VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 1
What Torment Is
This whole volume is about culture, and it does not begin where books about culture usually begin. It does not begin with poetry, or philosophy, or the fine and admirable things set behind glass in a museum. It begins with something small, something shabby, something you have run into more times than you can count and never once had a name for. You walk up to a counter to get a thing done. The person behind it does not look up, and tells you a document is missing, come back later. You ask which document. Look for yourself, he says. You make the trip three times, and each time he hands you one more missing item, like squeezing a tube. He has broken no rule. He has not said one foul word to you. And you walk out with your chest tight and nothing you can point to. That is the thing this chapter is going to name.
The chapter starts from a line that came drifting off the internet, credited to one well known novelist and then another, its trail long gone cold. The greatest evil in a person is not theft, not robbery, not even murder or arson. It is torment. Above all, the ones who, handed a little power, wield it to the hilt. The moment a person hears that line, something in the chest gives a small lurch, because the line has put its finger on a thing everyone has lived through and no one has properly named. Across three sections the chapter does one thing, and only one. It takes that overlooked thing, drags it up onto the table, and gives it a name.
The first section catches the line and makes it exact. To catch a line, and not claim it, turns out to sit at the root of this whole book. Twenty-five centuries ago Confucius said, I pass things on, I do not make them up, and then wrote no book at all. His words reached us only because students cut them into strips of bamboo with a knife. The knife did its part, and no one calls the knife the author, because a knife is a tool, and a tool does not stand where the credit stands. That plain point, a tool is not the author, gets planted here and left to wait for the chapters on today's newest tool, near the end of the volume.
The second section takes the first of two changes, and it is the hinge of the chapter. The line, as it came, spoke of making life hard for others, and that word is too loose. There is an honest bind, and there is torment, and they are not the same animal. A bind can fall between equals, a friend hemming over a favor, two people stuck at cross purposes, and a bind can be nobody's fault at all, the rain washing out the road so you cannot get home. Torment is another thing entirely. It always runs downhill, from someone who holds a scrap of position over someone who does not, and it always wants you to know whose hand it is. The weather does not torment you. Only a person torments you, on purpose, with method, in a spot where the barrier never needed to be. One word of difference, and a world between them, and that one word is what cuts the real subject out of the blur.
The third section takes the second change, stranger than the first, and then lays the chapter's first stake. Ask yourself who, across your whole life, has actually tormented you, and the answer is never the head of state or the billionaire, who cannot be bothered, cannot afford it, and take no pleasure in it. It is always the clerk, the window, the guard, the desk, the ones holding a tiny scrap of power and nothing else. So some kind of power becomes a little power, set down on the exact spot where torment lives. And then the first of the old teachers steps in. Confucius said, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, a line an American reader already owns as the Golden Rule. Read it against torment and it names the deepest root in four words. Positions do not trade. The person who settles into the seat that can block others forgets that he too once stood, and will stand again, on the blocked side of the counter. Let him spend one second trading places in his own head, and the torment, right then, cannot happen. That one second is the smallest thing in the world, and this whole volume is, in the end, about it.
One last thing to know going in, because it governs how the whole book is written. Confucius does not scold, and neither does this chapter. It hangs no sign reading bad person on anyone. It only lays two positions side by side, the one who will trade places and the one who will not, and leaves the choosing to you. That method, laying positions out and passing no verdict, is the steady way of all the old teachers, and it holds cover to cover. What you carry out of this chapter is not a verdict but a name, and once a thing has a name you are no longer its prisoner. You can look straight at it.
SECTION
SECTION 1 A line comes drifting off the internet
SECTION 2 An honest bind and torment, one word apart
SECTION 3 Some kind of power and a little power, Confucius and do not do unto others
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.