Vol. 3: What Kind of Mistake Is Subjectivism?

Where do people's ideas and knowledge come from? They can only come from social practice... They do not drop from the skies, and they are not innate in the mind.
—Mao Zedong, "Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?"

This line doesn't actually come from "On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party," the essay we're taking apart today. It's from another of Mao's essays. But I put it at the top because it's the key to today's topic. Once you understand this line, you'll know exactly where subjectivism goes wrong.

"On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party" isn't long, but it's an absolute A-list essay in Volume I of the Selected Works. For A-list essays like this, I'll write two or three posts taking them apart from different angles.

The title is very direct. In the essay, Mao lists eight mistaken ideas.

No.	Idea
1	On the purely military viewpoint
2	On ultra-democracy
3	On the disregard of organizational discipline
4	On absolute equalitarianism
5	On subjectivism
6	On individualism
7	On the ideology of roving rebel bands
8	On the remnants of putschism

Today, let's talk about subjectivism.

I chose subjectivism because I think it's the most common problem in today's society, and a flaw that breeds very easily. Some people don't have it at first, then they do.

In life and at work, subjectivism is often the thing most likely to sway a person's judgment.

I think if you learn to analyze subjectivism and shake it off, you can solve a lot of the worries and hard problems in your life and work.

What Is Subjectivism?

Let's work out what Mao means by subjectivism. What are its main features?

• The first is dogmatism. Dogmatism means only knowing how to copy theory wholesale, without using the material of real life to analyze reality. Reciting straight from the book, that's what it is.
• The second is empiricism. Empiricism is different from dogmatism. It doesn't copy theory from books. It trusts its own intuition and experience completely, with no theory at all.

That seems contradictory. We criticize dogmatism for not thinking with real material and experience, yet when we criticize empiricism, we say it leans too much on personal experience and doesn't even count as theory.

This contradiction has to be straightened out, or nothing after it will make sense.

I thought it over and realized that although one leans toward theory and the other toward experience, pointing in completely opposite directions, they actually make the same mistake: they both skip the step of "investigating the specific thing in front of you."

Think about it. The dogmatist opens a book and says "this is what the book says," so that's how it should be done. The empiricist slaps his forehead and says "this is how I did it before," so that's how it should be done.

One replaces reality with a book, the other replaces reality with old experience. As for what the specific thing in front of them actually looks like, neither of them goes and looks.

So you see, the directions are opposite but the root is the same: neither takes objective reality seriously. That's why they can both be thrown into the same basket called subjectivism.

Why Is Subjectivism Wrong?

If subjectivism's two main features are dogmatism and empiricism, then one word describes such people: self-righteous.

Whether dogmatist or empiricist, these people are at bottom sure they're right. The dogmatist takes the laws other people summed up in books for the reality he's living in. The empiricist takes his own little bit of partial experience for the truth.

The dogmatist never considers that the problems and contradictions he faces have their own particularity. Without deep investigation and analysis, just plugging the experience of those before him into a formula can't resolve a contradiction at the root.

The empiricist never considers that contradictions differ from one another. Having resolved one contradiction doesn't mean the same approach works on the next. Even for the same type of problem, the factors will differ in small ways.

Put the mistakes of the dogmatist and the empiricist together, and you have subjectivism.

What Kind of Mistake Is Subjectivism?

Mao explains subjectivism in very plain terms. Many people understand it at a glance and feel like people like this are everywhere around them.

Take empiricists. I'm surrounded by them. You tell one of them the current state of a problem, and he starts telling you how he handled it in the past. No matter how you explain that this situation is different from his, he thinks there's nothing hard about it. If you can't handle it, that's a problem with your ability, and besides, he already taught you how.

Concrete analysis of concrete problems. In our time, that has almost become a rare quality.

So the aim of this post is to get inside subjectivism and see what its root really is.

Two Theories of Knowledge

In philosophical terms, subjectivism is actually a kind of epistemology, a theory of knowledge. What it stresses is that people's knowledge and judgments come from their subjective experience, including feelings, intuition, will, and so on, rather than from objective reality.

So what theory of knowledge is materialist dialectics built on?

In the materialist theory of knowledge, the birth of knowledge is a complete closed loop. It starts from objective reality, develops into perceptual knowledge, rises to rational knowledge, and finally returns to reality, where practice tests the knowledge and, in the end, corrects it.

There are two key points here:

• First, the starting point of knowledge must be the objective world.
• Second, the end point of knowledge must be practice.

So at the level of their underlying logic, subjectivism and dialectical materialism are fundamentally different.

To be honest, comparing subjectivism with dialectical materialism isn't really fair.

Why? Because dialectical materialism is a complete system. It tells you where knowledge comes from, how it develops, how it's tested, and how truth is born, every link connected to the next.

Subjectivism, put plainly, comes down to one sentence: I feel it's like this. It doesn't say where its knowledge comes from, or how to test it, let alone what to do when it's wrong.

So rather than calling subjectivism a crooked road, it's more accurate to say it never built a road at all. It's just a person wandering through the wilderness on a hunch, ending up wherever they end up.

Dialectical materialism is right precisely because it isn't an isolated viewpoint. It's a systematic, scientific body of ideas:

• It defines the source of knowledge as objective reality
• It lays out how knowledge develops
• It stresses that the development of knowledge can't be separated from practice
• It explains that truth can only be born in practice

That's why the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge is a complete closed loop: its parts both constrain and push each other forward.

Wrong from the Start

From the angle of the theory of knowledge, we've seen how subjectivism differs from dialectical materialism. Now let's go back to the title of this post: what kind of problem is subjectivism?

