Reality Hijacking: Mind Control and Self-Deprivation on 祝融说。

Appendix: Terminology, Chapter Guide, and Notes on Sources

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What Ye's Story Alone Proves

How the conditions of judgment become concentrated in a single interpreter, and how relations open to verification can be restored. This volume belongs to philosophical argument and thought experiment. Terminology, normative requirements, and empirical material play different roles: normative requirements need reasons and counterexamples; empirical conclusions need corresponding research or records; the setting of a story shows only how conditions combine. Writing an empirical claim in the form of "possibly" does not discharge the responsibility to state one's grounds.

The Transfer of Interpretive Authority Across the Three Acts

This volume employs three layers of argument. The first layer is the philosophical thesis of RC: cognition is a gradual, incomplete mapping, and power can appear as the structural concentration of the capacity to converge possibility. The second layer is the bridging hypothesis of this volume: the persistent concentration of material, interpretation, recognition, and exit conditions raises the capacity of a single explanation to sustain itself. The third layer is the empirical judgment: whether a given relationship constitutes sustained control requires support from versions of the rules, source relations, the distribution of authority, temporal patterns, and actual consequences. The upper layer cannot directly prove the lower one.

Chapter 22: In an Apology, Who Owes Ye What

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Chapter Twenty-One finally placed the several versions of the old project on the same table: the original deadlines, the dates later backdated, the copies Ye preserved, and the internal revision records of the coordination group. Once the materials could be checked against one another, Lin proposed convening an apology meeting. Those present, besides Ye and Lin, were Su, who had been responsible for executing the rules, and Zhou, who later took over Ye's original duties. Cen did not attend; she submitted only a written statement of what she had seen at the time.

The meeting invitation read "facing the past together, restoring the relationship." Ye drew a line under the word "together." He had indeed attended every meeting, and at certain moments had chosen silence or continued working; Lin made the rules, Su executed and explained them, and Zhou benefited from the vacated position. They were jointly present, yet they did not jointly hold the same powers. If "everyone participated" is finally translated into "everyone is at fault," the de facto hierarchy of powers will be leveled away by a reconciliation table.

Chapter 23: The First Week Back, and Where Ye Sat

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Chapter Twenty-Two returned the responsibilities between persons to Lin, the coordination group, the knowing beneficiaries, and the blank that remained unverifiable. Once the accounts were settled, Ye's situation did not thereby return to its place. Another imaging team was willing to let him join a new project, and the person in charge also said: "What happened before does not affect how we see you." On his first day back at work, his workstation was placed in the middle of the team; access, equipment, and pay had all been set up. Only one detail was not quite right: on the project sheet, his name appeared under "support personnel," while the shots he was responsible for were credited to someone else.

This file does not evaluate existing employment systems, nor does it offer a personnel plan. Files, appeals, chains of authorization, and institutional review all matter, yet they cannot replace a person's reclamation of a place within concrete relationships. This chapter follows Ye through his first week back at work, watching a few very small things: where he sat, how his words entered the record, whether he could decline an arrangement, and whether the support others provided demanded repayment in gratitude. The organization here is not the end point of the analysis, but the site at which an individual reclaims his place in reality.

Chapter 24: Not Promising Freedom as Never Being Hurt

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During a review of a new project, an error of judgment was identified in Ye's plan, and the rework consumed an entire week of working hours. When a colleague relayed the incident to an external partner, the lapse was recast as his habitual carelessness. At the same time, Cen was preparing to live in another city for half a year, and the two of them needed to renegotiate the arrangement of their shared residence. The old records had been corrected and the new responsibilities carried explicit authority; these changes did not, however, shield Ye from criticism, misunderstanding, and loss.

In this fictional scenario, the improvement of conditions of support and new difficulties arrive together. To judge whether the improvement is meaningful, one cannot merely ask whether Ye still feels distressed, nor simply count how many points of access the institution has added; one must examine separately what losses each matter has caused, what he can do, and which consequences those actions actually change.

