Ah Q And The Method Of Spiritual Victory
When I read The True Story of Ah Q as a child, it was easy to see Ah Q as someone far away from me: a small figure from an old age, a little ridiculous and a little pitiful. But the older I get, the less distant he feels. Very often, people are not defeated by reality itself, but by their ability to patch up a story for themselves. They have clearly suffered a loss, taken a hit, or fallen behind, yet they quietly rewrite the plot in their own minds and cast themselves as the one who did not really lose.
That is the strongest and most dangerous part of the method of spiritual victory. It does not make a person truly stronger; it only makes them feel, for a moment, less embarrassed. It wraps failure in a nicer explanation, gives incompetence a respectable excuse, and packages retreat as the posture of "I never really cared anyway." On the surface, it looks like self-comfort. In reality, it is avoidance.
This has not disappeared at all today. You do badly on an exam, but instead of thinking through what you failed to understand, you say the grading system was flawed to begin with. You miss an opportunity, but instead of admitting you were not ready, you say you never wanted it anyway. You fail to do something well, but instead of reviewing where you went wrong, you first blame the environment, luck, or other people's lack of taste. The biggest benefit is that you feel better immediately. The biggest cost is that you stop right there.
Of course people need some self-comfort. Everyone has moments when they cannot hold it together. No one can be calm, clear-headed, and ready to review immediately after every failure. The problem is not comforting yourself. The problem is whether you turn that comfort into a long-term way of living. Taking a breath for a while is fine. What is truly frightening is that, after breathing in that story long enough, you begin to believe the words you invented.
The more I think about it, the more I feel that the method of spiritual victory ruins a person not by making them look ridiculous, but by taking away the desire to change. Once you can always explain away the past, it becomes very hard to force yourself to face the most painful question: where exactly am I lacking? That question hurts, but only after asking it can a person move forward. If you keep yourself upright only through stubborn words and self-anesthesia, it may look like you are protecting your dignity, but in fact you are slowly consuming the possibility of becoming stronger.
So what deserves the most vigilance in Ah Q is not that he is "funny", but that he resembles a common part of human nature. When people are hurt, they want to save face. When they fail, they first want to preserve their self-image. That is normal. But if a person is always willing to defend only that small inner dignity and never willing to face the loss in reality, then in the end that dignity is all they have left.
A truly strong person is not someone who never feels pain, never loses face, and never fails. A truly strong person is someone who does not rush to excuse themselves after failure. You can be sad. You can feel unwilling. You can even give yourself a little time to recover. But in the end, you still have to come back and honestly admit: this time, I did not do well. Only after that can improvement, growth, and reversal begin.