Time & Perspective Quote by Lu Xun

Suspicion, in Lu Xun's hands, isn’t paranoia; it’s a civic muscle. He wrote in an era when China was being carved up by imperial powers and convulsed by internal decay, and he distrusted the soothing stories that let people endure humiliation as normal. So he grants suspicion a kind of moral legitimacy: to doubt official narratives, inherited traditions, and polite consensus is not “a fault” but a necessary starting point for waking up.

The blade turns in the second sentence. Lu Xun isn’t romanticizing permanent skepticism as sophistication. “All the time without coming to a conclusion” is aimed at a particularly modern (and particularly Chinese, in his May Fourth context) pathology: the educated observer who sees through everything and commits to nothing. Endless suspicion can become a refuge from responsibility, a way to posture as enlightened while avoiding the risks of judgment, action, and solidarity. In that sense, “defect” reads less like a personal quirk than a social failure: a public stuck in analysis, privately convinced nothing can change.

Rhetorically, the quote works because it reframes doubt as unfinished work. Suspicion is permitted only if it moves somewhere: toward diagnosis, toward clarity, toward choosing a side. Lu Xun’s subtext is impatient and strategic. He’s not asking for blind faith; he’s demanding intellectual courage - the willingness to stop circling, name the illness, and accept the consequences of the cure.