Epilogue: The Judgment Must Still Be Made by the Person Concerned

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After leaving the old project, Ye may still delete a doubt he had originally intended to voice, or mistake ordinary disagreement for punishment. For this fictional figure, the significant change is not that hesitation ceases altogether, but that after hesitation there are materials to consult, people willing to explain their reasons, and opportunities to admit that he has misread someone. The old relationship no longer monopolizes interpretation, and the new relationships have not acquired the standing to interpret everything on his behalf.

The hijacking loop proposed in the introduction can here be seen taken apart segment by segment: stable agreements reduce rule drift, cross-checking sources mitigates evidential imbalance, labels no longer acquire cross-domain validity, support is no longer conditional on endorsing a particular narrative, and silence no longer automatically proves compliance. No single change can "cure" the subject on its own; what they accomplish together is the cancellation of any single position's monopoly over the conditions of judgment. The opposite of hijacking is not the implantation of a correct set of beliefs, but the redistribution of experience, records, interpretation, and the consequences of action across multiple positions capable of correcting one another.

Chapter 10: The Withdrawal of Recognition and Relational Pressure

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Being responded to in earnest and having one's contributions acknowledged provides a basis for cooperation. Yet a word of praise does not guarantee that a relationship will endure forever, and a single disagreement does not amount to a negation of the whole person. This chapter distinguishes among these different forms of recognition, and asks when they are bundled together into conditions of compliance.

Recognition likewise cannot become an unlimited obligation. Friends may end a relationship, an organization may reject substandard work, and a group may set boundaries against real harm. Calling every refusal manipulation would cancel the agency of others.

The questions are how recognition is withdrawn, what behaviors the withdrawal is tied to, and whether the subject can retain basic standing while declining to accept a total explanation. We continue the fictional residency project. Ye's "high-attention" label is narrowed in scope upon review, yet he still maintains that the attribution decision was wrong. The mentor no longer criticizes him publicly, saying only that collaboration requires mutual trust. If Ye acknowledges that the dispute arose from his own manner of communication, he may continue participating in core projects; if he accepts only behavioral boundaries while rejecting the explanation of motives, invitations and informal assistance gradually diminish.

Chapter 11: How Counterexamples Are Interpreted as Control Success

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Explanation connects scattered facts into relations on which one can act. Without explanation, a person can only store fragments and cannot judge causes, responsibilities, and next steps. A stable theory also lets many people use a common language instead of starting from zero each time.

An explanation can also acquire a peculiar protection: supporting material proves it correct, opposing material proves that the object is resisting, and the absence of material proves that control has penetrated deep. However reality changes, the theory only accumulates certainty.

Continue the fictional residency project. As the attribution dispute enters independent review, Ye and the organization each hold a narrative. The open version says that the record conflict may arise from process, communication, and interests, and that new version documents would change the judgment. The closed version says that all of Ye's objections stem from "not yet accepting his true self"; his agreement demonstrates the theory's effectiveness, his opposition is defense, and his silence is exposure.

Chapter 12: How the Censor Moves Into One's Own Mind

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When someone explicitly stipulates what may be said and states the consequences of violation, external demands are relatively easy to identify; implicit demands are not necessarily so. Self-censorship is harder to judge. A person who changes a word before speaking, deletes a record, or abandons an action appears on the surface to have suffered no immediate block, and the decision may indeed have been completed by himself; yet the conditions under which the decision formed may already have been altered by long-standing relations of approval, punishment, interpretation, and resources.

Extend this thought experiment to the collaboration after the residency ends. Suppose that Ye provides materials in one review, confirming that a version of the archive is erroneous; the institution corrects the record yet still lists his fierce expression as a "collaboration risk." For the following three months, before attending meetings, he deletes the objections from his notes, first writes a paragraph of endorsement for the project, and only then raises smaller questions. Later, looking back through his notes, he says that some of the deletions and revisions were made so that his requests would be processed, while some omissions had not been noticed by him at the time. This recollection supplies one thread of evidence, which must still be compared with materials left at different times.

