There Are Now 18 Kinds of Bad People You Can Name. Don't Trust Anything They're Good At | QDaily Research Lab

Today's bad people are better at packaging themselves than the bad people of the past. Armed with theories quoted out of context and "politically correct" declarations that smuggle in their own premises, they are harder to spot, faster, and more convincing.

People lie to themselves, usually to feel good: "We're fairies — the filter barely changes a thing"; "I walked 14,223 steps today, so a double burger and a milkshake tonight is well within budget"; "I really do have abs, if I don't eat anything for the next week"...

When bad people lie to you, that also usually looks like it's for your happiness: "Text 556 to 12345 for a free guide to wealth management that will serve you for life"; "The last 100 VIP audiobook cards are waiting for you — join a million other users in a lifetime of learning"; "Whose youth isn't lost and confused? Walk toward the light. You just don't want to be like everyone else"...

Most of these cons look mild and hard to spot precisely because they are so uplifting, and plenty of people hoping to change their circumstances fall into them simply by being too trusting.

Jeremy Knowles, the late dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, once described what he took to be the single most important goal of higher education. The goal, he said, was to "make sure graduates can recognize when someone is talking rot." Graduates, he added, "should learn this ability by challenging and being challenged, by facing dissent and disagreement head-on, and find their own path within it."

But plainly many people around us lack that ability. They are frightened, threatened, enraged, and soothed by con artists dressed in stirring disguises, and they end up handing over their time and money with both hands.

For years the con artists around us have gone about in the costume of righteousness: reading books for you, thinking for you, breaking up with your partner for you, manufacturing the next hot sector for you, "coming to check your water meter" for you. They are good at manufacturing new anxieties and then selling the newly anxious a "one-stop solution." They take over the victim's brain, take the money out of the victim's pocket, and congratulate the victim on joining the "internet-thinking carnival club."

We call all of the above "the bad people of this era."

To be clear: calling the people discussed here "bad people" is not meant to label any profession or any individual. We want to put readers on alert about phenomena that may do harm, and to encourage a reasonable skepticism toward the problems of our time.

We define "bad people" as "people who do harm to others, to varying degrees." If we had to sum up their traits: most are after money; or they muddy the water to pull public attention away from questions that actually matter; or they steal people's time under the banner of "saving the public time"; or they manufacture a false profundity out of grand vocabulary and borrowed laws of nature; or they manufacture anxiety purely in order to sell things. They love handing users a "painkiller for your pain point" without ever solving the problem. They are very likely accomplices in the modern condition of being restless, anxious, unable to concentrate, and permanently insecure.

Today's bad people are usually better at packaging themselves than the bad people of the past. Armed with theories quoted out of context and "politically correct" declarations that smuggle in their own premises, they are harder to spot, faster, and more convincing.

In your daily life, they tend to come in the following varieties.

1. The Nonsense Guru Who Analyzes Everything Through Feelings

• "Do you have any idea how hard he's worked?"
• "With true love, what can't be solved, what can't be forgiven?"
• "If you can't change the world, change yourself; if you can't change yourself, change your mood."

It is hard to tell whether these people cook the toxic soul-soup or drink it. Faced with any complicated problem, they are brilliant at holding forth with true-love maxims, lines from the collector's edition of the magazine Zhiyin《知音珍藏版》, and quotes from BoJack Horseman. Lately they have also caught the wave of "explaining the entire universe through screenshots of Japanese drama dialogue." But if there is one thing they do best, it is probably inventing an inspirational story on Zhihu on the spot.

2. Enemy-Making Mania: Official Accounts That Turn Emotion Into Traffic

The guru persona above has a second playbook. One of the fastest ways to gather allies and stir up feeling is to name a common enemy, and that enemy might be "mediocrity, blandness, aging, the opposite sex." This kind of pointed steering lets an emotion-based content business reach instant empathy.

