思考的盲点 -- 中国人爱面子

Kind of busy recently due to the preparation of my trip to Australia~~ Nothing special happened, so, moved another old MSN blog to here again, which was written on Oct 21, 2007.

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October 21, 2007

思考的盲点 -- 中国人爱面子
Read a book recently, title "思考的盲点", written by a Hongkonger "陶国璋". This book is viewed from a mix perspective of "Psychology" & "Philosophy", and explained what usual 思考的盲点 for a person.

It has a few sentences talking about why Chinese people always talking abou "Mian Zi" comparatively to Westerners. It written:

"社会的结构越紧密，人与人之间越交往多，这种面子，门面心态越重。 因此我们留意到东方社会，如中国，日本，印度，东南亚等国家，因为人伦关系密切，以致特别重视名牌，追上潮流，以便有面子， 门面。相对而言，西方社会中，个体意识较强，门面问题就较为平淡。"

And sometimes such belief is seeded when we were young. When we were young(teenagers), we were trained to get the 认同 from your parents, pals, teachers, etc. And which we would try to project the way they like, so, when you wear the particular similar type of dress/clothes, you will be treated as "自己人" and will gained the "地位 * 认同" among the group, so, when will group older and older, your belief of this will become stronger and stonger.

This book also have some other good point of discussion, for example "权力". Sometimes, i don't quite understand why some working people like to have 权力 in their workplace as this may not give them any profit nor goodwill (while may only burden their workload). But this book has a minor part explaining this under the sub-topic of 投射式认同:

“权”是个人意志的伸延； 每当我们能控制，指使别人，即表示我们的意志擴展了开去。 男孩特别喜欢舞刀弄剑，是因为刀，剑好像延长了我们的手臂，能及于更远的事物，这就是一种意志伸延的象征。故此，权力欲强的人，是投过控制他人的意志，来认同自己的实在性，亦是一种投射的心理要求