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Hello and welcome to today’s episode.
Recently, the victory of Suqian Team in the Super League has brought He Rundong’s portrayal of Xiang Yu back into public attention.
Meanwhile, the so-called “Foundation General” has once again become the target of public criticism.
Most of us are familiar with Xiang Yu, but who is this “Foundation General”?
The term refers to a male actor in a historical drama who plays a military general, yet goes to battle with a flawless, pale, heavily made-up face—completely lacking the roughness, weathering, and ruggedness expected of a warrior on the battlefield.
As soon as the image appeared, nearly all criticism, mockery, and blame fell directly on the actor himself:
not masculine enough, unprofessional, unwilling to suffer, only caring about looking good.
Using this story, today we will explore a more fundamental, cold, and honest truth about how society really works:
Why does all the anger, all the conflict, and all the blame that should be directed at systems and those in power end up precisely targeting the most innocent, powerless, yet most visible person?
This is not simply a case of “the audience not knowing the full story.”
It is a complete, sophisticated, and even cruel mechanism of power operation and emotional transfer.
To make it clear and relatable, let’s start with two workplace scenarios almost everyone has seen or experienced firsthand.
The first scenario:
A leader makes an unpopular, even unreasonable decision—such as mandatory weekend overtime, unrealistic KPIs, or rigid, one-size-fits-all rules.
Yet the leader never announces it personally, never explains to the team, and never accepts pushback.
Instead, the leader simply asks a secretary or assistant to pass the message to everyone.
Everyone knows full well that this is not the secretary’s decision—it comes from the boss.
But the problem is, you cannot reach the leader directly.
You cannot see them, argue with them, or express your frustration to their face.
The only person you can talk to, vent to, and complain about is the messenger: the secretary.
So all resentment, anger, and doubt are directed straight at them.
People will tell the secretary, “Go tell the boss this is unreasonable.”
But few ever understand:
The reason the leader uses the secretary is not to listen to feedback, but to isolate themselves completely.
If the secretary honestly reports the team’s anger, the leader will not change the decision—instead, they will blame the secretary for being unable to keep things under control, for being immature, for not handling the job.
Meanwhile, when the team sees their demands ignored and nothing changes, they only grow angrier—and the blame still lands on the secretary.
The secretary has done nothing wrong.
They only pass along messages and carry out orders.
Yet they become a human shield for those in power, the center of conflict, and a punching bag from both sides.
The second scenario is even more subtle and heartbreaking:
A leader assigns a colleague to manage materials and distribute documents.
Everyone knows this colleague is in charge.
But privately, the leader tells them: strictly control the quantity, hand out only the assigned amount, do not give extra, do not allow random requests.
This critical instruction is never shared with the rest of the team.
Then conflict arises.
Someone asks for extra documents for backup, and the colleague refuses, following the leader’s order.
That one refusal triggers an immediate outburst:
We’re all equal colleagues. These are company supplies, not yours.
Why are you being so strict?
You’ve got a little authority and suddenly you’re somebody important?
You’re abusing your power over nothing.
Even if the colleague tries to explain that the leader ordered this, no one believes them.
Even if some do believe it, the resentment remains.
If they give in to everyone, the leader will hold them accountable for poor management.
If they follow the rules, colleagues resent them for overreacting and being difficult.
They are stuck no matter what.
Their only “mistake” is standing at the front line, as the only visible person carrying out the job.
These two scenarios follow exactly the same logic as the public backlash against the “Foundation General.”
In the film and television industry, the real decision-makers are investors, platforms, producers, directors, and the entire creative and styling team.
They set the aesthetic, approve makeup and costumes, define characters, and decide on-screen presentation.
They demand actors look delicate, pale, and marketable—forbidding weathering, roughness, or “unflattering” battle damage.
The people who truly decide why the general looks like he’s wearing heavy foundation stay entirely behind the scenes: invisible, silent, and free from public pressure.
The actor, however, is only a passive executor.
They follow styling arrangements, obey directors, and comply with the entire industrial process.
They have no authority to make themselves look tanned, dirty, or rugged on their own, nor can they fight against an entire established system.
But the audience cannot see those hidden decision-makers.
All the audience sees is the face, the image, the actor on screen.
And so, all frustration with unrealistic dramas, disgust with capital-driven aesthetics, disappointment with increasingly fake historical shows, and collective obsession with “masculinity”—all emotions that should target the system, the rules, and the power-holders behind the scenes—completely bypass those truly responsible and pour down on the actor.
