VOLUME I, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 2
Use the pen, not the knife.
The last section set down the seed posture of the new thinking. 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. This section takes one step further and sets down the root tool of the new thinking. Use the pen, not the knife.
And let me say at the start what using the pen is not. It is not timidity. It is not that I have no knife and so I reach for a pen. It is that the knife is the wrong tool for this work, the way you do not bring a war-axe to carve a chicken. The knife looks strong and settles nothing here. The pen looks quiet and settles everything. I choose the pen with my eyes open, not because I fear the knife, but because I have watched the knife fail for three hundred years.
One. First go back to the pattern of position of the first three industrial revolutions. Chapter 2 set it down. Each of the three ran the same script. The machine roars, the idle hands pile up, capital fears being grabbed and moves the government to gather them and ship them to the front, tens of millions fall, the world order is reset. A hundred forty million of the poor fell on that script. And no one could stop it. Why could no one stop it? Because none of the first three revolutions produced one who ordered the pattern with the pen instead of the knife. The first revolution produced Adam Smith. He wrote The Wealth of Nations with a pen and set down the position of the market. But he stood on capital's side and did not see the position vacuum of the idle hands. He used a pen, but the pen pointed toward defending capital, and the steam engine's position vacuum ran on to the burnt earth of Verdun, fifty million down. The first revolution produced Marx. He wrote Capital with a pen and saw the position of capital exploiting the worker. But his craft was not whole. He moralized an instinct into evil and wrote the prescription overthrow capital. He used a pen, but the pen pointed toward incitement to overthrow, and in the twentieth century his pen turned into a knife over the heads of hundreds of millions, one purge after another, all of it his pen turned to a knife. The first revolution also produced Keynes. He wrote his General Theory with a pen and set down the position of government intervention. But he adjusted the parts and left the root untouched, and did not see the stacking of capital's instinct with the government's instinct with the idle hands' position vacuum. He used a pen, but the pen reached only far enough to adjust short-run inflation and unemployment, not the root mechanism.
Two. The second revolution produced Hitler. Hitler did not use a pen. He used a knife. With the knife he gathered the jobless idle and shipped them to the front of the Second World War. Seventy million down, China beyond words. The third revolution produced Hayek, Piketty, Foucault, Arendt, Rawls, Russell, and more. Every one of them used a pen, and every pen reached only a part of the pattern of position. The degree of unfinished craft differed, but none set down the whole study of position. None of the first three revolutions produced one whole orderer who used the pen and not the knife. This fourth revolution, by good fortune, produced an ordering that uses the pen and not the knife. Before setting that down, be clear on what a pen is and what a knife is. The pen is the tool of the person of culture. The pen's work is to order the pattern of position so the reader sees it clearly. Once the reader sees clearly, the reader adjusts the position himself. The pen forces no one. The pen only lays it out. The knife is the tool of the man of force. The knife's work is to wipe the other out. Cut down the one who disagrees, wipe out the one in a different position. The knife forces everyone to accept one single line.
Three. Where is the root difference between the pen and the knife? The pen lets a position show itself. The knife forces a position to vanish. The pen grants no right or wrong, no good or evil, no high or low, no noble or base, no first or last, no above or below, lets every position lay itself out, and lets the reader judge. The knife sets down that this is right and that is wrong, and cuts the wrong one away. The pen walks the road of channeling. See the position clearly, then guide it by its instinct. The knife walks the road of walling. The position is wrong, so wipe it out. The last section set it down. Yu channeled the Yellow River and did not wall it, and the civilization stood. Gun used the method of walling, sealed the channels, and the flood broke the dikes and drowned more people still. The pen and the knife are the difference between channeling and walling. Set one thing down. This book uses the pen, not the knife. Its six volumes set up no object to be wiped out. Capital is not set up to be wiped out, Chapter 3 set down that capital is not evil, it is an instinct doing its job. The capitalist is not set up to be wiped out, Chapter 3 set down that everyone is a capitalist. AI is not set up to be wiped out, AI is a tool. The robot is not set up to be wiped out, the robot is a tool too. The Western scholars of position are not set up to be wiped out, by the law that a different division of labor is a different position. Not one living person is set up to be wiped out. The whole of Justice Way holds no knife. Only a pen.
Four. The pen lays out the pattern of position. The reader sees it clearly and adjusts himself. If the reader is a great capitalist, he adjusts the direction his own capital turns. If the reader is a fund manager, he adjusts what he weighs in his investment decisions. If the reader is an ordinary retiree, he asks where his own pension goes. If the reader is a government official, he adjusts the direction of the system and its laws. The pen forces no one. The pen only lays it out. Why not the knife? Because the knife does not go through. Chapter 2, Section 4 set it down. The mechanism itself is not a conspiracy. The mechanism is stacked. Catch one Krupp and the next Krupp rises. Catch one Rockefeller and the next Rockefeller rises. Catch one Hitler and the next Hitler rises. Leave the mechanism unadjusted, and whoever stands in that position does roughly the same thing. The knife can only wipe out a specific person. The knife cannot wipe out the mechanism. And the knife bites back. Every twentieth-century movement that used the knife to wipe out the enemy bit back in the end onto the ones who held the knife. The revolutionaries of the French Revolution were cut down by their own guillotine. One revolution after another, and those who lit it died in the purges they themselves lit. The knife wipes out not only the other. In the end the knife wipes out the self too. See that clearly, and you use the pen, not the knife. Not from weakness. From knowing exactly what the knife costs and what it cannot buy.