Chapter 13: The Distinction Among Conflict, Misunderstanding, and Sustained Control

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The second act now takes up a question more difficult than exposing mechanisms: in real relationships, how does one determine whether what one faces is a conflict of opinion, a misunderstanding that can be clarified, influence that brings pressure, or control that continuously contracts the conditions of judgment. Words applied too lightly let real harm go unnamed; applied too heavily, they recast every quarrel as complete domination, blurring facts, responsibility, and repair alike. Imagine a clearly fictional community documentary project. Ye is responsible for organizing interviews, Zhou for protecting the privacy of interviewees, and Lin for final publication. In one dispute, Zhou demands the deletion of a recording; Ye holds that the material proves the project once made a wrongful promise; Lin fears that publication will cost them funding. Voices rise, and the meeting breaks up acrimoniously. From this conflict alone, one cannot determine who is controlling whom. If Ye can afterwards obtain the original files, propose alternative arrangements, request independent review, and if the dispute affects only this publication, then it more nearly resembles a difficult disagreement within a bounded task. If Lin repeatedly changes the reasons for deletion, ties objections to housing, income, and membership, prevents Ye from contacting others, and uses his protest as evidence that he is "unfit to judge," the nature of the relationship has changed.

Chapter 14: Describing Events Without Characterizing Them

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Chapter Thirteen distinguished conflict, misunderstanding, influence, and sustained control, leaving behind a practical difficulty: people often need to explain to others what happened precisely when the material is most fragmented and the emotions are strongest. If one recounts only uninterpreted details, the listener may not see the relational structure; if from the outset one summarizes with "control," "betrayal," or "manipulation," subsequent materials easily serve only to maintain the label. Ye explained to the independent reviewer: "Lin is punishing me again; he has always wanted to silence me." This sentence expressed Ye's judgment and his sense of danger, yet it did not let the listener know which permission had changed. Replaced with "On Tuesday afternoon, after the meeting, Lin suspended my archive access; the written notice cited a privacy review, with no deadline; the two previous suspensions both occurred after I submitted version objections," the number of verifiable objects increased. The second formulation did not prove control, nor did it cancel the first experience; it gave each level its own place. This chapter does not require the party involved to become an investigator before seeking help, still less does it treat linguistic precision as a qualification for obtaining protection. What it discusses is how institutions, aid workers, and writers can jointly preserve a matter, so that observation remains open to revision, serious risks are not ignored because the evidence is not yet complete, and overall characterization cannot prematurely swallow the unknown.

Chapter 15: Reserving a Place for Contrary Evidence

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Chapter Fourteen decomposed the event into observation, interpretation, consequence, and intention, but the decomposition itself does not guarantee that judgment remains open. A record can be rigorously formatted while preserving only the material that supports an existing conclusion; a procedure can demand evidence endlessly while requiring only the affected party to prove themselves, never examining the claims of those who hold power. Reserving a place for contrary evidence means requiring every high-consequence judgment to state what material would change it, while accepting the responsibility to search for that material. Ye believed that the suspension of her archive access was part of Lin's suppression of dissent over versions. Reviewers later found that another member who had raised no dissent also lost access on the same day, because the storage system had misconfigured a permission group; but after discovering the error, Lin restored everyone else while leaving Ye to wait for additional review. The system failure counts against the interpretation that "the initial suspension was entirely Lin targeting Ye," while the differential restoration supports "the subsequent decision was selective." Contrary evidence did not turn the event into nothing having happened; it changed the shape of the chain of responsibility.

