this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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"Diary of a madman" is a short story from 1918 by Chinese author Lu Xun. It describes a man who falls ill and begins to read Confucian texts obsessively until, to his horror, he can see the words "Eat People" written between the lines. It's a timeless classic about the horror that comes from awakening to an unjust culture, realizing how all the pillars of your society have licensed it, and even your friends and neighbors are complicit in supporting that which everyone knows to be self-evidently wrong (Cannibalism, which the publisher notes reveal is not entirely a delusional hallucination or a metaphor, but an actual social ill taking place then)
The narrator continues to unravel as he next realizes his own complicity within soceity, but as foretold in the prologue, ends optimistically, with him resolving to struggle to build a fair soceity for future generations and finally recovering from his illness and leaving his village to serve as an official.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1918/04/x01.htm