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[转帖] [zz]好运不是才能,厄运亦非德性

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发表于 2012-8-20 13:51:30 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
对于这篇文章,我不想多做评论,各位看到自有共鸣。
“泽上有雷,归妹;君子以永终知敝。”----《易经》第五十四卦 雷泽归妹
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好运不是才能,厄运亦非德性
by 独孤力命 from 豆瓣 原帖地址 http://www.douban.com/note/224760232/
2012-07-11 04:48:21
2012年美国普林斯顿大学毕业演讲,请的是写Money Ball的作家迈克尔•刘易斯。他的演讲题目Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie,最常见的中文翻译是“不要吞吃命运的饼干”。这个题目单独看颇为费解,但若看过演讲全文,便能知道它的意思大概是,不要把好运当作自己应得之物,不假思索地享受。

美国名校的毕业演讲说到底也还是一种较为高端的“励志文”,但一个成功的美国人写出这样的文章,还是让人颇为感慨。在美国生活过一段时间之后,最大的感触就是美国人何其幸运,正如刘易斯所说,“处于世界历史上最富饶的社会”,平均说来,美国人所享受的资源大概要远超中国数倍,更不消说与更欠发达的地区相比了。而美国人有时令人感到哭笑不得的无知和“何不食肉糜”的态度,大半也正是来自他们惊人的幸运。而他们这个社会又最崇拜个人奋斗、最信服个人能力,偏偏刘易斯对一群真正的常春藤名校“精英”说,成功绝不仅仅是关乎才能、禀赋、努力的事,相当大部分还要归功于好运,不仅如此,“最重要的,是要认识到,如果你获得成功,你也同时曾获得好运——而运气带来义务。你欠了一笔债,不只是欠你的神。你也欠那些没你那么好运的人的债”。

这个演讲在中文网络上流传没有多久,国内高考结束,大学录取开始了。北大清华在北京录取分数低这个事,自然又拿出来说一遍。很多人义愤填膺,也有人逐条反驳。对于我个人而言,这是我大学四年一个心结,而拿到清华毕业证书之后,这心结仍未解开。这心结正是刘易斯说说的那笔债:我觉得我欠下了那笔债,而无论是在清华的四年,还是毕业后这四年,我所做的,都远远未能偿还。

在清华的时候,有人对我们说过刘易斯这样的话么?或许算有,至今记得新生培训时,时任团委书记的杨振斌说,“不要占着茅坑不拉屎,你不拉,换别人拉来!”但细想来还是不太一样。杨振斌的意思,是要我们必须努力保持优秀,好配得上我们在这大学里能享受到的一切条件,这无关人生态度,似乎有些“要对得起恩赐”的味道。虽然最后都要归结到“幸运者理当感恩”上来,但我更喜欢那个关于“债务”的说法,这债某种程度上说,是糊里糊涂欠下的,偿还它基本上要靠自觉,而很难用道德来强制,这是一件很个人的事。当然,刘易斯说法中的这种宽松,也正是幸运的结果。

幸运不能算是一种道德劣势,但它也绝对不是才能,不是一个人靠自己得到的东西,因而,也的确不应当被当成一个人理所当然配得的东西。我总觉得,哪怕不是为了责任云云,而只是为了成为一个更好的人,也应当对此有所意识。享受了好运的人当然能用各种办法来证成这种幸运的合理,但在我看来,就算能够,也还是不要这样做为好。

而从另一方面讲,我也觉得,厄运值得同情,但本身却不是德性。我是听着“我们那个时候”,“这种苦你们年轻人肯定吃不了”等等长大的,梁文道好像也说过类似的话,大意中国有种把苦难当崇高的倾向,似乎苦难或者厄运就确保了一个道德的制高点,一种评判他人的资格。但好运与厄运本质上相似,它们降临到人身上这件事情本身,是与个人道德无关的。

一般人们不会去追寻好运的源头,从它的偶然性中找到一笔“债务”,但人们却总是会追寻厄运的源头,很难接受它的偶然性。苦难是人类无法接受也无法理解的东西,是以圣经约伯记中,无端受难的约伯拒不承认自己有罪,而诅咒自己出生的日子。如果能为厄运找到一个不公平来作为源头,则痛苦可以用愤怒作为宣泄的出口。这本身无可厚非,甚至是一种有正面意义的质问,但它很容易超出自己的限度,发展为在与这种不公平没有直接关系的人和事面前,也随意进行责问和批评。和把好运视为理所当然一样,这倒也算不上是什么错误。遭受到厄运的人当然可以宣称自己理应获得尊崇,斥责一切可以斥责的人或事。或许我没有资格说这样的话,但我仍然觉得,就算能够,也还是不要这样做为好。

这并不是说就要放弃对不公平(无论是不公带来的幸运,还是不公带来的不幸)的追问,更不是说人的经历和行为无从体现其品质与道德。恰恰相反,我觉得面对命运,积极、有意识的作为与选择,而非命运本身,才是人类品性的试金石。

在演讲的最后,刘易斯说,“你们都面对着那块多出来的饼干。你们也将面对更多。随着时间的推移,你会发现你很容易觉得你本来就配得那块多出来的饼干。就我所知,你可以这样。但你可以更快乐,这个世界也可以变得更美好,如果你能够至少假装你不配。” 关于这段话,我只能同意一半。幸运者的感恩也可能变成内疚,我们已经有了托尔斯泰这个极端的例子。说他死于这种内疚恐怕并不夸张,而他的反应,则可被讥为矫情与感伤主义。从另一方面来讲,面对厄运完全的平和与接受似乎也有泯灭善恶之嫌。但我想补充刘易斯的半句话说,认识到好运不是才能,厄运亦非德性,这个世界似乎可以变得更美好一些。
 楼主| 发表于 2012-8-20 13:54:09 | 显示全部楼层

刘易斯的演讲原文

"Don't Eat Fortune's Cookie"
Michael Lewis
June 3, 2012 — As Prepared

(NOTE: The video of Lewis' speech as delivered is available on the Princeton YouTube channel.)

