Composition Is a Worldview

Composition is a worldview.

Sometimes I find other people’s choices hard to understand. But often the problem is not that a single judgment has gone astray; it is that the entire worldview behind it no longer shares the same coordinate system. Everyone is effectively making decisions while holding only one corner of the whole map. So right or wrong, there will always be gains and losses. Some people simply see more of the terrain, and therefore hold heavier chips in their hands.

As someone trained in engineering, I have to know and admit this: the world is not determined by technology alone, still less does it revolve only around my own skills. I may understand a particular domain better, and I may make a living from it, but that does not mean other forms of knowledge cannot help me live more deeply, more steadily, and more freely.

I cannot have professional competence alone while keeping only a thin, superficial image of society, politics, and economics. Skill is only one dimension of a person. The barrel that can truly hold water is a rich and layered structure of knowledge; the capacity and disposition for continuous learning are the source that keeps it evergreen.

As for those who choose to dance on what I take to be a sinking ship, I do not think there is much to reproach. But if they have thought it through, they are warriors; if they have not, they are almost martyrs. I have always believed that what moves us about a person is never how much suffering they have encountered, but the resilience and courage they still show when facing it.

That is why, in works of art and literature, even when sacrifice and tragedy appear in various forms, some people inspire reverence and astonishment because they act while knowing the impossibility before them. Others leave only regret and elegy, because before they have understood the road that brought them there, they have already stopped, obscurely and irreversibly.

Similarly, the radiance of morality does not lie in obedience to discipline, but in the active choice of love, goodness, and justice under conditions of freedom. To react reflexively because of chastity doctrines absorbed since childhood is the posture of a Little Pink. To have seen the darkest and deepest side of things, and still choose to act, is to be a patriot.

Likewise, a choice may be a form of courage in facing reality; it may also be nothing more than a low waterline of cognition, an almost total blankness in the relevant field of knowledge. There is no ready-made right or wrong here. Everyone merely pushes down their chips and entrusts their wish to time. Merits and faults across the ages will be judged by those who come after; one need only do one’s own work well.