Middle School Essay Competition

Middle School Essay Competition What can literature teach us about ethics and how to live a good life?

Zakariya Tanweer (10M2) on The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

The Three-Body Problem teaches human beings what living well actually means and how to pursue a meaningful life through its vast scope of hundreds of years. Throughout this essay, I will be covering how Cixin Liu teaches us this.

Cixin Liu uses worldbuilding to represent our world on a massive scale, through the amplification of space and time. Usually, writers try to keep their worlds small and specify only necessities, but from the mass riots in the cultural revolution to the hectic meetings of world leaders, Liu always manages to downplay the protagonists. Each individual has a minute part to play in the vast and eventually pointless attempt to save the world, but they

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each build on each other and get closer and closer to achieving their goal.

At first reading, the writer seems to have a very nihilistic view on life, but I believe Cixin’s most criticized chapter holds the true meaning behind this. Throughout the simulation of the unsolvable three-body problem, each “scientist” tries their own way to solve the weather cycle, ending in failure until they start building off each other to create somewhat more productive systems and calendars.

Through this incorporation of astrophysics, Cixin Liu shows that scientific discoveries are built off each other, and society is a result of layers and layers of different ideologies built on top of each other, which we sometimes forget when we talk about “more evolved countries”. In reality, if one were to attempt to solve such a problem on one’s own, the solution would be quite primitive and more likely to be coincidental rather than based on rationality. Here is a good analogy: Ludolph van Ceulen (the man who spent his entire life calculating pi to a few decimal places in a very inefficient manner)… people like him try to rely on their own knowledge rather than looking at the application of theories and ideas from others within the contemporary and past community. Sure, we have advanced from the mathematicians who used to hoard formulae for wealth, but Cixin Liu also shows how global communication and lack of sovereignty is needed to achieve peace.

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A full-on Communist revolution is not the idea I am suggesting; the writer was not particularly supportive of the communist revolution, since it displaced his family. Liu even goes as far as to condemn Mao’s “cultural revolution”, in the first chapter on 2 bases: that it had a nationalist identity and that it aimed to destroy anything that was remotely contradictory.

Instead, the society which Liu suggests in The Dark Forest is somewhat more idealistic – bland maybe, but idealistic. The idea that culture and religion can be separated from politics is a believable notion, but to achieve such a thing would mean the co-existence of different religions and cultures, which does not seem plausible due to their contradictory nature. Rather we should foster rivalry within constructive parameters which would prevent any cultural or religious identity from being undermined.

Religious groups often see themselves as charitable organizations. If they all stopped pointing guns at each other and trying to make their names in charitable acts, two things would happen: 1) They might actually carry out the will of God by helping others; 2) They would remove the ridiculous justification that religion causes war and fighting from people’s minds, and, even better, getting rid of the stigma on religion due to it being “too dated” and “anti-modern” – an idea propagated by conflict between religions in addition to political integration. People need

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to understand religion and science (the modern-day world) are not mutually exclusive.

The international law proposed in The Dark Forest follows something of an anarchistic ideology, providing quite a fluid and interpretable law system that accommodates for most views on how to live life; however, rather than being built on trust and rationality, it is built on social stigma and moral aptitude on an individual level. The more common “trust and rationality” approach to anarchism is kept on a global level, as relations are more strategic and thought out.

The most obvious benefit of a society like this, is the abolishment of defeatism. In the first book, the greatest problem and threat to society is this lack of trust in authoritative power as world leaders try to suppress waves of defeatism. Why is this rebellion not present in the latter stages of the series? Well, this is because of the fundamental anarchistic idea that people are more likely to feel threatened and question the power system when they feel that they have lost power to a governmental body. But the governmental body in The Dark Forest seems to be ethereal and does not pose this threat.

I have talked about the wider scope for human society and life, but in essence Liu’s message for the reader here is to condemn ideas that radicalize society by undermining people in any number, whether they are a minority, or a majority, and look at the bigger picture. How

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can you the individual contribute to society in a meaningful way? You probably aren’t going to be running around threatening multi-dimensional nuclei with a more paranoid version of the fermi paradox, but still remember that the best way to improve yourself and your ideas is learning from the successes and failures of others and by standing on their shoulders.

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