“五十部笑百部” 50 Steps Laughing at 100 Steps

My roommate taught me a new and interesting Chinese saying last night. Usually I get frustrated when a Chinese friend says a Chinese proverb or expression and makes it sound like I should know what they’re talking about. When they realize I don’t and they start to explain, I get even more frustrated, because I realize we've just spent all this time over something I will never use and therefore, will certainly forget as soon as we finish talking about it. Of course, the real reason I probably forget is because my ears do an automatic censorship of the whole conversation as soon as I realize where it is going.

For some reason I was listening this time around. It could be that my roommate had a more casual approach that didn’t activate my ears to shut-down. So this time, I actually listened, and found I understood and even found it interesting.
Forgot what we were talking about that lead to it. She asked if I knew or heard of “五十部笑百部.” I said no. So she explained to me that it tells of a story of two soldiers. During war, were soldiers are supposed to stand still and die for their country, these two decided to flee.

The first guy ran for say 50 steps, looked back, saw nobody after him and decided to stop running. Then ahead of him he sees this other soldier running and stopping at 100 steps. So he laughs at this guy who had to run further when there was nobody after them anymore. But the point is, what gives him the right to laugh at the other soldier, when they both made the same mistake of fleeing from duty in the first place; damage done. I came up with my own example. It’s like someone killing someone by stabbing them once through the heart, and another one killing another by stabbing the victim over and over again. Gruesome. Either way, the victim's dead, so you can't compare and say who's a worst killer for killing, but you can compare and say who's more psychotic (but that's another topic).