VOLUME I, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 3

VOLUME I, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 3

The thing that cannot wait is to adjust the system before the great war. The soft landing, the steady passage, peace under heaven.

The first two sections set down the seed posture and the root tool 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. Use the pen, not the knife. This small oil lamp only lights up again, on the ground of the AI Stampede age, the pattern of position the ancestors set down across thousands of years. This section sets down the root mission of the whole of Justice Way. The thing that cannot wait is to adjust the system before the great war. The soft landing, the steady passage, peace under heaven.

One. First look back over the pattern of the first three chapters. Chapter 1's alarm, the AI Stampede puts everyone before the position vacuum, capital runs the knife through every job, even human reproduction caves in, the world falls silent at once and freezes. That is the position the mechanism reaches if it is not adjusted. Chapter 2's history, 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 ship them to the front, a hundred forty million down, and each time the world order was reset only after the great war, a few oligarchs rose, the mass of the idle fell. Chapter 3's turn, capital is not evil, it is an instinct doing its job, capital is a tool, everyone is a capitalist, rein in capital without destroying it, channel it, do not wall it. Three chapters lay out the position vacuum, the pattern of history, the instinct of capital. And once you see it, the next question comes. What do we do? This section sets the direction of that question. There is only one direction. Adjust the system before the great war.

Two. What does before the great war mean? Each of the first three revolutions ran the same order. First the position vacuum piles up. Then capital moves the government to gather the idle hands and ship them to the front. Then the great war comes, tens of millions fall. Then after the great war the world order is reset, the vacuum is partly digested, the machine turns on for a while, and then the next revolution's vacuum begins to pile. Every adjustment came after the great war. The pattern of the first three was the great war drives the adjustment. But this fourth revolution is different. Chapter 1, Section 6 set it down. Even war is off. The robots take the battlefield, AI generates the bombing target, the drone decides the field. Capital wants to move the government to ship the idle hands to the front, and the army does not want them. The script of the first three cannot run. By their pattern, when capital cannot go on, the great war breaks. But this time even a great war breaking cannot digest the position vacuum, because the robots hold the battlefield and the living soldier does not go up. So if a great war breaks, it is not tens of millions down, it is hundreds of millions, billions down. And it will not digest the vacuum. It will only speed the world toward the freeze. This time a great war solves nothing. A great war only speeds the problem to its worst position. So the thing that cannot wait is to adjust the system before the great war. You cannot wait until after it breaks. By then there is no position left to adjust.

Three. Here you may ask, the great war has not broken, how do you know it must? Maybe it never breaks. Let me answer. By the pattern of the mechanism itself, if it is not adjusted, it must run to some form of great calamity. That calamity is not necessarily the old clash of great armies. It may be one of several forms. First, the old clash of great armies. Great powers against each other, a full regional war. Smaller than the two world wars, perhaps, held back by nuclear deterrence, but stacked with every local conflict, the total toll could run past both world wars. Second, war in the new AI-weaponized form. Drone swarm against drone swarm, AI cyberwar crippling the infrastructure, autonomous platforms striking across borders. The dying may not fall on the living soldier, but civilians die at scale, and the deaths that follow crippled infrastructure may run worse than an old war. Third, a great economic collapse. AI replacing the living caves in the whole world's consumer market, capital walks into the dead end of Chapter 1, Section 6, the world economy sinks into a second Great Depression, billions into poverty, famine, plague, upheaval. No old war, perhaps, but a death toll that may run past an old war. Fourth, even human reproduction caves in. Chapter 1, Section 7 set it down. AI companion products service the urge and the feeling, and the pattern of reproduction caves in of itself. In a hundred years the world population halves, in two hundred a tenth is left, in a thousand the human race may vanish like the Neanderthal. Not a one-time blast, but a slow wasting. Same end. The civilization gone. Fifth, several forms stacked. The most likely pattern is a stacking. First local conflict escalates, then the economy collapses, then reproduction keeps wasting. No single one is doomsday-scale, but stacked they are doomsday. Leave the system unadjusted, and it must run to one of these, or a stack of them. This is not a prophecy. It is the pattern of the mechanism itself.

