On "Fast Cultivation"

Rant#

What I want to talk about is a certain influencer (or maybe it’s an organization? a channel?) that my friends keep bringing up. I’ve never actually watched them, so I have no idea what the reality is. Which means everything below is a straw man argument. Things have probably gotten all twisted up somewhere along the game of telephone.

Lately, whenever I talk with my friends, this influencer comes up constantly. As far as I can remember, the number of friends who have mentioned them reached four today.

I don’t have many friends, so this is a genuinely abnormal situation. Not Demon Slayer-level, but it seems to be about as popular as Frieren.

Of course, everyone should be completely free to like whatever they like, and I have no standing whatsoever to complain. In fact, if that many friends are mentioning them, I should probably get a little curious myself. And criticizing something without having seen it is the worst thing you can do.

But what makes me furious is the way my friends are being influenced!!!!

When I’m having a deep, smart(?)-sounding conversation with my friends, this influencer is often dragged in as a reference.

Fast Cultivation Mass-Produces Ignorance of Ignorance#

(By “fast cultivation” I mean fasuto kyoyo (ファスト教養), a Japanese term for bite-sized, shallow “learning” consumed like fast food. There’s no established English equivalent that I could find, so this is my own rendering.)

Even if they clearly cite it, like “according to [Influencer]…”, that would be fine. The problem is when they don’t frame it as a quotation and talk about it as if it were their own opinion.

Concepts and names I’ve never heard of come pouring out, and just when I think “this conversation is getting interesting!”, I dig a little deeper and they say, “Actually, [Influencer] was the one who said it, so I don’t really know.” And the conversation ends. This has been happening again and again.

What infuriates me about this is that my friends only listened to [Influencer], yet they’ve mistaken themselves for people who understand the topic.

If [Influencer] genuinely aimed to provide real kyoyo (教養: cultivation, as in being well-read and well-rounded), they would try to avoid a situation where this kind of ignorance of one’s own ignorance spreads. In reality, that’s not what’s happening.

If it were one person, I could chalk it up to how that person receives things. But if it’s happening to several people, it’s only natural to wonder whether there’s something wrong with the influencer’s approach. So I’m being picky about something I haven’t tried.

Encountering a new concept or piece of knowledge ought to come with a kind of healthy, crushing feeling: “Wow, the world is this incomprehensible?” Then you look into it yourself, read the original source, and end up with knowledge that no longer necessarily matches the form in which it was first introduced to you: knowledge that you were influenced by, but that has passed through your own understanding. That’s what’s fun about it.

In short, knowledge only becomes flesh and blood once you’ve chewed it with your own teeth. Simply knowing a bunch of trivia shouldn’t make anyone impressive.

Otherwise, that knowledge becomes an isolated node, connected to nothing. When the conversation drifts into an adjacent but unfamiliar area, you have neither the material nor the will to guess, and all you can say is “Actually, I’m just repeating what I heard, so I don’t know anything.” If it were connected to other knowledge, you could at least say “Here’s how I understand it, anyway,” and that’s exactly what I want to hear!!

The Critical Point#

From here on, I’ll go with a Nietzsche flavor.

What made me finally lose all patience was hearing that this person had written a book! No, writing a book is fine, even admirable.

But the motive is what makes my blood boil. I don’t know the truth of it, but at least according to my friend’s secondhand account, this person decided to write a book in order to “reduce the volatility of their life.” In other words, they wrote a book because “if it doesn’t sell, I can give up on my dream of being a writer.”

This statement made me nauseous on every conceivable layer!!

First of all, what is this, writing a book because failing would let you abandon the dream of writing? Not only is writing treated as a means rather than an end, it’s a means to “giving up the dream”! If you don’t want to write that badly, why not try not writing?

Second, the calculation in that statement also makes me angry. As mentioned, this influencer apparently has considerable influence. The remark was reportedly made on a podcast. So it should be read not as mere self-disclosure but as part of the promotion.

And the promotional tactic they adopted was “if this doesn’t sell, I won’t write anymore.” If that was really the intent, it’s like holding the scope of their own activities hostage against their fans. That’s marketing in the guise of timidity!

And what angers me most is the likelihood that many of the fans feel no discomfort at all about this remark, and praise it as a “mature / realistic / smart” decision. At the very least, the friend who told me this story, holding exactly that opinion, seemed to be presenting it to me as one role model of what “becoming an adult” looks like.

But that is not cultivation, nor science, nor scholarship, nor wisdom!

For fear is an exception with us. But courage and adventure, and delight in the uncertain, in the unattempted: courage seems to me the entire prehistory of man.

From the wildest and most courageous animals he has envied and robbed all their virtues: thus only did he become man.

This courage, at last become subtle, spiritual and intellectual, this human courage with eagle’s pinions and serpent’s wisdom: this, it seems to me, is called today…

That’s Zarathustra! (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Science”) And since this passage was originally a rebuttal to the Leech scholar’s claim that “science was born of fear,” it’s also Zarathustra’s answer to the question of what science is.

I think this attitude may well be the core of fast cultivation. Fast cultivation influencers, and the people who revere their words, aren’t seeking science or cultivation in any real sense.

The reason such people “learn” is that they’re afraid of not knowing. And what they fear isn’t something noble like a brown bear lurking behind a tree. It’s failing grades, rejection, being seen by others as ignorant. So they never intended to understand the subject in the first place.

That’s why they believe that a person who hears the three syllables “Sapir” and answers “the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” is a cut above a person who hears “the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” and asks back “…toki pona?” You could call it turning conversation into a buzzer quiz show. And because it turned my friends into that, I am fuming!

The Offset#

Let me repeat: writing a book is admirable. And I’m told that during that time they cut off other activities and friendships to focus solely on writing, so that effort is unquestionably worthy of praise. What I’m angry about is why they cheapened their motive with words like “to reduce the volatility of my life.”

Why not just say it straight? “I wanted to write a book, so I wrote one. I worked really hard on it, so please buy it.” The idea that striking a cynical pose is a good thing, a mature attitude that more people should learn, is wrong, in my personal opinion 💢