapping, forced attribution, evading reality—stabbing through each sentence without beating around the bush or whitewashing anything.
Flaw 1: The Biggest Flaw—Forcibly Grafting “the People’s Suffering” onto “the Influence of Foreign Forces’ Ideas”
The article’s logic:
Young people complain about the rat race, layoffs at 35, mortgage pressure, benefits squeezed by overtime, not wanting to have kids, not wanting to join the rat race
→ It’s not that reality is too harsh
→ It’s that foreign forces are deliberately setting the narrative and conducting opinion infiltration
Fatal flaw:
The root of all negative emotions is the real, touchable reality:
Labor law exists in name only, unpaid overtime is the norm, age discrimination at 35, housing prices draining a lifetime, education and healthcare crushing the middle class, class ossification, labor returns severely unbalanced.
It’s not that people turn negative because someone said a couple of demoralizing things online—
it’s that life itself is hard, and that’s what produces demoralizing thoughts.
The causality is completely reversed: reality → emotion, which it rewrites as: foreign rhetoric → emotion.
Flaw 2: Swapping Concepts, Dressing Up “Resistance to Squeezed Benefits” as “Lying Flat and Decadence”
What ordinary people complain about has never been “effort”—it’s being meaninglessly over-exploited:
- Normal effort to earn money and support a family ✅
- 996, unpaid overtime, taking the blame, pay cuts and layoffs, age discrimination, working a whole life just to pay off a mortgage ❌
The article deliberately conflates them:
Turning resistance to capital’s bottomless over-exploitation and refusal to sell your life cheaply
directly into a stigma: giving up, decadent, lacking ambition, brainwashed.
It deliberately dodges one question:
Why has the cost-benefit ratio of effort now plunged off a cliff?
It only disciplines workers to be positive, never questioning the problems of enterprises, rules, and distribution.
Flaw 3: Selective Double Standards—Only Talking About External Factors, Never Mentioning Internal Structural Problems
The whole piece runs thousands of words:
Holding forth at length on foreign water armies, external conspiracies, ideological struggle
Never mentioning:
- Companies widely violating labor law with no one policing them
- Blatant age discrimination in the job market
- High housing prices binding the fate of a generation
- In the distribution mechanism, labor returns getting lower and lower while capital returns get higher and higher
- The narrowing of the ladder up for ordinary people
Using an “external enemy” to deflect the contradiction,
using a grand narrative to cover up internal structural contradictions in people’s livelihood,
a classic misdirection style of writing.
Flaw 4: Rampant Conspiracy Theories, No Evidence, All Imagined Attribution
All the accusations in the article:
Funded by foreign foundations, big influencers setting the narrative, batch rhetoric produced on an assembly line
No concrete named list, no fund flow, no complete chain of evidence whatsoever.
All vague rhetoric like “it’s said,” “organized,” “secret infiltration.”
Defining something without evidence is trial by public opinion, big-character-poster-style criticism.
Whenever a negative consensus appears in society, slap a label on it: foreign forces, influenced by ideas, infiltrated.
Flaw 5: Splitting Human Nature Apart, Violating Basic Common Sense
Common sense about human nature:
People seek benefit and avoid harm; when payoff and reward are severely disproportionate, they naturally lower their desires and expectations.
- Wages don’t rise, prices and housing do
- More and more work, less and less security
- At middle age, optimized away at any time, no sense of security
In such an environment, young people lowering their desires, marrying late, not having kids, refusing the rat race,
is a normal person’s rational self-preservation choice.
The article forcibly interprets it as: influenced by ideas, disintegrated, spiritual surrender,
completely ignoring human nature and the logic of survival.
Flaw 6: Only Demanding the Bottom Reflect, Never Demanding the Top Concede Benefits
The whole piece’s object of discipline, from beginning to end, is only:
ordinary young people, workers, the masses at the bottom.
The rhetoric is always:
Be optimistic, strive, consider the big picture, be restrained, don’t be led by the narrative.
But it never demands:
that enterprises obey labor law, that capital restrain expansion, that rules be fair, that housing prices be reasonable, that there be a safety net.
Suffering is only for ordinary people to swallow, responsibility only for ordinary people to bear—this is the most infuriating point of all.
Flaw 7: Deliberately Beautifying “Striving,” Evading the Reality of “Striving Being Plundered”
Striving in the past:
Save money, buy a house, support a family, rise steadily—effort had positive feedback.
Much striving now:
Overdrafting health, overdrafting time, sudden death, shouldering huge debt, kicked aside at middle age,
with most of the fruits of striving harvested by capital, real estate, and platforms.
The article pretends not to see “the alienation of striving,”
forcibly peddling an old, single set of values:
As long as you work hard enough, all problems can be solved.
Completely detached from the current economic environment and employment reality.
The Essence of This Article in One Sentence
- Evades the real problems: doesn’t discuss the squeezing of benefits, the rules, housing prices, or the age-35 crisis;
- Scrambles for a scapegoat: dumps all grassroots negative emotions onto foreign forces;
- Core purpose: discipline the bottom into silence, to accept the status quo, to not complain, to obediently endure the rat race;
- The essential trick: using a grand narrative to cover up real pain points, using ideological labels to suppress livelihood demands.
This article is a modern version of grand-narrative PUA,
specially designed to gag ordinary people and dissolve everyone’s legitimate dissatisfaction.
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