npd

Twelve years after their breakup, the two of them opened the same diagnostic manual and pointed at each other.

The manual listed nine criteria; you need five to qualify as NPD. The two argued until the whole internet was watching. Neither of them ever counted even one of the criteria. Then again, nobody asked them to.

Wu Zhihong published three long posts in a row. He said that for the ten-odd years since their breakup, the other person had kept hinting in her writing that he had NPD. He had tried to talk to her privately. It didn’t work. So he went public and asked her to avoid conflicts of interest. At the end of his post, he posed a question: Which of them was more likely to have NPD?

Li Xue responded that evening. She said her articles about men’s psychology were based on observing all kinds of men and drawing conclusions from what she saw—with Teacher Wu Zhihong as the exception. Then she praised him as a man with immense love in his heart, a rare find in this lifetime. The rest was all self-deprecation: poor health, laziness, receiving four or five packages a day.

Taken on its own, it sounds like an apology. Read together, it’s a verdict.

The harshest part has nothing to do with who’s right or wrong. Once those three letters are uttered, the person they’re aimed at has no clean way out. One of the core traits is supposedly a lack of self-awareness. Admit it, and you’ve confirmed it. Deny it, and that’s a symptom. Say nothing, and you’re refusing to respond. All three roads lead to the same piece of paper.

That private conversation was doomed to fail. In a language that can’t be falsified, any response becomes new evidence. When a conversation reaches a dead end, all that’s left is to call someone out in public—because a public trial at least gives the audience a chance to vote with its volume.

Many people think this is just two intellectuals falling out. What’s really worth noticing is that this vocabulary has been around on the Chinese internet for only a decade or so, yet spread so fast that hardly anyone stopped to ask: What gives you the right to use it?

A proper diagnosis has prerequisites. The first is qualification. Article 29 of China’s Mental Health Law says that a diagnosis of a mental disorder must be made by a licensed psychiatrist. Article 23 of the same law is even more explicit: psychological counselors may not provide psychotherapy or diagnose or treat mental disorders. Authors who write books about psychology don’t even come close to meeting that standard.

The second is being there in person. There’s a rule called the Goldwater rule, which dates back to the 1964 presidential election. A magazine called Fact asked 12,356 psychiatrists whether presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was psychologically fit to be president. 2,417 responded. The cover printed just one sentence: 1,189 believed he was unfit. It didn’t mention the more than 9,000 who hadn’t said a word, or the 657 who said he was fit.

Hide the denominator, and the remaining number stops being the result of a survey. It becomes testimony. Testimony signed by people who never took the stand. Goldwater won his lawsuit, the magazine was bankrupted by the damages, and in 1973 the rule was written into the ethics code.

The third is time. A personality disorder requires a stable pattern that begins in early adulthood and holds across different contexts. Can behavior within a single relationship fill five of those nine criteria? Not even close.

There’s something interesting about this fight. The two accounts don’t line up, yet everything both sides have put forward is verifiable. Wu Zhihong posted a timeline: his book came out in 2007, they got together in 2008, they split in 2014, and his income didn’t rise until he started a column in 2017. Li Xue posted that she receives four or five packages a day and has 1.78 million followers.

On one side are verifiable dates; on the other, an unverifiable personality. After twenty years of history, the only thing they can put on the table and cross-examine each other about is the timeline. Each side has its own story about who gave more back then. Outsiders can’t actually verify the third piece of evidence.

I’d rather see it as something else. On the Chinese internet, those three letters stopped being a diagnostic term long ago. They’ve become a format for making accusations. The format’s defining feature is that whoever fills in the blanks needs no qualifications, doesn’t have to be present, and bears no responsibility.

We’ve already seen this play out on-chain, in an even purer form.

An analytics company labels an address “North Korean hacker” or “mixer.” Once the label is attached, exchanges freeze it and users steer clear. The whole thing happens without a court judgment or any chance to appeal. If the person being labeled wants to say it wasn’t them, they first have to prove they aren’t the owner of that address. Since addresses are anonymous, that statement is technically impossible to make.

The on-chain world also has something public opinion doesn’t: signatures and timestamps. An address can sign a message to prove that it really controls the private key. Transaction records are public: who moved how much, where, and when can’t be denied. From day one, Bitcoin’s ledger has recorded just one thing. It doesn’t ask about motives, judge anyone’s character, or assign scores to addresses.

The chain can’t prove what kind of person you are. It can prove what you’ve done. There’s no field on-chain for personality.

The next time you see “So-and-so has NPD” or “That address is a hacker,” ask three questions first: Who said it? Were they there? Are they qualified? If even one answer is missing, treat it as an opinion.

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#NPD #亲密关系 #On-chain labels