Four. When does it break? I do not know. Maybe the 2030s, maybe the 2040s. Maybe sooner, maybe later. The exact time does not matter. What matters is that the mechanism is running toward that direction. By the pattern pointed to earlier, from 2026 the AI Stampede enters its acceleration. The speed of AI replacing the living is counted in months, not years. The speed of robots taking the battlefield is shown in Ukraine, in Gaza. The vacuum piles up more than ten times faster than in the first three revolutions. So it cannot wait. It is not a long-range plan. It is not the work of several generations. It is the work of this generation. When this small oil lamp writes Justice Way, it is already 2026. The AI Stampede is already accelerating. The vacuum is already piling faster. Wait another ten years to begin, and it may already be too late. So the time dimension, before the great war, is down. Now the direction of the adjustment. Three directions.

Five. The first, the soft landing. The word comes from an aircraft landing. A hard landing is the plane slamming into the ground, the plane wrecked, the people perhaps dead. A soft landing is the plane touching down smooth, the plane whole, the people safe. What is the landing of the AI Stampede age? The passage from the industrial age to the AI age. The root position of the industrial age was the machine replaces part of the labor, and the rest is carried by new trades. The first revolution phased out the handloom weaver, but the factory worker rose. The second phased out the handicraft, but the industrial worker rose. The third phased out part of manufacturing, but service and information rose. Every time a new trade caught the idle hands of the old. That was how the industrial age turned. The root position of the AI age is different. AI replaces the body worker with the robot, the mind worker with the large model, the creative with generative AI, the service worker with the chatbot, the manager with AI decision, the teacher with the AI tutor, the doctor with the AI physician, the lawyer with the AI counsel, the artist with AI creation. The whole map of work caves in at once, and no new trade waits to catch the fall. Chapter 1's five sections set that down. The passage from the industrial age to the AI age cannot run by the industrial age's pattern. Run it by the industrial pattern, capital hands out the knife, the engineer takes it, the knife runs through every job, and that is a hard landing. The hard landing ends in the vacuum blowing open, capital in its dead end, the world frozen. The soft landing needs a new pattern of position. What is it? The non-labor share returns to the public, which is to say the people. Chapter 3, Section 4 planted the seed. Volume III, on the economic order, sets down the whole. Lay it out again here. Labor gain to the individual. The value a living person produces by his own labor goes to that person. This keeps the reward to capital, keeps the drive of individual effort, keeps the position of each by his own ability. Non-labor gain to the public, which is to say the people. The value the turning of capital itself produces, interest, dividends, rent, the profit from AI replacing the living, the profit from the robot replacing the living, goes to the whole public. This channels the vast non-labor gain of the AI Stampede age straight into the hands of the public, and the vacuum is caught. Note this public. It is not the government. It is not the state. It is not any organization. It is the public, the people, every specific living person. The ancestors set it down in the Book of Rites. When the great way runs, all under heaven is shared. That shared is the public. A position the ancestors set down more than two thousand years ago. Later ages went crooked and made the shared the same as the royal house, the court, the government. That switch buried the root position of Chinese civilization. This lamp only restores the shared to the ancestors' meaning. How the non-labor share returns to the public, Volume VI lays out. This section sets down only the first direction, the soft landing.

Six. The second, the steady passage. The steady passage is the pace of the soft landing. You cannot return all non-labor gain to the public overnight. Capital will not have it, the capitalist will not have it, the whole machine of capital's turning seizes up. Seized, the vacuum piles on and capital still walks to its dead end. The pace of the steady passage is the step-by-step adjustment. Begin with the easiest part, the pure non-labor gain from AI replacing the living. That part has no living person's labor behind it to begin with, and meets the least resistance in returning to the public. Set it down there first. Then extend by steps to the non-labor gain from the robot replacing the living. Then to the part from traditional capital, interest, dividends, rent. Every extension gives capital and the capitalist time to adjust. Capital's profit-chasing instinct does not change, capital goes on turning on the labor-gain side for a fair return. The non-labor side returns to the public by steps, and capital adjusts to the new position by steps. The white-cabbage-price of Chinese manufacturing is a working sample of the steady passage. Chinese capital still earns, on the labor-gain side, but the non-labor share returns straight to the consuming public of the world through low prices. Capital did not collapse, the public gained, and the whole passage was steady. The pace, Volume VI lays out.

