The Obligation to Wake Others

Author: Dexin Kong
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3831-5725
Structured and refined with assistance from ChatGPT
AI Automatic Translation (Unreviewed)

Discussion

Many forms of harm do not come from malice.

After The Person Pretending to Sleep, more questions slowly began to emerge.

“You can never wake someone who is pretending to sleep.”

The phrase seems to carry a kind of natural correctness.

In reality, what people see may only be a movement, a scene, a reaction, a statement, or a result.

And once the judgment of “pretending to sleep” is established, many things immediately become simpler and easier.

There is no longer a need to keep observing, to continue communicating, or to further investigate the facts.

Because: “The problem has already been confirmed.”

Yet the very idea of an “obligation to wake others” also contains many hidden assumptions:

• I am awake
• The other person is asleep
• I have already seen the truth
• I know the correct way to handle the situation

More complicated still, human vision itself has boundaries.

What people see is often only a “projection” of reality obtained from where they happen to stand.

That projection is real. But it is still only a part of reality, not the whole of it.

And when people decide, through that projection, that someone is “asleep,” they may, out of conscience, responsibility, or a commitment to what they believe is “right,” try to “wake” those “sleeping people.”

Many people remember the movie quote: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

But “responsibility” is not only about “saving the world,” “defending justice,” or even “fighting aliens” in some heroic sense.

It also means: “self-reflection” and “self-restraint.”

Perhaps the real difficulty is not “how to wake others,”

but rather: “stopping for one minute before making the decision.”

Note:
This project is an ongoing independent research effort developed in spare time.
Because of limited time and maintenance capacity,
English documents may contain translation inaccuracies or semantic deviations from the original Chinese texts.
The Chinese version remains the primary reference whenever ambiguity exists.