Thank you. President Tilghman. Trustees and Friends. Parents of the Class of 2012. Above all, Members of the Princeton Class of 2012. Give yourself a round of applause. The next time you look around a church and see everyone dressed in black it'll be awkward to cheer. Enjoy the moment.

Thirty years ago I sat where you sat. I must have listened to some older person share his life experience. But I don't remember a word of it. I can't even tell you who spoke. What I do remember, vividly, is graduation. I'm told you're meant to be excited, perhaps even relieved, and maybe all of you are. I wasn't. I was totally outraged. Here I’d gone and given them four of the best years of my life and this is how they thanked me for it. By kicking me out.  

At that moment I was sure of only one thing: I was of no possible economic value to the outside world. I'd majored in art history, for a start. Even then this was regarded as an act of insanity. I was almost certainly less prepared for the marketplace than most of you. Yet somehow I have wound up rich and famous. Well, sort of. I'm going to explain, briefly, how that happened. I want you to understand just how mysterious careers can be, before you go out and have one yourself.

I graduated from Princeton without ever having published a word of anything, anywhere. I didn't write for the Prince, or for anyone else. But at Princeton, studying art history, I felt the first twinge of literary ambition. It happened while working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a truly gifted professor, an archaeologist named William Childs. The thesis tried to explain how the Italian sculptor Donatello used Greek and Roman sculpture — which is actually totally beside the point, but I've always wanted to tell someone. God knows what Professor Childs actually thought of it, but he helped me to become engrossed. More than engrossed: obsessed. When I handed it in I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: to write senior theses. Or, to put it differently: to write books.

Then I went to my thesis defense. It was just a few yards from here, in McCormick Hall. I listened and waited for Professor Childs to say how well written my thesis was. He didn't. And so after about 45 minutes I finally said, "So. What did you think of the writing?"

"Put it this way" he said. "Never try to make a living at it."

And I didn't — not really. I did what everyone does who has no idea what to do with themselves: I went to graduate school. I wrote at nights, without much effect, mainly because I hadn't the first clue what I should write about. One night I was invited to a dinner, where I sat next to the wife of a big shot at a giant Wall Street investment bank, called Salomon Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to nothing about Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be where Wall Street was being reinvented—into the place we have all come to know and love. When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job in which to observe the growing madness: they turned me into the house expert on derivatives. A year and a half later Salomon Brothers was handing me a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to give advice about derivatives to professional investors.  

Now I had something to write about: Salomon Brothers. Wall Street had become so unhinged that it was paying recent Princeton graduates who knew nothing about money small fortunes to pretend to be experts about money. I'd stumbled into my next senior thesis.

I called up my father. I told him I was going to quit this job that now promised me millions of dollars to write a book for an advance of 40 grand. There was a long pause on the other end of the line. "You might just want to think about that," he said.

"Why?"

"Stay at Salomon Brothers 10 years, make your fortune, and then write your books," he said.  

I didn't need to think about it. I knew what intellectual passion felt like — because I'd felt it here, at Princeton — and I wanted to feel it again. I was 26 years old. Had I waited until I was 36, I would never have done it. I would have forgotten the feeling.   

The book I wrote was called "Liar’s Poker."  It sold a million copies. I was 28 years old. I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative. All of a sudden people were telling me I was born to be a writer. This was absurd. Even I could see there was another, truer narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm from which to write the story of an age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? Of having parents who didn't disinherit me but instead sighed and said "do it if you must?" Of having had that sense of must kindled inside me by a professor of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in the first place?

This isn't just false humility. It's false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.

I wrote a book about this, called "Moneyball." It was ostensibly about baseball but was in fact about something else. There are poor teams and rich teams in professional baseball, and they spend radically different sums of money on their players. When I wrote my book the richest team in professional baseball, the New York Yankees, was then spending about $120 million on its 25 players. The poorest team, the Oakland A's, was spending about $30 million. And yet the Oakland team was winning as many games as the Yankees — and more than all the other richer teams.  

This isn't supposed to happen. In theory, the rich teams should buy the best players and win all the time. But the Oakland team had figured something out: the rich teams didn't really understand who the best baseball players were. The players were misvalued. And the biggest single reason they were misvalued was that the experts did not pay sufficient attention to the role of luck in baseball success. Players got given credit for things they did that depended on the performance of others: pitchers got paid for winning games, hitters got paid for knocking in runners on base. Players got blamed and credited for events beyond their control. Where balls that got hit happened to land on the field, for example.

Forget baseball, forget sports. Here you had these corporate employees, paid millions of dollars a year. They were doing exactly the same job that people in their business had been doing forever.  In front of millions of people, who evaluate their every move. They had statistics attached to everything they did. And yet they were misvalued — because the wider world was blind to their luck.

This had been going on for a century. Right under all of our noses. And no one noticed — until it paid a poor team so well to notice that they could not afford not to notice. And you have to ask: if a professional athlete paid millions of dollars can be misvalued who can't be? If the supposedly pure meritocracy of professional sports can't distinguish between lucky and good, who can?

The "Moneyball" story has practical implications. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with  luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

I make this point because — along with this speech — it is something that will be easy for you to forget.

I now live in Berkeley, California. A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus.

Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn't. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader's shirt.

This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He'd been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.  

This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I'm sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new graduates of Princeton University. In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.

All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you'll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don't.

Never forget: In the nation's service. In the service of all nations.

Thank you.

And good luck.
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