Enemy-making mania is common among WeChat official accounts that turn emotion into traffic. While advocating one way of life or one point of view, they must vilify another as thoroughly as they can. A made-up story about "my friend Xiao A" plus a thunderous run of parallel sentences — one day an essay against freeloading "bitches," the next day a tirade against men — regularly leaves readers thinking, "Ha! Satisfying! That felt good!"

What makes them irresponsible is that they don't believe what they advocate, and they switch positions as the news cycle and the trends shift. Along the way they quietly push most of the blame and responsibility onto someone else while pretending to stand shoulder to shoulder with the reader: "Hey, I'm giving you a place to vent and a way out of your own mistakes. I take all the abuse for you. Keep loving me! Promise me!"

3. The Life-Template Manufacturer

If enemy-making is too fierce for you, there are also the gentle life-template manufacturers, whose long-running line of models for the good life might include:

• "A couple both quit their jobs and spent every yuan they had saved traveling the world";
• "Skipping school to play games has its rewards too: game streamers make tens of thousands of yuan a day";
• "The shipping-container living expert who turned 200,000 yuan of renovation into a home worth living in"...

There is nothing wrong with such examples in themselves; they offer an option. But like soul-soup maxims, they hide the preconditions and put a linguistic filter over the result — usually by posting before-and-after photos, prettifying the after while making the before as ugly as possible. Then they knock on your soul with the same false question, over and over: "The world is so big! Why don't you go see it! Are you going or not? Everyone who cares about quality of life is out there seeing it. If you don't, you're a loser! Look! We even have a package deal that will take you along."

4. The Marriage-and-Dating Template Manufacturer

The marriage-and-dating template manufacturer is a subsidiary of the life-template manufacturer, in charge of producing a second flood of vulgar, cringe-inducing opinion: from Learn These Few Moves and Your Husband Will Come Home Early to Anyone Who Buys You Roses for Your Birthday Isn't Sincere — Someone Who Really Loves You Will Spend Real Money on You to Weekend Date? Use a Man-Slaying Lipstick to Hold On to His Heart. These template suppliers work their way into every corner of daily life, using lectures and shopping recommendations to define love and marriage, to tell you "what love is supposed to look like," and to encourage everyone to live in the Qing dynasty alongside them.

5. The "Youth Above All" Believer

Some young people brag and blunder conspicuously enough that this era embraces them on the spot.

Bored people are often besotted with wisdom out of proportion to a young person's age. More vulgar people may instead be besotted with earning power out of proportion to that age. The "youth above all" believers are in the business of magnifying that infatuation and selling it with every exaggeration available.

• "Entrepreneurs born after 1995 don't catch the eye anymore; only entrepreneurs born after 2000 have the flavor of legend";
• "Every success by a young person is a success worth celebrating; every failure by a young person is only because they are too young, so let's be forgiving";
• "Faked numbers, moving out overnight, months of unpaid wages, illegal dismissals? Ha, that only shows post-2000 founders have picked up some middle-aged habits too! (Now let's drop the question of whether they live or die and) take a look at the founders born after 2005..."

"Youth above all" believers are skilled at steering the public gaze and fixing it on the question of age, then talking frantic, rousing nonsense until you forget one simple point: a success that has to advertise itself through age is probably not much of a success.

6. The Sticker-Pack Player

Like livestreaming, bullet comments and ACG culture — all the "things young people are into" — sticker packs are treated as a shortcut into young people's hearts. The people peddling junk information tell you, in the voice of someone who has been there: "If you don't use stickers, nobody will have the patience to finish your article."

True sticker players paste stickers over every corner of the world. Any truth that needs a clear, precise discussion loses to this false profundity. Whatever anyone says, a sticker player can convey, through some half-smiling, half-smirking face, the shameless message: "you know what I mean," "is there really any point in going on," "I can't argue, but I'm very funny, aren't I."

