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Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #23 Calling A Stag A Horse (指鹿为马)
Deliberately confounding right and wrong
This article is one of the “Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals” series.
A True Story
～200BC, from Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian.
In Qin dynasty, there was a powerful and evil counsellor named Zhao Gao. Zhao Gao wanted to rebel, but he didn’t know how many people in the court would stand by his side. So he worked out a way to test the officials.
He presented a deer as a tribute to the emperor in front of the royal court and said that it was a swift horse. The emperor did not accept his statement and said, “This is obviously a deer.”
Zhao Gao turned to the court and asked, “Is this a deer or a horse?” In the court, those who didn’t dare to go against Zhao Gao agreed with him and said that it was a horse. Those who dared to go against Zhao Gao said that it was a deer.
Zhao Gao singled out the officials who didn’t agree with him and persecuted them. There were only officials who supported him remained on the court. He solidified his power in this way.
The Meaning
Zhao Gao deliberately confounded right and wrong. People use this idiom to describe someone who calls white black.
I told the story (real history) to my daughter when she was about 6 years old. She couldn’t believe that this actually happened in history.
Examples in Software Development
At the workspace, there are no life-or-death situations in this idiom story. However, when seeing obvious lies or nonsense, most people keep their mouths shut: Don’t care.
Once I worked at a large firm with 500+ employees in its IT division. The chief agile coach told the CIO that they had a Continuous Testing process that runs about 980 automated end-to-end tests for our main web app every night. This poor CIO believed it and announced this…