Chapter 16: Why a Reality Check Requires External Relationships

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Chapter 15 required that a place be reserved for contrary evidence, but counterevidence does not appear by will alone. If a person's work, housing, income, principal information, and emotional recognition all pass through the same relationship, then even if he knows he may be wrong, it is difficult to find a place where a different judgment can be carried. The importance of independent relationships lies not in supplying external answers that are forever correct, but in allowing reality to arrive by different paths, so that refusing one explanation does not mean losing one's entire life. After the archive dispute with Lin, the project director, Ye began contacting Cen, an old classmate, a community legal service station, and another film team. Cen knew nothing of the project's details; the service station could only judge procedure; the other team might become a future employer. None of the three relationships was fully neutral, yet none was under Lin's unilateral control. They respectively provided emotional containment, clarification of permissions, and an alternative for work, enabling Ye to examine the materials and to live while his judgment was still incomplete. This chapter does not treat leaving an organization or an intimate relationship as a universal answer, nor does it offer legal, medical, or safety judgments for real cases on the basis of a thought experiment. Independent relationships can protect the subject, but they can also be exploited to gather information, expand factions, or establish new dependencies. What requires critical analysis is the topology of relationships, their resources, permissions, and consequences — not the automatic identification of the "external" with freedom.

Chapter 17: Why Leaving Is a Reality Check

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Chapter Sixteen let Ye regain contact with people and materials outside the project. External relationships made another interpretation possible, yet they left behind a sharper question: when Ye prepared to leave, would he first have to accept Lin's interpretation of the dispute before being permitted to leave with his own records?

After the archive dispute, Lin offered three options: continue in the original position, convert to a short-term consultant, or terminate the collaboration immediately. The three options appeared to preserve choice. Yet an attached note stated that only by confirming that "the earlier dispute arose from a personal failure of understanding" could Ye obtain a complete certificate of his work; if he refused to confirm, the project would issue only a departure record that omitted his specific contributions.

Chapter 18: Can the Helper Become a New Interpreter

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Chapter Seventeen treated departure as a reality check: after the relationship ends, whether the materials can stand independently, whether unresolved disputes can continue to be verified, and whether Ye can complete the handover without accepting a single narrative. The exit is thus already open, yet it does not automatically restore the whole of judgment and the capacity for living. Ye still needed housing, income, assistance with the files, emotional containment, and professional opinion. Aid is not the dispensable business of a bystander; but supporters who control resources, language, and procedure may also, in goodwill, acquire total interpretive authority over Ye's experience. The service station assigned the advisor Su to assist Ye, Cen provided temporary lodging, and the peer team offered short-term work. All three wished to reduce risk, yet each raised different demands: Su suggested that all communication pass through her, Cen believed Ye should make the project's problems public, and the peers hoped to confirm as soon as possible that he would bring no controversy. Each demand may have a legitimate object, and each may also expand aid from limited support into new conditions of loyalty, transparency, and obedience.

Chapter 19: Starting Again from Local Predictability

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At the end of Chapter 18, Ye's assistance relationships had already contracted into limited services: Su retained only the role of archive and deadline consultant, Cen's residence rules concerned shared living alone, and the peer team evaluated him on his work materials. Lin no longer issued any demands to him, and the project gave no new instructions for his daily life. By intuition, control ought to end when the controller exits the scene. Yet when Ye wrote messages to new colleagues he would still first delete the sentences that carried doubts, still pause at the sound of keys at the door, and still rehearse the worst outcomes before filling out an ordinary form. The external executor had left, but the execution continued. Taking these fictional reactions as its setting, this chapter discusses which relational conditions supporters can change: how agreements are honored, how feedback is verified, and whether the person concerned can pause or raise objections. The "action-feedback unit" is a scale for analyzing agreements, not a unit of measurement for psychological recovery. Chapters 19 through 21 discuss respectively the supporting conditions of relationships, of body and time, and of records; they prescribe no order of precedence for recovery.