The rise of stickers saves people a great deal of unnecessary social effort, but using them constantly also leaves a person's powers of expression infantile and hollow. This almost magical force of bad taste sets off a fresh round of arrogance, posturing, and evasion. It covers up their intellectual poverty for the moment, and costs them the ability to speak plainly for good.

7. The Buzzword Player

When it comes to using buzzwords, the pioneers are every bit as irritating as the latecomers. Like schoolchildren copying out "fine words and phrases," they rush to transcribe every new buzzword into their chat windows the moment it appears, pleased with themselves for keeping up: "Hey buddy, you know what I'm talking about?"

The buzzword player's badness lies in using wisecracks to block serious discussion. Having just learned the phrase "Chinese homegrown feminism," they announce that "Chinese women have all lost their minds." With no sense of proportion, faking humor or acting in bad faith, they go around shouting "XXX — reported!" The moment their opponent starts laying out an argument, out come the fashionable, fake-magnanimous lines: "you lose the second you take it seriously," "whatever makes you happy," "let's be reasonable here, ..." — the point being that the other side is unreasonable, while they themselves, so generous, having pleaded and reasoned to the end of their patience, can only "choose to forgive."

More irritating still: this kind of wisecrack is stale by the second time you see it, yet it gets repeated hundreds of times, pushing bystanders into a fake-humor hell walled in by endless cliché.

8. The Muddled-Logic Player

• "You don't have a girlfriend just because you're ugly"
• "You only landed the girl of your dreams because you have money"
• "You're poor because you don't work hard enough"
• "If two people love each other they can break through anything — the fact that they did that just means they don't love you enough"
• "The script is bad because the actors are good enough"
• "The film didn't sell because audiences are prejudiced against domestic movies"...

The muddled-logic player's method is hard to summarize, but their apparently "spot-on" gibberish — maliciously misattributed cause and effect — really is often mistaken by fools for sharpness and precision.

9. The Neighborhood-Committee Economist

The neighborhood-committee economist lies in wait beside you, counseling you in the voice of every meddling aunt and uncle: when you pick a partner, look for a "growth stock"; with your children, you must talk about "emotional investment"; grand, righteous-sounding words like "fairness, justice, freedom" are certainly a con. They saw through it long ago — "all sentiment is affectation and hypocrisy" — and they tell you: "Human beings are a bundle of selfish genes, chasing fame and profit is human nature, and all kindness and justice are masks worn for gain. Keeping a mocking posture toward every virtue humanity claims to admire is your passport to taste and to success."

10. The Worthless Self-Expresser Who Takes Up Everyone Else's Space

In an age when everyone has a voice, this type might be "the tearful talent-show singer working through their youth, their health troubles and their dreams"; or "the questioner at a lecture who spends 15 minutes on preamble and has no question at all, having come only to express admiration for the speaker"; or "the self-propelled lecturing machine who believes that among any three people, the other two must be his students — the compulsive know-it-all who never stops talking." Being far too self-centered, they occupy other people's time while lost in their own "stories and drinks, exes and current partners."

11. The Big-Talk Sufferer

Big-talk disease is typically an epidemic among middle-aged men at the dinner table. The moment a public event comes up, these men turn automatically into a budget-model Lu Xun with a disordered mind and no grip on logic, dragging in "the Chinese people, genetics, human nature" at the slightest provocation to pronounce on "the truth about society." They equate the habits of one person from country X with the habits of everyone in country X. They reach unconsciously for grand-narrative phrasing and a head-of-state's vantage point, surveying world affairs from on high — even though the substance of what they are discussing is nothing more than up-to-the-minute gossip and unverified lore.

Because they are fixated on holding forth, the individual gets drained away into concepts, numbers and groups: "Why should I care what one particular person thinks? Ha, one look and I can tell you don't understand politics." This way of thinking is terrible and popular, and big-talk sufferers are usually addicted beyond rescue to their own self-satisfied dash.