Behind this lies a clear strategy: the invisibility of power.
In any hierarchical structure, the core strategy for power to operate stably, safely, and without obstruction is for decision-makers to actively hide, turning personal will into impersonal rules, notices, procedures, and norms, creating an insulating layer between decision-making and execution.
If a leader personally announces an unpopular decision, conflict becomes personal.
If investors and directors step forward, public anger targets them directly.
That is why power must stay hidden, removing itself from direct friction and confrontation.
The person at the front line—the secretary, the colleague managing supplies, the actor—automatically becomes a physical container for power, the visible scapegoat for the entire system.
Emotion follows a brutally realistic logic:
I cannot punish an invisible will, so I punish the visible body in front of me.
Confronting leaders, fighting capital, or questioning platforms is too costly, too risky, and largely ineffective.
But attacking a secretary, an equal colleague, or a celebrity actor carries almost no cost, provides strong psychological safety, and even delivers an illusory sense of justice and resistance from a moral high ground.
On a deeper level, this mechanism achieves an even more subtle deflection of conflict:
turning vertical hierarchical opposition into horizontal interpersonal conflict.
In the workplace, the real conflict is vertical—between employees and unfair systems, between frontline staff and top-level decisions.
This kind of conflict is sharp and potentially destabilizing to the structure.
Yet through the filter of frontline executors, conflict is quietly redefined into petty friction between colleagues, between employees and secretaries.
The same happens in public opinion.
What the audience should truly confront is the hegemony of capital-driven aesthetics, lazy industry production, and the erosion of content by traffic logic—a vertical conflict between the public and the entertainment industrial system.
But this opposition is too big, too powerless, and too abstract.
So the system automatically replaces it, turning “audience vs. the system” into “audience vs. a single actor.”
Criticism becomes personal attack.
Questioning becomes moral judgment.
Anger becomes safe mockery.
The most sophisticated defense of any system is not eliminating conflict, but dismantling it.
Low-intensity, emotionally charged, harmless internal bickering dissolves the sharp force that could otherwise challenge the rules themselves.
In the end, those in power remain untouched, gaining profit while avoiding blame.
Frontline executors alone bear all stigma, hostility, and emotional violence.
Even more despairing, those caught in the middle are trapped in a black hole of feedback.
People naturally assume secretaries can report feedback, colleagues can communicate, and actors can give input.
But when decisions are already fixed, so-called feedback channels are not for gathering information—they are only pressure valves for emotion.
Grassroots opinions and public dissatisfaction, when passed to decision-makers, are never used to improve policies.
They only measure how much frustration people can bear.
Reporting upward leads to being labeled as provocative or incompetent.
Staying silent and making no changes leads to being seen as a puppet of power.
They are the weakest load-bearing walls in the system, crushed between the weight of authority above and public anger below.
Cracks always appear first on them, and sacrifice always falls first on them.
By now, we have seen the coldest truth of all:
In a hierarchical, anonymous, assembly-line system,
whoever is exposed at the front bears all responsibility;
whoever hides in the depths reaps all benefits.
The audience blames the actor not because they are truly responsible, but because they are the most visible, safest target for emotion.
Employees resent colleagues and secretaries not because they have done something wrong, but because they are the only reachable targets.
It is not that we cannot see the truth.
It is simply that we can only see what is visible,
only hold accountable what is reachable,
only fire at concrete individuals—
and are powerless to fight abstract systems.
This public trial of the “Foundation General” is essentially a form of collective psychological compensation.
We cannot shake the rules, confront power, or change a massive industry ecosystem.
So we seize the weakest, most visible, most defenseless individual, carrying out a symbolic revenge that only comforts ourselves.
This logic repeats in every workplace, every public debate, every system and organization we live in.
The secretary is innocent.
The colleague managing supplies is innocent.
The actor is not necessarily at fault.
The fault lies in a structure that always makes the weak carry the sins of the strong,
the executors take the blame for decision-makers,
and the visible pay for the invisible.
And every one of us, at some point, may become the person pushed to the front, standing in the line of fire.
Staying clear-minded is not about making excuses.
It is about pausing for a second before anger takes over:
Is the person I am blaming right now the one who made the rules—
or just an innocent person pushed in front of me?
Do not let your emotions be easily manipulated by structures.
Do not let judgment become nothing but the comfort of the powerless.
Thank you for listening.
We’ll see you next time.