Chapter 20: Rebuilding Command over Body and Time

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At the end of Chapter 19, Ye's recovery list already contained a set of honored minimal units; the same chapter also left two unresolved questions: what the physiological basis of bodily rhythm as a source of feedback is; and why, when temporal margin is zero and the cost of failure too high to test, repair must move to the level of conditions. At bottom these two questions are one and the same — command over body and time. Ye still wakes punctually at the hour the old project began, still saves materials requiring a clear head for late at night, and still finds, in noisy settings, that he cannot hold onto a complete sentence. The units are recovering, while the body and time that carry the units still retain the shape of the old arrangement. This chapter discusses the relation between bodily states and the conditions of judgment, and how these conditions are occupied within relationships of control. The characters and plot remain fictional. The causal claims concerning sleep, fatigue, memory, and sensory load are empirical claims and are not exempt from evidentiary requirements merely by being called "mechanisms"; the discussion below keeps separate what general research can support from the specific stipulations of the thought experiment, and does not use them to judge any individual's state of health.

Chapter 21: Verifiable Memory and the Shared Record

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While sorting out the deadlines of an old project, Ye found that he remembered three months, while the copy Su kept stated two. The support arrangements described earlier improved his conditions for checking the materials; they did not, on that account, determine which account was correct. This chapter continues with the fictional characters and projects to discuss how limited judgments are formed when memory and records conflict; the episodes here are not used to indicate what clinical effects anyone's memory has suffered.

Chapter Nineteen concerned predictable arrangements in the environment, and Chapter Twenty concerned decision rights over bodily and temporal arrangements. The shared record introduces a further task: how to make claims about the past capable of being checked, without turning the custodian of the archive into a new total interpreter.

Chapter 5: The Conditions of Observation in Relations of Dependency

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The fifth case file was the first that Ye could not close merely by checking a single sentence: the entry point for material was itself held in the hands of the person being questioned. Human beings do not begin to observe the world only after achieving complete independence. We depend on language, the testimony of others, housing, income, care, and shared facilities before we possess the time and the material that many judgments require. Dependency can enlarge cognitive capacity; it can also allow a particular relationship to control the entry point of information, the cost of rebuttal, and the consequences for life.

Imagine a fictional community that provides temporary lodging in an old hotel. The resident Gu moved in for three months while his original dwelling was under repair. The coordinator Shen was responsible for keys, repair notices, shared expenses, and applications for extended stays. Gu needed this information to arrange his work and his life, and he also needed Shen to forward problems to the management group.

Chapter 6: How a Corrigible Self Is Established

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Ye spread the first five files across the same table and found that in each of them someone had said "you may be wrong," yet only a few responses specified which judgment was wrong, on what grounds, and how it should be revised. Only from this did the capacity that Act One truly seeks to establish come into view: the corrigible self is not a person who never errs, nor a prudent observer perpetually ready to overturn himself. It is able to form tentative judgments, to know which question such a judgment answers, to allow relevant materials to change it, and, when no new materials are forthcoming, to stop re-examining and return to action and to life.

The preceding five chapters took up, in turn, confirmation by others, fact and interpretation, language, emotion, and dependence. Together they show that self-judgment is completed neither in an inner citadel sealed off from the world, nor by delegation to relationships, records, or authorities; the subject needs external materials and feedback from others, while retaining a position of participation in how materials enter a conclusion and how the conclusion accepts correction.

Chapter 7: Rules Always Change After Yesterday

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Rule changes do not inherently harm the subject. When new facts emerge, when material conditions shift, or when an old arrangement reveals its defects, reasonable revision can make shared life more reliable. The question is whether, after a rule changes, a person can still know which actions bring which consequences, whether past judgments can be understood under the conditions that held at the time, and whether raising a discrepancy will enter the next round of correction.

Consider a fictional shared studio. Members had to reserve equipment for evening use; the original rule required registration one day in advance. A month later, the coordination group required confirmation in the group chat as well; two weeks after that, a further stipulation declared that failing to reply to a reminder within two hours before use would trigger automatic cancellation. Ye, a member, acted each time according to the rules he had seen, yet across four reservations two were cancelled, on one occasion he was criticized for monopolizing resources, and on another his asking in advance was described as excessive anxiety.