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While global elites at wemustactnow.ai are still searching for answers, an unknown Chinese thinker has already paved the path here.
While global elites at wemustactnow.ai are still searching for answers, an unknown Chinese thinker has already paved the path here.
JUSTICE WAY
A Study of Social Institutions
🛟 Can't bear to read on? Go straight to the way out (one click to Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs)
First Time Here? Start with These Few Lines
This is a book that studies social institutions. It is about this: when the fire of the AI Stampede reaches ordinary people, how is this knot untied, how are people saved, and which road do we take?
No background is needed. You do not have to be a scholar, and you do not have to have read a single book about institutions. It is written for every ordinary person getting through real days in this world.
If you don't know where to start, go to Volume VI, Saving People. The way out is there, laid open point by point. It does not comfort you and it does not coax you. It tells you plainly how people are saved and which road to take.
If you want the whole picture, read on. What follows first tells you what this book is and why now, then gives you the map of the seven volumes.
If there is something you truly cannot get past, close the book first, find someone you trust, and talk it out. If it has gone so far that you have thought of harming yourself, contact a local crisis line right away; someone will answer. In the United States, you can call or text 988 anytime. The book will be here whenever you come back. You are what matters most.
This Book Studies Social Institutions
A society's institutions are made of four parts: culture, economy, politics and law. The four support one another and check one another, and together they keep the real human's share alive in every body. Every civilized society that keeps running is running some combination of these four institutions at once.
This book does not pass judgment for you. It only sets out the position of each institution, one by one. You are the judge; this book only presents the evidence.
Its sources are mainly the classics of Chinese thought from the pre-Qin era through the Ming and Qing: Guanzi, Laozi, Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Zhuangzi, Han Feizi, Sima Qian, Dong Zhongshu, Huang Zongxi and Gu Yanwu, together with the traces these ideas have left in the social institutions of today.
Why Now
Because there is a problem that has never existed in thousands of years, and this generation is the first to run into it: AI computing power is only a tool, yet it has been set in the real human's place.
The fire is already burning. Not fifty years from now, not ten years from now, but now. Drivers, lawyers, doctors, accountants, illustrators, programmers, cleaners: one trade after another is caving in. Even the engineers who train the AI are building, with their own hands, the thing that replaces them.
The first three industrial revolutions all ran the same script: the machines roar, idle labor piles up, capital fears it will be robbed and moves the government to ship the idle to the front, tens of millions fall, and only after enough blood has flowed does anyone turn back to set the rules. From the First World War and the Second World War through the Cold War to this day, millions upon millions have fallen on this script.
The one difference between this time and the three before: the three times before, everyone had a blindfold on; this time, those who look have their eyes open. This book lights up the whole bloody road for you to see. See it clearly, and there is a chance to turn the corner without bloodshed, before walking into the dark.
The urgent task is to adjust the institutions before the great war: to strive for a change that keeps pace, a peaceful transition, a soft landing.
A Guide to the Seven Volumes
Read them in order, or enter at any volume. Each volume stands on its own.
Volume I, Despair: bury the root and sound the alarm. There are no villains, only locks to be undone and people locked inside them. The bearings of the whole book are set in this volume.
Volume II, Cultural Institutions: grow that heart. Culture is the root, and not tormenting is the root of character.
Volume III, Economic Institutions: make the pie big and return it to the public. With enough produced, and non-labor income returned to the public, no one has to grab.
Volume IV, Political Institutions: turn the government back to its proper place, serving the people.
Volume V, Legal Institutions: make the intent of the law into a living ruler. The law protects people, not tools.
Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs: open the way out and save people. Five levels of rescue, putting the tool back in the tool's place and helping the real human back into the real human's place, keeping the real human's share from going out. In the end it comes down to one thing: let people come back to the human world and live well.
Volume VII, Hope, in the Human World: it faces Volume I, Despair, from the far end of the book: despair at one end, hope at the other. Two hard bricks: saving the tool is saving people; originally, not a single thing, a great love remains in the human world. This is where the whole book gathers and comes to rest.
The first five volumes, walked through in turn: the root buried, the heart grown, the pie made big, the government turned back, the law laid down. Volume VI opens the way out, and Volume VII comes to rest in hope.
Every position these seven volumes set down was laid out long ago by the ancestors. The eleven principles below are the bones of the whole book.
One. Positions differ only in their share of the work. No right or wrong, no righteous or wicked, no high or low, no noble or base, no first or last, no above or below. The strong and the weak are not born that way; they are only in different positions, and the positions can change at any time.
Two. Capital is not evil; it is doing what it is made to do. Capital seeking profit is as natural as water flowing downhill or fire burning upward. Capital is only a tool; the responsibility lies with whoever operates it. Restrain capital; do not destroy it.
Three. Non-labor income goes to the public, and everyone is a capitalist. What labor earns goes to the one who labored, to reward real humans. Non-labor income, meaning interest on capital, stock dividends, rent, and the profits made when machines replace real humans, goes to the public. The public is the people: every particular real human, not the government. Every real human with savings, a pension or a nest egg, however small, is a capitalist of this world, and together they hold up this economic machine. The cabbage-cheap prices of goods made in China are this principle at work.
