VOLUME I, CHAPTER 4
The Study of Position, and the Mission of the Soft Landing.
Can't read on? Go straight to the way out. Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs.
The first three chapters ran colder, each one colder than the last.
Chapter 1 pulled the alarm. The pill-robot is already operating inside the gut, and the plumber can't be replaced is a lie. The senior Silicon Valley engineers training the AI are cutting their own throats. Lawyers, doctors, therapists, accountants cave in across the board. The white-collar army caves in, the blue-collar army caves in, and at the very bottom even the one collecting cans has no way to live. Capital hands out the knife, the knife runs through every job, and runs on to capital's own dead end. Even war is off, even the funeral trade is gone, even human reproduction caves in. The world falls silent at once, and freezes.
Chapter 2 turned to history. This is not the first time. The first three industrial revolutions ran one script. The machine roars, the idle hands pile up, capital fears being grabbed and moves the government to gather them and ship them to a foreign battlefield to destroy each other. The steam engine sent a wave, electricity and the combustion engine sent a wave, the computer and the Cold War sent another. Three waves together, about a hundred million of the poor fallen on the battlefields. Every one of them idle hands, and not one capitalist among the dead, capital coming out of each war stronger. Not a conspiracy. The mechanism itself, stacking layer on layer.
Chapter 3 pressed the fire back down and made the deepest turn of all. Capital is not evil, it is an instinct doing its job, like water running downhill, and it does not stand in the position of right or wrong. A single coin in savings makes you a capitalist. Capital is only a tool, like a hammer, like a knife, like a gun, and the real responsibility sits with the living hand that holds it. So the way out is not to overthrow capital, because to overthrow capital is to overthrow everyone. The way out is to rein in the pace at which capital turns. Channel it, do not wall it.
Three chapters together, and the whole shape of the AI Stampede age stands in front of you. The position vacuum, seen clearly. The pattern of history, seen clearly. The instinct of capital, seen clearly. Read this far, and the question rises in the chest on its own.
What now?
This chapter sets down the direction of that question. But a direction is not raised out of thin air. A direction has to stand on a way of seeing, on a tool, on a mission. So the four sections of this chapter set down those three root things first, and then close the whole volume.
The first sets down the seed posture of the book. A position is only a division of labor. No right or wrong, no good or evil, no high or low, no noble or base, no first or last, no above or below. The engineer, the doctor, the farmer, the scavenger, the capitalist, the wage worker, the elder, the child, every position is one a turning society requires, only a different division of labor, none a rank above and none a rank below. This is the seed of the whole book. Every pattern of position across all seven volumes of Justice Way, the no one torments of Volume II, the non-labor share returns to the public of Volume III, every way out of Volume VI, grows out of this one seed. Set the seed down, and the whole study of position has a root.
The second sets down the root tool of the book. Use the pen, not the knife. The pen lays a position out and lets the reader see it clearly and adjust himself. The knife cuts down the one who disagrees and forces everyone onto one single line. The first three revolutions produced people of the pen and people of the knife alike, but not one who set the ancestors' whole pattern of position down, and the script ran again and again, about a hundred million down. This fourth time is different. This time there is a small oil lamp, and it cuts no one, wipes out no position, and does one thing only. It lights up again, on the ground of the AI Stampede age, the pattern of position the ancestors set down across thousands of years.
The third sets down the root mission of the whole book. The thing that cannot wait is to adjust the system before the great war. Each of the first three revolutions adjusted only after the great war, only after the blood had run enough. About a hundred million lives were the price of three adjustments that came too late. But this time that road is closed. The robots take the battlefield, and after a great war there is no position vacuum left for the battlefield to digest, only a frozen world. So there is only one road, to adjust before the great war breaks, while there is still time. The soft landing. The steady passage. Peace under heaven.
The fourth closes the volume. Volume I, Despair, sets down only the layout, and does not open the way out. The way out, all of it, is laid out point by point in Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs. Why hold the whole way out for Volume VI? Because a way out has to be built on seeing the layout clearly. Write a prescription without seeing the layout, and it only treats the head for a headache and the foot for a sore foot. Volume I sets the layout down first. Only then can Volume VI open the way out point by point.
The root posture of the whole chapter is very plain. This book hands no one a road, and sets no one up as a master. It is only a small oil lamp that saw the house catch fire in the AI Stampede age, and by its own instinct raised the ancestors' pattern of position with the pen, lighting one small circle in this age. Even if it lights only a small circle, it is light. What the reader does once he sees it is the reader's own. The reader can light his own lamp too, and lamp on lamp, stacked, there may be light enough to reach across the whole dark.
Once these four sections are set down, Volume I, Despair, closes whole. Turn to Volume II, Cultural Institutions, where the root virtue of the whole book, no one torments, is set down. Or turn straight to Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs, where the way out is opened point by point. Whichever you turn to, the pattern of position the ancestors set down across thousands of years waits there, for every living person who sees it to carry it in their own position.
Can't read on? Go straight to the way out. Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs.
Chapter 4, Contents
Two. Use the pen, not the knife.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.