Vol. 7: The Roots of Change Lie Within: Why Things Change, from the Two World Outlooks in "On Contradiction"

The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. —Mao Zedong, "On Contradiction"

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Starting with this post, we say goodbye to "On Practice" and move into "On Contradiction."

I put this line at the top because it's the key phrase of the whole of "On Contradiction," and the key to today's topic. Once this line sinks in, you'll have a handle on everything else today.

In the last post of the "On Practice" series, I left this line: the end point of knowledge isn't figuring it out. It's doing it, testing it, and being ready to have it overturned.

I used it as a closing line, but it buried a bigger question I never answered.

I said you have to be ready to be overturned because conditions change, environments change, and people change too. But the question is: why does the world change? What keeps it changing without end?

"On Practice" deals with how knowledge comes about and how it develops. It's a theory of knowledge. But it doesn't answer why the world itself is in ceaseless motion. Mao addressed that question specifically in another essay, the one always named alongside "On Practice": "On Contradiction."

So today we're moving from "On Practice," where knowledge has to change along with things, to "On Contradiction," and why the world changes at all.

Why Mao Wrote "On Contradiction"

"On Contradiction" and "On Practice" are brothers. Both were written in 1937, and both were lectures Mao gave on philosophy in Yan'an.

At the time, the Party had suffered badly from dogmatism. Some people clung to ready-made conclusions from books and applied them regardless of China's actual conditions, and the revolution paid heavily for it. In writing these two essays, Mao was essentially doing one thing: explaining the pathology of this disease at the level of method of thought.

"On Practice" talks about where knowledge comes from. "On Contradiction" talks about something even more fundamental: by what laws does this world actually move?

And "On Contradiction" doesn't start with contradiction itself. It first lays out two fundamental ways of seeing the world. Mao calls them "the two world outlooks."

Here's the first. Mao doesn't mince words:

The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static and one-sided.

Isolated, static, one-sided: those three words sum up everything wrong with this view. It sees the world as separate chunks that have nothing to do with each other, as things that basically don't change. When change comes, it can only look outside a thing for the force pushing it.

The other is its direct opposite:

As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things.

The difference comes down to one sentence, and the weight falls entirely on the word "internally."

	The metaphysical view	The dialectical view
What the world is like	Isolated, static, split into separate chunks	Interconnected, constantly moving and developing
Why things change	Because a force outside pushes them	Because there's contradiction inside them
How change happens	Increase or decrease in quantity, change of place; the essence stays the same	Driven by internal contradiction; qualitative change

These two columns aren't an academic classification. They match two kinds of people.

One kind, when something happens, habitually looks outward. The business didn't take off: the market was bad. The body didn't change: no talent. Life isn't going well: bad luck. Every cause is outside, created by other things, other people, other circumstances.

The other kind looks inward. In the same market, why did someone else make it? With the same talent, why does a different training method work? With the same luck, why can some people seize it and others can't?

The first kind puts every cause of change outside the thing. The second goes looking for the basis inside it. That's the plainest dividing line between metaphysics and dialectics.

The Egg and the Stone

So is the view in "On Contradiction" right? On what grounds do we say the basis of change is inside, not outside?

Mao gives an especially simple example, so simple you can't forget it once you've seen it. It's about an egg and a stone.

Materialist dialectics holds that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become operative through internal causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis.

The same temperature is the same external condition. Put an egg in, and a chick hatches. Put a stone in, and however long you keep it warm, it stays a stone.

The temperature plays no favorites. It treats the egg and the stone exactly the same. Yet the results are worlds apart. Where's the difference? The egg already holds inside it the basis for becoming a chick. The stone doesn't.

So the temperature is only a condition. What really decides whether something changes, and what it becomes, is the basis inside it. That's the whole weight of the line: external causes are the condition, internal causes are the basis, and external causes become operative through internal causes.

The first time I read this example, I thought: isn't that obvious? Everyone knows a stone can't hatch a chick.

But slowly it sank in. What stings about this line isn't the egg or the stone. It's that it forces you to look again at everything you've been through.

All those failures you blamed on outside things, the bad market, a platform with no traffic, a boss who didn't appreciate you, bad timing: how many were really because, at the time, you were still a stone?

A Framework to Carry with You

We can twist the core of this post into one sentence you can pull out any time:

When you want to explain why something changes, or why it succeeds or fails, don't rush to stare at the outside. First turn back and look for its internal contradiction.

Note that this doesn't mean external conditions don't matter. An egg can't hatch without warmth either. External causes are real and indispensable conditions.

It's saying something else: when you can't explain a result, the problem usually isn't in the external conditions you've already seen. It's in the internal basis you've overlooked. External conditions are out in the open for everyone to see. The internal basis is hidden. You have to dig to see it.

That's what makes metaphysics so effortless. It lets you charge the bill to the outside, and once you've done the math you feel at ease. No need to dig into yourself. Dialectics takes effort. It demands that you admit the root of how things turned out may lie inside you.