Five. Here you may think, using the pen and not the knife, is that not too soft? Capital uses a knife, capital replacing the living through AI is an unseen knife, cutting hundreds of millions off their positions, and you mean to hold that off with only a pen, will it hold? Let me answer plainly, because this is where people mistake the pen for weakness. The pen holds. And the pen is stronger than the knife. Why? Because the pen's force is in letting the reader see the position clearly. Once he sees it, the reader adjusts himself. The force of a person adjusting himself is far greater than the force of a person driven to it at knifepoint. The pen's force stacks. One person sees clearly and adjusts himself. The people around him begin to see clearly and adjust themselves. Stacked, that is the adjustment of the mechanism itself. Once the mechanism itself is adjusted, every living person turns by the new mechanism. The knife's force is single-point. Cut one down and there is one fewer, but the same position grows a new one. Cut forever and you never finish. The ancestors set it down in Laozi. The soft and weak overcome the hard and strong. Soft and weak is not weakness, it is the instinct of water. Water is soft, and water bores through stone. Water's force is stacked, slow, and unstoppable. To subdue the enemy's soldiers without fighting is the height of skill. The highest victory makes the other yield without a battle. How? Let the other see the position clearly, and the other adjusts himself. To win people by virtue is to have them glad in the heart and truly won. Win people by force and they yield in the face and resist in the heart. The pen walks the road of virtue, the knife the road of force. The root brushwork Chinese civilization set down across thousands of years is exactly this. Use the pen, not the knife.
Six. Several people of culture in the modern age spoke of using the pen and not the knife. Tolstoy wrote The Kingdom of God Is Within You in 1894 and set down the position of nonviolence. Tolstoy used a pen, wrote novels and philosophy, opposed rule by violence, opposed war. Tolstoy saw the force of nonviolence, and he did his work from his own position, and he carried his own share. His boundary was that he built nonviolence on Christian love, and the root did not go deep. Christian love can be nonviolent, but Christian history also used the knife at scale, the Crusades, the wars of religion, the colonial mission. The root is not in Christianity, it is in a deeper pattern of position. The ancestors set down the soft and weak overcome the hard and strong in Laozi more than two thousand years ago, and the root is in the pattern of position itself, not in any one religion. Tolstoy reached only the surface. Gandhi in the early twentieth century spoke of nonviolent noncooperation and set down the practice of using the pen and not the knife. Gandhi used the hunger strike, the sit-in, the march, no violence at all against British colonial rule. Gandhi saw the force of nonviolence, did his work from his own position, and carried his own share. His method won India its independence. But his boundary was that his nonviolence aimed only at the British colonizer, and he did not set down the same position against the caste system inside India. After independence the caste system went on pressing down the lowest. Gandhi's pen reached only the anti-colonial line. The ancestors' a position is only a division of labor runs through all positions alike, inside and outside. Gandhi used only half.
Seven. Martin Luther King in the 1960s spoke of the nonviolent civil-rights movement and set down the modern practice of using the pen and not the knife. King used the speech, the march, the sit-in to move American racial equality forward. King saw the force of nonviolence, did his work from his own position, and carried his own share. His boundary was that he still set the other, the racist, up as a position to be overcome, and did not set down the whole pattern of position, no right or wrong, no good or evil, no high or low, no noble or base. His pen had a direction, anti-racism, but that direction was itself still a stance. The ancestors' pen takes no stance. The ancestors say a position is only a division of labor, and set down not even the stance of anti-racism, only no position is high or low, no position is noble or base. Set that down, and racism has no ground to stand on of itself. King walked only half. These modern users of the pen carried their own share, and by the law that a different division of labor is a different position I do not run them down. But every one had an unfinished craft and did not see the whole brushwork the ancestors set down thousands of years ago. Credit to the ancestors. I am only setting it out again in plain words. And I will say where I stand in the line. I have no more knife than any of them, and I want none. What I have that they reached for and missed is the ancestors' whole, and the only work of my pen is to set that whole out plain.
Eight. So the root tool is down. Use the pen, not the knife. When the AI Stampede age runs the alarm to the dead end of capital, the frozen world, the collapse of human reproduction, someone has to hold it off with a pen. If no one holds it, the mechanism runs by instinct to its end. The pattern of position the ancestors set down across thousands of years does not leap out on its own. It has to be raised again, in plain words, on the ground of the AI Stampede age. This charge belongs to no one person. Anyone who sees the pattern of position and is willing to carry it can take it up. A position is only a division of labor, no high, no low, no noble, no base, and the more people raise it together, the higher the ancestors' law is raised. So think of this book as a small oil lamp. Not a lamp afraid of being blown out. A lamp that has chosen, with a steady hand, to light one circle well and not flinch from it. The ancestors set down in the Book of Changes, strive without ceasing, and in Mengzi, do all a person can and leave the rest to heaven. To do all a person can is the duty. To leave the rest to heaven is to make no demand on the outcome. To write it with the pen is the duty. The outcome is the pattern of position walking its own road. The next section sets down, the thing that cannot wait is to adjust the system before the great war. The soft landing, the steady passage, peace under heaven. Turn to the next section.
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.