12. The Feral Scholar

The misuse of many theories starts with the feral scholar. Public events are always "the crowd is a mob" or "the herd effect." The moment anything goes wrong, "ah, Murphy's Law again." "Whatever is real is rational" gets mangled into a rule that anything which exists is thereby justified. Soul-soup gets called "positive psychology." "Survival of the fittest" is used to prove that "if you have no money you deserve to sink." And losing a competition to someone else is mainly because "bad money drives out good."

Showing off borrowed learning is annoying enough. Worse is using laws, effects and theories to explain phenomena at random, because it forces everything into a rational shape: "This follows the laws of nature, it's not my fault"; "Every outcome was inevitable, struggling is pointless, I saw through all of it long ago."

13. The Defeatism Pandering Party: "How Would You Know What Despair Is If You Never Even Tried"

• "Three years of hard work and it turns out lying flat and saving money would have been better"
• "You can't buy happiness with money — because you have no money"

If the seen-through-it-all feral scholars announce that they have "seen through it even more," they can be filed under this heading too.

A QDaily Research Lab survey called "Which Forms of Contemporary Cynicism Do You Hate Most?" drew 23,767 responses. One result is worth noting: readers widely disliked behavior such as "answering most questions with 'and yet it makes not the slightest damn difference,' pinning some illness label on yourself and then being sick with a clear conscience, and the world-weary 'you lose the second you take it seriously'" — and yet many of the same respondents also said, "That's me."

The popularity of sang culture, the cheerful strain of defeatism, has its good side: using self-mockery as protective coloring eases everyday anxiety and draws sympathy from the people around you. A little sang is endearing. But if you normalize this apparently unstriving, ungrasping, unresentful, uncomplaining helpless banter — or go further and romanticize "incompetence," embrace cynicism, belittle yourself, and lower your standards and your bottom line without limit — you will eventually discover that the people who first announced "three years of hard work and it turns out lying flat and saving money would have been better" are the ones who walked off with your money.

14. The "If You're So Good, You Do It" Party

It isn't that they stay out of discussions of public issues. It's that when they join in, they like to say things such as "Fine, ban it, I don't watch it anyway," "It's a serious matter, but none of my business," and "If you're so good, you do it — if you don't like it you can get lost, this glorious age is exactly what you wished for." In a QDaily Research Lab survey called "In Discussions of Public Issues, Which Type Annoys You Most?," these "people with no interest in change and no hope for it, who nonetheless cut in to pour cold water while others are seriously debating" were judged bad people through and through. They routinely treat feminism as making a scene over nothing and call fighting for a receipt a triviality; "what's the big deal, back where I'm from it's much worse than this" is their catchphrase. They are exactly the people Ji Ye described: those who, "having grown used to the darkness, defend the darkness, take pride in their own muddling through, and mock anyone braver than themselves."

15. The Thick-Black Careerist

Thick-black careerists have occupied the commanding heights of every workplace for years, quietly putting out wildly read guides like "The 10 Things Your Boss Most Loves to Hear" and office-intrigue manuals like "Points to Watch in State-Owned-Enterprise Backstabbing." However punishing the grind, they still serve up soul-soup such as "as long as your heart is in it, the dream is still alive," along with toxic soup such as "the workplace doesn't believe in tears; the truth about internships is that you fetch the takeout." They love teaching you scripts and flattery techniques, and the scripts themselves are either cliché or nonsense.

For example: everyone cares about face, so when you speak you must read the room and the other person's mood, watch your boss and your clients for every flicker of expression, say "but" as little as possible, and replace it with "at the same time" or something similar.

There is also a whole self-contained system of rubbish: 10 secret techniques to "handle" your boss. Step 1, respect your boss. Step 2, treat your boss as a client. Step 3, use your boss... They encourage scheming in every way imaginable, and it may be completely useless, or it may be nothing more than flattery plus small-mindedness.