You can try this framework on something that's been going badly for you lately. First list every external cause you can think of: the market, the platform, other people, luck. Once you've listed them, don't stop there. Ask yourself one more question: if you handed these exact external conditions to someone else, would they get a different result? If the answer is yes, then the result isn't decided by those external conditions alone. There's also the internal basis you skipped over.

Here are two examples.

Where Was My Fat-Loss Plateau Really Stuck?

I've written about cutting fat before, but today I want to look at it again from a completely different angle.

I was using carb cycling. Early on the weight came off smoothly, about five kilograms. Then it stalled. I hit a plateau and my weight wouldn't budge.

My first reaction back then was to look for causes outside.

Has this method stopped working? Should I switch diets? Is my training not intense enough, do I need more volume? Did I slip up somewhere in execution? My head was full of adjusting the plan, this external thing. I figured that if I just got the outside setup right, the weight would naturally keep coming off.

That's textbook looking outward. I assumed the cause of change was in the plan, so the solution was to change the plan.

And I really did change it. I added some training volume, tweaked my diet, fiddled for a while. At first there seemed to be some movement, then a few days later it was stuck again. I was pretty fed up and wondered what else I was doing wrong, so I kept digging through the plan. Was this ratio off? Was that exercise not done right? I turned almost every external knob I could, and my weight still sat there.

All that time I had a vague, nagging feeling: I'm changing everything, so why isn't anything working?

But what was the truth?

The truth was that my diet plan hadn't changed a word. The difference between losing and not losing wasn't in the plan at all.

What had changed was me.

I'd lost five kilograms. I was lighter, my basal metabolism had dropped with it, and the same amount of food no longer made a big enough calorie deficit for my new body.

The plan was the external temperature. My body was the internal basis.

Early on, the weight came off not because the plan was magic, but because my body's internal state at the time, higher weight and higher metabolism, let the plan work.

Later, when it stopped coming off, the plan, the external cause, hadn't changed at all. What had changed was the internal cause: my body itself was no longer the body it had been five kilograms earlier.

The same external cause, acting on a changed internal cause, gives a completely different result.

Once I saw this, I realized my whole way of searching had been wrong from the start. I'd been rummaging through the plan outside, but the root wasn't there at all. What I really needed to do was admit that the conditions inside my body had changed, and then adapt the plan to the new body, instead of hoping the old plan would give the old results on a new body.

When I talked about this in the "On Practice" posts, it was the same experience, but a different light was shining on it. Back then I was saying that knowledge expires and has to go back to practice to be tested again.

Now I'm talking about a step earlier: when the result changes and you can't explain it, don't go in circles around the external conditions. Look back and see whether the internal basis has already changed.

Both Had Oil. Why Did One Get Rich and the Other Poor?

Put this on a bigger scale and it gets even clearer.

Let's look at Norway and Venezuela.

These two countries share one striking thing: both have huge oil reserves.

For any country, lots of oil underground is an external condition that falls from the sky, the most enviable kind of good luck.

By the logic of looking outward, the conclusion should be simple: oil means money, and money means a good life.

But what happened?

Norway turned its oil income into a sovereign wealth fund and built up one of the richest nest eggs in the world. The country is wealthy and stable. Venezuela sat on just as much oil, yet slid step by step into economic collapse, soaring prices, and people fleeing the country.

The same oil, the same external wealth. For one it became a blessing, for the other a curse.

If you only stare at the external condition of having oil, you'll never explain this contrast.

Because the external conditions were almost the same. The whole difference was inside: a country's internal institutions, its way of governing, how it managed and shared out that wealth. That's another matter entirely.

The oil was the temperature. What was inside the country decided whether it hatched a chicken or a mess.

That's why economics has a special term, the resource curse. A windfall of external wealth, landing on different internal conditions, can be a blessing or a curse.

External causes never decide results on their own. They work through internal causes.

The fat-loss plateau is the same external cause acting on a changed internal cause. The resource curse is the same kind of external cause acting on different internal causes.

One looks along time, the other looks across, and both point to the same sentence: the basis that decides where things go is inside, not outside.

Final Thoughts

Looking back, the difference between metaphysics and dialectics isn't really the difference between one school and another. It's the difference between one habit and another.

Looking outward is effortless, and it's comforting, because it takes you out of the picture. Looking inward takes effort, because it forces you to admit that the root of how things turned out may be in you.

But only by looking inward do you have something to grab hold of. You often can't change the temperature outside, but whether you can go from a stone to an egg is something you can work on.

External causes are the condition, internal causes are the basis. You can't change every condition, but you can always work on the basis.

That's the first thing "On Contradiction" hands us: when you look at any change, first go back inside the thing and look for its contradiction.

But here a new question pops up.

I keep talking about internal contradiction as if everything had contradictions inside it.

But are contradictions really that universal? Could they only show up in certain unlucky situations, certain special cases, and vanish when things are going smoothly?

In other words, is contradiction an isolated phenomenon, or is it everywhere, running through everything from start to finish?

That question will wait for the next post.