VOLUME I, AFTERWORD
Despair
A word after the alarm.
You have read the whole volume now, or you have come to the end of what you could bear of it. Either way, sit for a moment before you go on.
What this volume did. It sounded one long alarm and laid one thing out plainly: the position vacuum of the AI Stampede age, top to bottom. The plumber is not safe. The engineers at the top are cutting their own throats. The professionals, the white collar, the blue collar, the one collecting cans, all of it caves in at once, and for the first time in human history no next position waits to catch the fall. Then it set that beside history, the three revolutions that ran the same script, about a hundred million of the poor shipped to the front and spent. Then it turned the common verdict over. Capital is not evil, it is an instinct doing its job, and the road out is not to overthrow it but to channel it. And it set down the seed the whole book grows from, that a position is only a division of labor, no one higher, no one lower, no one worth less.
What this volume did NOT do, on purpose. It did not hand you the way out. Not because there is none, but because a way out laid on top of a layout you cannot yet see is only a painkiller. Despair sets the layout. It stops there. Every solution, the whole of the how, is opened point by point in Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs. The four volumes between, on culture, economy, politics, and law, connect the layout to the way out.
The one thread under all of it. See the position clearly first. Not the villain, the position. The mechanism stacks itself out of ordinary people each making a reasonable choice, and no knife cuts a mechanism down. Only a clear eye, and then an adjustment made before the great war, not after it. That is the whole wager of this book, and the reason it had to begin in the cold.
And a last word on where the credit goes. Nothing in this volume is new. Every turn in it, capital as instinct, channel do not wall, a position is only a division of labor, the mechanism that can be adjusted, was set down by the ancestors thousands of years ago, in Laozi and Zhuangzi, in Mengzi and Xunzi, in the Book of Changes and the Book of Rites. The one writing this only carried a small lamp up to them and read their words again in the plain language of the AI Stampede age. If any light reached you in these pages, it is their light. The mistakes, where the lamp was held crooked or the plain words came out wrong, belong to the lamp alone.
If your heart is steady, turn to Volume II, on the cultural order. Culture is the root. If your heart is not steady, turn straight to Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs. The way out is there, and it is waiting for you.
Rest first, if you need to. Then come.
Or go straight to the way out. Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.