Evasion by Foot-dragging

What I mean by “evasion” is when a person turns to foot-dragging and passivity as ways of coping with a thought-remolding campaign. It is possible for evasion to arise from a variety of motivations, and to give rise to different manifestations at different stages of its development. Because of these differing circumstances, the significance of evasion varies from one case to another.

Some people are innately lacking in initiative. Such a person “often seems to have a natural immunity to thought remolding from the very outset.” The reason for this is quite simple. Unless a person embraces an attitude of taking the initiative to engage with the real world – whether it be to cultivate an ideal self of sterling character, to get established in a career and achieve merit, or to “keep up with the times” in pursuit of fame and wealth – he would otherwise simply not participate actively in thought remolding. What people ordinarily describe as “fake enthusiasm” refers to nothing other than the observation that a person’s participation in thought remolding stems from “impure motives” – such involvement with remolding has nothing to do with the goal of revolutionizing his thinking, but has merely been for the sake of achieving personal gain in the here and now. Yet there can be no doubt that even “fake enthusiasm” itself amounts to an attitude of taking the initiative to engage with the real world. During the last years of the Cultural Revolution, more and more of the “revolutionary young generals” in both the Conservative faction and the Rebel faction of the Red Guards began to realize that they had been engaging in lunacy as a result of having “been taken in and deceived.” Looking back over the recent past, they noticed that their only peers who had refrained from committing errors were members of the “Free-and-Easy” faction, who had remained aloof from the Cultural Revolution's political movements. However, the “young generals” did not admire the “Free-and-Easy” faction at all, for they felt that the reason why the latter faction committed no errors was not that this faction was somehow wiser than the rest, but simply that it was lacking in concern for worldly affairs.