Hello, I'm Zhan Qingyun.

This program has mentioned the social contract many times.

When people come together, make a social contract, and establish rules for shared life, we enter a legal society governed by the rule of law in the modern sense. Before that, we lived in a state of nature governed only by natural law.

Schools of thought interpret natural law very differently, but it does not mean the laws of nature in the everyday sense—the strong devouring the weak or survival of the fittest. It means basic principles derived through human reason.

Now that nearly all of us live in societies under the rule of law, are there still people who live in a state of nature, subject to natural law rather than the law of civilized society?

Some believe there are, under exceptional circumstances.

You may remember Ang Lee's film Life of Pi. In it, Pi, an Indian boy traveling by ship to Canada with his family, is caught in a shipwreck and thrown onto a lifeboat full of animals, because his family ran a zoo and was transporting many animals to Canada.

Pi ends up on the boat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After a long and fantastic voyage, he is finally rescued.

When representatives of the Japanese shipping company visit Pi in hospital to learn what happened, he tells the animal version: the hyena killed the zebra and orangutan, and the Bengal tiger killed the hyena. From then on, Pi drifted with the tiger.

When they finally reached shore, the tiger—his closest companion—left without looking back.

The shipping company's representatives do not believe the story and repeatedly demand the truth, so Pi tells its human version.

The supposed zebra and hyena were actually a sailor and the cook. The cook killed the sailor and then Pi's mother, so Pi killed the cook. The hyena was the cook, the zebra the sailor, and the orangutan the mother. The tiger that supposedly drifted beside him was Pi himself—a projection of his animal nature and instinct.

Both the writer interviewing Pi and the shipping company ultimately choose to record the animal version instead of the cruel story of humans killing humans.

It is a film I love, and there has been much discussion about what the tiger symbolizes. The usual view is that it represents the animal instinct within us.

When Pi reaches shore and is saved, the tiger leaves him as he returns to the embrace of civilization.