“What’s more, once they turn against someone, they’ll say he’s evil anyway.”

The “madman” recounts the events in Wolf Cub Village, wherein a man was killed and eaten. He muses that when people decide to hate someone, they then try and justify and rationalize that hatred with some fictionalized crime or sin, even when the person is not truly evil. Lu Xun portrays the villagers’ sense of justice as corrupt: Rather than assess the evidence and form a conclusion, people have already made up their mind about the verdict, and they try to frame the evidence to fit their desired outcome.

“If they’re capable of eating people, who’s to say they won’t eat me?”

The “madman” realizes that he is in danger and that his position in society will not protect him; this generates paranoia. At the same time, if cannibalism exists and is prevalent in the “madman’s” society, it is rational to fear it. It is possible that the same fears exist in the minds of the other villagers, but they are either too scared to voice them or have been conditioned by society to remain silent.

“There were no dates in this history, bur scrawled this way and that across every page were the words BENEVOLENCE, RIGHTEOUSNESS, and MORALITY. Since I couldn’t go to sleep anyway, I read that history carefully for most of the night, and finally I began to make out what was written between the lines; the whole volume was filled with a single phrase: EAT PEOPLE!”

As the “madman” scours history books for examples of cannibalism, he first encounters moral platitudes that flaunt the justice of the social system.