The Vicious Cycle of “Forcing good to becoming bad ” in Human Society

In many unrelated fields one can observe the same tendency. People who insist on honesty, who are willing to pay a price for long-term value, and who keep their independent judgment tend to bear higher costs; people who are good at pleasing, skilled at packaging, and adept at exploiting gaps in the rules obtain more reward at lower cost. Often none of this is the result of anyone’s explicit decision. This book borrows the folk idiom “bi liang wei chang” (逼良为娼, literally “forcing a decent person into prostitution”) to name this predicament, and turns it into a problem that can be analyzed systematically: what structure of pressure makes what kind of people give up what kind of principles, and to what extent? The core of the book is the theory of civilizational adverse selection. When a society’s mechanisms of reward, selection and feedback persistently raise the relative fitness of harmful behavior and lower the relative fitness of honesty, long-termism, responsibility and independent judgment, the society not only produces harmful behavior; it gradually selects the behaviors, individuals, organizations and cultures best adapted to that environment. Around this theory the book advances three original theories: the theory of civilizational adverse selection explains how a society selects its people; the theory of second-order responsibility distinguishes responsibility for behavior from responsibility for the environment of choice; and the Principle of No Forced Compromise turns an ethical slogan into a standard for evaluating institutions. The book has six parts and twenty-four chapters. The Problem part defines the concepts and examines what existing theories cover. The Mechanism part uses replicator dynamics and multilevel selection to describe the process of selection, and joins six distortions (of incentive, metric, information, responsibility, time and mimesis) with five stages (individual adaptation, competitive diffusion, rule alienation, moral inversion and civilizational adverse selection) into a single dynamic chain. The Validation part applies a uniform thirteen-variable template to test the same mechanism in four fields: capital, power, knowledge and technology. The Civilization part develops a philosophical critique through freedom, reason, responsibility and value inversion. The Refutation part confronts the existence of those who do not fall, successful institutions and the strongest objections, and proposes four falsifiable propositions. The Reconstruction part discusses the negative-feedback civilization and artificial intelligence as a new accelerator, introduces the Natural Cybernetics of the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology (LYGC) as a constraining layer for civilization, and finally arrives at a minimum ethics of civilization composed of seven principles and five tests. The book insists that the value of a theory depends on whether it can be refuted. The case analyses are analytical arguments, not statistical proofs; LYGC’s interpretation of the Dao De Jing is a testable philosophical reconstruction and does not claim to recover Laozi’s historical meaning. The conclusion of the book is a restrained one: a civilization cannot guarantee that everyone is a saint, but it should at least ensure that goodness does not become a systematic disadvantage.