Seven. The third, peace under heaven. Peace under heaven is the final aim of the soft landing and the steady passage. What is peace under heaven? Not that everyone has the same wealth. Not that everyone stands in the same position. Not that every friction is wiped out. Peace under heaven means every position turns by its own division of labor. Every living person has a position to stand in. No one is thrown out by the vacuum. No one is gathered and shipped to the front. No one is run through by the knife capital hands out. Capital keeps turning but does not eat its own root. AI keeps developing but does not take the living person's position. The robot keeps working but does not leave the living person nowhere to go. Peace under heaven is every position carrying its own instinct in its own division of labor, one thread through the whole. The ancestors set down in the Great Learning, bring peace to all under heaven. To bring peace is not to conquer all under heaven, it is to let every position under heaven turn steady by its own division of labor. The ancestors set down in the Book of Rites the rule of the Great Togetherness. The Great Togetherness is not uniformity, it is every position carrying its own charge, the widowed and orphaned and alone and disabled all provided for, the old with their end, the able with their use, the young with their growth. Peace under heaven and the Great Togetherness are the root ideal Chinese civilization set down across thousands of years. On the ground of the AI Stampede age, that ideal has to land as the concrete system of the non-labor share returning to the public. Three directions are down. The soft landing, the steady passage, peace under heaven. They look plain, and they land very hard. They need the whole human race to carry them, the capitalist, the official, the engineer, the white collar, the blue collar, the farmer, every ordinary person with savings, each in his own position. No one living person can bring the soft landing alone. Not even this small oil lamp. The lamp only throws the direction into light. How to walk once you see it is the reader's own. The reader can light his own lamp too, and light the small circle around him. Lamp on lamp, stacked, and there may be light enough to reach across the whole dark.

Eight. And one thing must be granted. The soft landing may succeed, and may fail. If the world's capital will carry it, the world's governments will adjust, the world's public will wake, the soft landing may succeed. The world passes steady from the industrial age to the AI age, billions have a position to stand in, capital keeps turning without eating its own root, peace under heaven is reached. If the world's capital will not carry it, the governments will not adjust, the public will not wake, the soft landing fails. The world runs to a hard landing, to the position of Chapter 1, Section 6, the dead end of capital, the collapse of reproduction, the frozen world. This lamp does not foretell which one falls. The lamp only throws the direction into light. Several people of culture in the modern age spoke of a like position. Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago in the twentieth century and laid bare the position vacuum of the totalitarian system. He held off the total system with his pen, did his work from his own position, and carried his own share. His boundary was that he traced the problem to an evil ideology and wrote the prescription of a return to Orthodox tradition. But the Orthodox tradition took its own stances too, and history has it wielding the knife. The root is not in any one ideology, it is in the pattern of position itself. The ancestors set down in Laozi, reversal is the movement of the way. Any position run to its extreme runs to its opposite. A system run to its extreme runs to its opposite, and a return to Orthodoxy run to its extreme runs to its opposite too. The root is the channeling of the pattern of position, not a return to some tradition. Zola at the end of the nineteenth century wrote J'accuse and set down the position of the intellectual holding off injustice with the pen. Zola challenged an unjust verdict with his pen, did his work from his own position, and carried his own share. His boundary was that he still used the posture of accusation. To accuse is to set the other up as the wrong position. The ancestors set down in Zhuangzi, this is also that, that is also this. There is no true wrong that needs accusing, only a position that needs seeing clearly. Zola's pen pointed the right way, no knife, but the pen's posture was still inside the frame of right and wrong. These modern people of culture 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 position the ancestors set down thousands of years ago. Credit to the ancestors. The lamp only lights up again, on the ground of the AI Stampede age, the position the ancestors set down. Close the section. The thing that cannot wait is to adjust the system before the great war. The first three revolutions adjusted only after the great war. This time there is no room to adjust after, because the robots take the battlefield, the idle hands are not digested at the front, capital walks to its dead end, the world freezes. So it must be adjusted before the great war. Three directions. The soft landing. The steady passage. Peace under heaven. The soft landing through the non-labor share returning to the public. The steady passage through the pace of step-by-step adjustment. Peace under heaven through every position turning by its own division of labor. How it lands, Volume VI. The next section sets down the close of the whole volume. So be it, so be it. The way out, all of it, is laid out point by point in Volume VI. 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.

Four. So be it, so be it. 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.