Thick-black careerists describe the workplace as a battlefield, a palace intrigue, blowing ordinary competition for resources up without limit into a frenzied atmosphere where everyone is in danger and every step must be plotted. They get you to buy vague, vulgar toxic soup: "there are no friends at work, trust someone once and you'll be had"; "the more your boss praises you in front of others, the less you actually get"; "ideals matter, but survival matters more than ideals."

Thick-black careerists work hard and work diligently, taking great pains to custom-build a poisonous fog just for you.

16. The New-Concept Wholesaler

The place selling vegetables, flowers and homeware is a "lifestyle experience store"; anyone who can plate food and apply a filter calls themselves a "lifestyle aesthete." Entrepreneurs push out new concepts faster than new products, every few days. Besides "ecosystem," "closed loop" and "smart+," they always have to manufacture a few more industry soundbites and cram the lot into a slide deck. Take "Move fast and break things," a vague soundbite that has long circulated in startup circles and is meant to convey a spirit of breaking with convention and not fearing failure. To us ordinary people, though, "if you haven't broken anything yet, that only means you're not fast enough" reads like an interim progress note from someone halfway through learning a legendary kung-fu footwork technique. Even people inside the industry can't resist a more down-to-earth reading: the tech entrepreneur Robbie Allen wrote on his personal site that running fast and breaking things sounds an awful lot like a toddler learning to walk.

17. The Person Who Reads Books for You

Anyone who has been to school knows that learning something new means grinding at it. Usually you have to review, preview, practice, apply and digest for quite a while before you have it.

But the audience for paid knowledge products barely meets a threshold at all. They are handed a prescription, one that is foolproof and permanently suited to any semi-literate who falls asleep the moment a serious book opens: "365 yuan a year for 365 books. We read for you, we chew the hard bones and feed them to you, and you will never have to chew for yourself again. You won't even need a mouth of your own."

Paid knowledge feels relaxing and freeing because this easily digestible fast-food knowledge is, at bottom, entertainment in the storyteller's mode — entertainment solemnly packaged as study. Most knowledge purveyors out there have no real expertise behind them, and these middlemen of knowledge are usually skilled at quoting out of context, misreading and misleading: information scraped off Google and Wikipedia gets stitched into an "in-depth must-read" full of technical terms; listing the bold headings of an existing book counts as a premium course; a philosophy course run by an internet celebrity may be produced by someone who first heard of Socrates last Sunday. Because time is short, they always set out a question in the posture of someone delivering a verdict, or pour highly condensed concepts into the reader in place of a thought process. This maxim-style learning cannot produce systematic understanding, but it can produce fervent credulity: "A 10-minute condensed version reads the book for you — become a better you!" "The more you get through, the more you get — you'll have more insight than most people!"

Most people who pay for this half-baked knowledge believe firmly in "no pain, no gain." They spend money to produce the pain, and thereby produce the feeling of gain, arriving at an illusory kind of learning best described as "no pay, no gain." And a great many more, who only wanted to learn to drive, get an adrenaline shot from the ubiquitous slogan "overtake on the curve" and ambitiously forget that they can't even drive yet.

18. The Instant Slash-Career Faction

People who read books for others usually have a side business selling another instant-mastery illusion: buy it, learn it, con with it, all on the spot. They urge users to pick up a smattering of something in a short time, then resell it, vaguely, to someone even less informed.

These people with a smattering of skills are the "instant slash-career faction." They always claim to have mastered, in a very short time and by some special method, skills that take other people years to learn, and that thanks to a method kept secret (pay up and the answer is yours at once) plus their own outstanding talent, they have acquired so many skills in one lifetime that it takes a whole row of slashes to separate them.

They issue inspirational, intimidating calls to action: "Friend, come see how to go from beginner to expert, and from expert to the kind of expert who can produce the tutorials! Fools always assume that if they can't do it, nobody in the world can. Smart people work harder than you! Come and learn now!" And, more tempting still, they hint: "The 999 yuan you spend with us you can con back twice over, immediately!"

Cover image: Lin Xiaoyao

Animated images: GIPHY