To get clear on the nature of a problem, you need to know at which step subjectivism goes wrong. And from the angle of the theory of knowledge, subjectivism is wrong from the very start.

It sounds unbelievable, but there's no way around it. That's reality.

Usually when we make mistakes in daily life, we start from reality but make an error in reasoning or judgment along the way, and end up failing.

Subjectivism doesn't follow this logic. It doesn't start from reality at all. It starts from its own head, from its own imagination. As for the result, from the dialectical-materialist point of view, that's pure luck.

So when many people realize they've misjudged something, they reflect on where their thinking went wrong. But if the whole thing was wrong from the start, then even the direction of their reflection will be wrong.

Let me use two very famous episodes from Romance of the Three Kingdoms as examples.

The first could be called the turning point of the whole Three Kingdoms story: Ma Su losing Jieting.

Jieting was a vital chokepoint. Ma Su had read all the military classics and was ordered to hold it. But in choosing how to hold Jieting, Ma Su kept insisting that from the high ground, his army would be unstoppable.

His subordinate Wang Ping kept warning him that there was no water on the mountain, and Ma Su wouldn't hear a word of it. In the end the enemy cut off his water, and Ma Su's army fell apart on its own without even fighting a battle.

Now let's analyze Ma Su's failure. He did have a great terrain advantage, but he was living in his own imagination, thinking that as long as he held favorable ground, he was sure to hold Jieting.

But he ignored the particular condition of Jieting: there was no water on the mountain.

He lived in his imagination and his military manuals, refused his subordinate's advice, and ignored the objective conditions right in front of his eyes. His failure was inevitable.

The second example is the famous story of Guan Yu losing Jing Province through carelessness.

Guan Yu had an illustrious life. He won countless battles and killed countless famous generals. A lifetime of glory was his pride and also his weak spot. In his heart he had long had a belief that "I know how to fight this." When Wu replaced its commander with Lu Xun, he thought it was just another young man. When Lü Meng retired sick, he believed it.

Guan Yu's experience was certainly real. But all of it came from past clashes, not from the current situation. He didn't investigate Wu's real intentions afresh. He let his old experience blind him and came to a miserable end.

Like Ma Su, Guan Yu failed because he was living in his own imagination. When Lü Meng retired sick, Guan Yu had already replayed his past experiences ten thousand times in his head and figured this victory would be just like the old ones.

The two men's imaginations came from different places, one from military manuals, the other from his own past experience.

The sources were different, but the effect was the same: it clouded their minds.

If Ma Su had wanted to, couldn't he have found a way to solve the water problem? I don't believe he couldn't.

Besides, Ma Su had Wang Ping right beside him, warning him again and again. It's exactly like the workplace today. There really are people like this: you keep laying out the facts beside them, and they turn a deaf ear. You can't help wondering: is he deaf? Why can't he hear what I'm saying?

Wang Ping was probably cursing in his head: Ma Su, I can't believe you!

Ma Su's eyes weren't blind, his ears weren't deaf, and there was nothing wrong with his brain. But he just couldn't hear Wang Ping and couldn't think of the water on the mountain. Because of subjectivism. His imagination had covered his eyes, sealed his ears, and numbed his brain.

Guan Yu's failure works the same way, but his problem is more typical. Many people in today's society have the same problem as Guan Yu.

Guan Yu is the most dangerous kind of empiricist: his experience was real.

Think about it. Every battle he won in the past was won for real, and every famous general he killed really fell by his hand. Precisely because that experience was "solid enough," he believed his own judgment all the more firmly, and others hardly dared to object.

That's the trickiest thing about empiricism: the more successful the experience, the less a person can take in new circumstances. The "this is how I got it done before" people around me are often not the ones doing worst. They're the ones who really did get a few things done in the past, and their "I feel" is harder to shake than most people's.

So Guan Yu wasn't a mix of dogmatist and empiricist. He was a pure empiricist trapped by his own brilliant record.

While I'm at it, I want to say a bit more about the word "self-consistency."

These past few years, a lot of people have had "self-consistency" on their lips, and it sounds like a compliment.

But think about it carefully, and subjectivists are actually the easiest people to be self-consistent. They don't investigate reality or test their conclusions, so convincing themselves costs almost nothing. Every day they live in a little world of their own making, the logic neatly closed, all calm and peaceful.

I'm not saying that wanting self-consistency is bad. I just want to point out: if your self-consistency comes from avoiding reality, it isn't stability. It's self-deception. When Ma Su held the mountain and Guan Yu believed Lü Meng had retired sick, weren't they self-consistent in their own minds too?

It's just that reality has never cared whether you're self-consistent.

---

That's where I'll stop today, just touching on it. I originally wanted to go on from here and write about how to overcome subjectivism, but after thinking it over, I decided to put down the pen.

As this post says, the mistake of subjectivism is at bottom a mistake in the theory of knowledge, and mistakes born from the theory of knowledge are everywhere. To overcome them thoroughly, you have to change your theory of knowledge.

We won't judge here which theory of knowledge is right or wrong. But this is a column based on the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, so the theory of knowledge I promote is bound to be materialist.

That means many of the ideas I want to expand on need the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge and world outlook as their foundation.

So over the next month or two, I plan to first finish writing about "On Practice" and "On Contradiction," taking apart the theory of knowledge and the world outlook in "materialist dialectics" systematically, before I start on the other essays.

The theory of knowledge and the world outlook are the bedrock of all of "dialectical materialism," and only on good bedrock can you build a solid tower.