VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 1
A Line Comes Drifting Off the Internet
This chapter starts with a line. Not a line out of any scripture, not a line from any sage, just a piece of plain talk that came drifting off the internet these last few years. And that plain line holds the deepest thing this whole chapter, and in a way this whole volume, has to set down. So the first thing to do is take the line in hand, look hard at what it actually says, and then see why it is worth a whole chapter to say it.
Here is the line. It comes from somewhere out on the internet, and it runs about like this.
The greatest evil in a person is not theft, not robbery, not even murder or arson. It is making life hard for others. Above all, the ones who, having gotten hold of some kind of power, use every trick they have to make life hard for anyone they can reach.
The line has been passed around for years. It gets credited now to one well known novelist, now to another, and the trail has long since gone cold. Who said it first no longer matters. What matters is that the moment a person hears it, something in the chest gives a small lurch. Why the lurch? Because the line has put its finger on something every one of us has met, over and over, a whole life long, and that no one ever gave a proper name.
This is the place to take that line, seriously, and catch it. To catch it is not to claim it. Whoever the line belongs to, it belongs to them, and the credit stays with everyone who ever said it. To catch it is to do a different thing. To hold onto it, to open it all the way up, and to hand it on down.
That word, catch, is worth stopping on, because it holds the root of this whole book. Twenty-five centuries ago a teacher put it this way. I pass things on, I do not make them up. I trust the old and I love it. The teacher was Confucius. Think about what he did with his life. He talked, for decades, and set down more of how to live than almost anyone before or since, and he never wrote a single book. The one collection we have of his words was written by his students, who sat and remembered and cut each line, stroke by stroke, into strips of bamboo with a knife.
So who gets the credit for those words? Confucius, and the students who caught and kept them. But what about the knife that cut the strips, and the bamboo that held them? They did their part. Without them not one of those lines would have reached us. And still, no one says the credit belongs to the knife, or to the bamboo. Why not? Because a knife is a knife and a strip of bamboo is a strip of bamboo. They are tools. A tool is not the author. It does not stand where the credit stands.
The student's part is not to claim the words as his own, either. The student's part is to catch what the teacher got right, hold it fast, and say it again to more people. Confucius caught what the ancients got right and passed it on. His students caught his words and set them down. One hand to the next, on and on, and that passing is what a culture actually looks like as it comes down through time.
Today the passing is even more direct than it was twenty-five centuries ago. Whoever is talking now does not need a student with a knife and a strip of bamboo. There is a new pen for setting words down, one that showed up only in the last few years, and its name is artificial intelligence. But hold onto this. A pen is still a pen. It sits in the same place as the carving knife, the brush, the fountain pen, the typewriter. It is a tool, not the author, and it does not stand where the credit stands. The last chapter of this volume, the one on tools, will have a great deal to say about that. For now, one sentence, planted and left to wait.
Now, back to the line that came drifting off the internet. Having caught it, the first thing to do with it is make it more exact. Here it is again, as it came.
The greatest evil in a person is not theft, not robbery, not even murder or arson. It is making life hard for others. Above all, the ones who, having gotten hold of some kind of power, use every trick they have to make life hard for anyone they can reach.
Two words are going to change, only two, and with them the whole thing snaps into focus. Changed, it reads like this.
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 first change. Making life hard for others becomes torment. The second change. Some kind of power becomes a little power. Neither change is word games, neither is for show. Changing these two words drags the real thing behind the line, inch by inch, over to exactly the right spot. Why each word has to change, and where the change puts things, is the whole business of the next two sections, one word each, taken apart slowly. This section only sets the sharper version down and leaves it standing.
Hold onto the sharpened line. The greatest evil in a person is not theft, not robbery, not even murder or arson. It is torment.
Someone may be grumbling by now. It is just an internet catchphrase. Does it really take a whole chapter to chew on it?
It does. Because the line names something every single person lives through, again and again, and that no one has ever properly named.
The word is not new. The idea is old. You can find it in a novel five hundred years old, and in the dynastic histories after that. For centuries people have had the word ready to hand. And in all those centuries, no one ever set it down on its own and made a study of it, no one asked the plain questions. What is torment, exactly. Where does it happen. Why does it get handed down, one generation to the next. Why is there not a single law, anywhere, that can reach it.
No one asked. Which is strange. A thing that happens every day, that everyone is on the receiving end of, and no one ever studied it. Why?
Here is one answer. Because it is too small, small enough that everyone assumes it is not worth mentioning. And because it is too common, common enough that everyone assumes it is simply how things are, the way of the world. Too small and too common, so it slips through, unnamed, never seen clearly, and so it just goes on, one generation after the next.
What this whole chapter sets out to do is drag that overlooked thing up onto the table, give it a proper name, and look it up and down. None of this is invention. Every section ahead has one of the old teachers holding it up from underneath. The idea that torment lives on refusing to change places is held up by Confucius, and his line about not doing to others what you would not want done to you. The idea that the position makes the behavior is held up by Xunzi. The idea of how it gets passed down is held up by Mozi, and the dyer standing at his vat. All this chapter does is catch what those teachers set in place more than two thousand years ago and carry it forward, in plain talk, down to the thing you and I run into every day, every hour.
So here is where this section leaves us. A line came drifting off the internet, the greatest evil is torment, and it has been caught and made a little more exact. Making life hard became torment. Some kind of power became a little power. Catching a line is honest work, and the credit stays with everyone who ever spoke it, and with the teacher who said, twenty-five centuries ago, I pass things on, I do not make them up. And the reason the line is worth a whole chapter is that it has named a thing that went a few hundred years without a name.
That is the first layer of this chapter, the first brick the eight sections to come will all rest on. Torment is a real thing that had no name. Giving it a name is the first thing this chapter has to do.
The next section takes the first of the two changes on its own. Why torment, and not the softer thing, making life hard. One word of difference, and a world between them. See you in the next section.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.