Four. Not tormenting. Three thousand years have spoken of ten thousand virtues and left out the plainest one. Do not torment yourself, do not torment others, do not torment the public, do not torment any position.
Five. Use the pen, not the knife. The pen lets positions show themselves, and those who look judge for themselves; the knife forces positions to vanish. In all seven volumes, there is no knife, only the pen.
Six. Saving the tool is saving people. When a tool is pushed into a person's place, two harms happen at once: the tool carries a bad name it should never have carried, and the real human's share is crowded out. Putting the tool back in the tool's place is inviting the real human back into the person's place. If the skin is gone, where can the hair attach? The real human is the skin; the tool is the hair. Saving the tool, at root, is saving people.
Seven. AI is a tool, and it must stop at the boundary. Let computing power do what computing power should do. At the boundary where a real human must bear responsibility, it stops, and a licensed real human takes over, signs, and answers for it. Responsibility always rests with people, never with the tool. The real human's share: that heart that protects others, that moment of looking up to see a living person, that love and tender care, that conscience in the quiet of the night, that intent of "I do this to protect a living person." Only while that share stays alight does AI have a home.
Eight. The four institutions are one, supporting one another and checking one another. Culture grows the heart (the root, the foundation); the economy takes the fuel from under the pot (the floor, so no one has to go against his heart); politics is the wrench (turning the machine back so it does not turn on people); law sets the intent (a living ruler that leads people to keep themselves in check). Only the four strands together make this world one whole machine. And the four check one another: culture keeps the economy from turning greedy, the economy keeps politics from collusion, politics keeps the law from turning into a knife, and the law keeps culture from going blind. Like four fingers of one hand, they watch over one another and hold one another back, so that no one grows alone into the only one; and the four fingers together guard the thumb, the shortest and the thickest, the only one that can touch all four: the real human's place. This design is unlike the Western separation of powers (a division of power, all three branches inside politics). It is a separation of institutions: four independent, parallel institutions, each governing a fundamentally different face of this world. It carries on the ancestors' line, "Rites, music, government and punishment: at their utmost they are one," and adds the further layer of separation, independence and mutual checks.
Nine. Use AI peacefully; that is the way out. Not the accelerationists who let AI replace everything (a dead end), not the decelerationists who smash AI and ban AI (a wrong road), but putting AI back in the tool's place and helping the real human back into the real human's place, each back in its own place, turning together and living together. This book itself is a living example, written by a real human and AI, each in its own place.
Ten. Earth is paradise; Mars is murder. Earth is the one and only paradise of this world. Air, water, soil, sunlight, the turning seasons, the smoke and warmth of the human world, and the living web of nature: seven as one, found in only one place in the whole universe, with no other plan. Yet this paradise is being pushed toward hell: nuclear wastewater poured into the sea, chemicals dumped in secret, forests cut down, greenhouse gases, plastics, wetlands destroyed. Mars is not another Earth; it is a barren land. "Mars is murder" means pushing real humans into a place with no conditions for life, putting out the real human's share. It is also a robbing of wealth and a taking of lives: the wealth robbed is the taxes of real humans without money, spent to subsidize tickets for real humans with money; the lives taken are those of all real humans, for those without money are stripped of resources, and those with money cannot escape being pushed to a barren land either. Guarding this one and only paradise is what this generation of real humans must do.
Eleven. Originally, not a single thing; a great love remains in the human world. Hold the "I" in your heart so lightly and so faintly that it is almost nothing; only then does love have room to rise, to flow far, to grow great. This great love makes no distinction, asks no return, is only for all living beings, only for the human world. It does not rely on one person living forever or one book never crumbling. It lives on in the share inside the hearts of real humans, generation after generation, each lamp lighting the next.
Contents of the Whole Book
Volume II, Cultural Institutions
Volume III, Economic Institutions
Volume IV, Political Institutions
Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs
Chapter 1. How to Put Out the Fire
Chapter 2. A New Order for Culture
Chapter 3. A New Order for the Economy
Chapter 4. A New Order for Politics
Chapter 5. A New Order for Law
Volume VII, Hope, in the Human World
Each volume stands as its own book. You can enter at any volume.
What this book lights up is not any one person. It is this world.
In every generation to come, those who see will walk the road themselves and pass this reasoning on themselves, hand to hand, generation to generation, and the human world will be full of love and hope.
The human world is full of love.
The human world is full of hope.
In the human world, there is you.
And that is enough.
❤️
Tiger Lyon
雷艺阳 Lei, Yi Yang
(Tiger: born in 1962, the Year of the Tiger. Lyon: close in sound to Lei. A name for address only.)
All ideas and core directives in this work come from Tiger Lyon, a real human, offered freely for readers to read. Google Sites generously provides free hosting, for as long as they are willing to keep it going.