People Are People, Not Stones -- You Can't Just Grope Them at Will

People are people, not stones -- you can't just grope them at will. This is a very simple principle, yet some people just don't get it, insisting on conflating people with the stones in "crossing the river by feeling the stones."

History is replete with examples of treating people as stones. For the sake of some so-called ideal, people were no longer people -- they were turned into a road, into stones on the road. We can of course assume that some people are born wanting to be stones, whether in the river or on the road. Such people are certainly worthy of respect on a moral level. But even the morality of reality is only one part of being human, not to mention that the purely God-like kind of morality -- the idea of achieving some social ideal or social system through morality -- has already been proven by history to be extremely tedious and childish. Even more terrifying, this moral sense of sublimity often comes with coercive and expansionist tendencies, invariably accompanied by an urge to spread across all of society and the entire universe. The tragedies this urge has caused throughout history probably need not be enumerated one by one, because there are far too many.

People are the purpose. Real people in reality are the purpose. All purposes that transcend this purpose cannot become true purposes. Even if morality can fabricate infinite justifications, this kind of purpose divorced from real people will forever remain one purposeless chaos after another. Every person is a real person, not a carrier of some ideal, belief, or moral code. The only thing worthy of respect is reality itself, not those ethereal, vague principles.

Does taking real people as the purpose constitute extreme individualism? No. Real people can never be extreme individualists, because real people always exist within the reality of human relations, and the reality of humanity can only be socially constituted by real people. From this naturally emerge real ideals, beliefs, and moral codes -- and these are no longer the inhuman, God-like kind of thing, but are rooted in the soil of reality. Precisely because people are people and not stones, once people are respected in a realistic way, they will unleash boundless power and create genuine miracles.