Mr. Zhao Tingyang pointed out in "Bad World Research: Political Philosophy as the First Philosophy": As long as a world has the two conditions of human selfishness and resource scarcity, the world is a bad world. Human selfishness and scarcity of resources have led to all the joys and sorrows of human life and the history of success and failure that are worth thinking about and talking about. In a bad real world, the most mundane and important issue is politics. Most issues related to politics are ultimately about power and interests, that is, how people obtain the power and interests they can obtain.
"How can I obtain the benefit that I may have? This is the simplest and the most difficult question. The difficulty in obtaining the benefit that I may have is that I can't get the benefit at all without the consent of others." Others are the source of all the problems in life. The strength and possible resistance of others is the ultimate reason why people give up stealing and rob. If you kill others, you may also be killed. Moreover, killing does not make your life meaningful. This book studies the reasons and principles of political legitimacy at the level of political philosophy, discusses the system that determines people's destiny, and key issues in political science such as freedom, justice, rights, and power. In this book, Mr. Zhao Tingyang not only discusses how to develop a certain system to ensure the acceptable life proposed in "On Possible Life", but also advances the theory of Tianxia proposed in "The System of Tianxia". What is even more commendable is that this book integrates the thinking of Chinese and Western political philosophy. It does not stick to the "rituals of Zhou Gong" and does not only respect the sages of Western philosophy. It even selects some "wise and erroneous views" in the history of philosophy for analysis to cope with the increasingly complex political reality.
"This book is more useful than Machiavelli's book, where Machiavelli taught only bad things. I try to reveal how to deal with a bad world," says the author.
