VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 3
Some Kind of Power and a Little Power, Confucius and Do Not Do Unto Others
The last section took the first change, the bind into torment. This section takes the second, and it is the stranger of the two. Some kind of power becomes a little power. Once that is clear, the first of the old teachers steps in, Confucius, and with one line he drives down the first stake of the whole chapter.
Start with a question, and answer it honestly for your own life. Run back over every time someone tormented you, all of it, and then ask. How big were they? How high did they sit?
Were you ever tormented by the head of state? No.
By the prime minister? No.
By the governor of your state, the mayor of your city? Most people go a whole life without laying eyes on them.
By one of the billionaires whose names are in the news? No. They do not know you exist, they do not care that you exist, and they are certainly not going to come stand behind a counter in person to hold up your paperwork.
So who was it, over your whole life, who actually tormented you?
The clerk at the records desk, who told you a document was missing and to come back next time. The nurse at the hospital window, who after three hours in line found one signature short and sent you home to get it. The inspector at customs, every paper in order, who decided to open your bag and go through it anyway. The guard at the gate, who has watched you walk past every day for a year and today, today, needs to see your badge. The junior clerk in the office, who took three separate trips to tell you, one item at a time, what was still missing.
Notice something. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the torment in your life came from a position like these. Not from the people holding great power. From the people holding a tiny scrap of it.
That is why some kind of power became a little power. Not to shrink the claim, but to set it down on the exact spot where torment actually lives.
You may want to push back. That is backwards, surely. The more power a person has, the more he can push you around. How can it be the ones with the least who push the hardest?
The full answer waits for the next chapter, but here is the shape of it, so you have something to stand on. The big power people do not torment, for reasons that have nothing to do with virtue. One, they cannot be bothered. A real mayor spends his day on the whole city, his eyes on a board that wide, and your form never rises into his view. Two, he cannot afford it. The higher the seat, the brighter the light on it, and a man in that seat who makes one citizen suffer out of spite may find it in tomorrow's news and find his job gone the day after. The price is far too high for so small a pleasure. And three, the deepest one, the pleasure is not even there for him. What lifts a big power man is signing the large deal, moving the large policy. Whether the person at the counter gets helped today never so much as enters his heart. So the big power people leave you alone, not because they are good, but because they cannot be bothered, cannot afford it, and cannot even work up the interest.
Turn that over and you have the small power people. That scrap in the hand is the one and only place they get to use any power at all. If they do not push it to the limit, they can hardly feel they are holding anything. The next chapter walks all four of these reasons slowly. For now, keep the one strange conclusion standing. Torment is a small power thing, not a big power thing.
Now the first of the old teachers. Twenty-five centuries ago Confucius said a line that nearly everyone raised in China has heard. Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.
An American reader already owns this line. It is the Golden Rule, put as a shall not rather than a shall, and some form of it turns up in nearly every tradition on earth. So you may think, fine, a kindly old saying, be nice to people. What has it got to do with torment?
Everything. That line is the exact reverse of torment, its antidote, and in one breath it names the deepest root torment grows from.
Lay it against torment and read it down the list. Do you want to be tormented by the clerk at the records desk? You do not. Then when it is you sitting behind that window, do not torment the person in front of it. Do you want the cold face from the nurse at the hospital window? You do not. Then do not put that face on when the window is yours. Do you want the inspector turning your bag inside out until you sweat? You do not. Then when you are the one at the inspection table, do not do it to another. Confucius saw all the way through this twenty-five centuries ago. The deepest root of torment is four words. Positions do not trade.
What does that mean, positions do not trade? It means that the moment a person settles into the seat that can block others, he forgets that he too once stood, and will stand again, on the blocked side of the counter. He starts to see the man inside the window and the person outside it as two different kinds of creature. He forgets that the one outside, wearing a nervous smile, asking him for help, and he himself yesterday, at some other window, wearing the same nervous smile, asking someone else for help, are the same person. He forgets that tomorrow he walks out of his own office, goes somewhere else to handle his own business, and turns straight back into the one waiting outside the counter to be blocked.
The whole heart of Confucius's line is to call that trade back. A person with a position in his hand needs only to spend one second trading places, inside his own head. If it were me outside this window, would I want to be treated the way I am about to treat this person? Let that one second of trading actually happen, and the torment, right then, cannot occur. So torment is not some complicated thing. Its root is that one trade going missing. Sit down into the position and the trade drops away. Let the trade drop, and a person turns the one across from him, who is exactly himself, into some other kind of thing.
One point has to be made very carefully here. Confucius is not giving an order. He is not scolding, you must not torment people. He only sets two positions in front of you. Here is what a person who will trade places looks like. Here is what a person who will not trade places looks like. Which of the two you choose to be, he does not decide for you. He leaves the choosing in your hands. This way of doing it, laying the positions out and passing no verdict, is the steady method of all the old teachers, and it is the method this whole book holds to, cover to cover. There is a chapter on it later, the sixth.
That closes the first chapter. Pull together what it has set down.
It began with a line off the internet and changed two words in it. The first change, the bind into torment, ground the subject exact. Torment is always a matter of position, someone higher using a deliberate method to block someone lower. The second change, some kind of power into a little power, set the subject on the right spot. Torment is a small power thing, not a big power thing. And last, Confucius, and do not do to others what you would not want done to you, driving down the first stake of the whole chapter and the whole volume. The deepest root of torment is that positions do not trade. Let a person spend one second trading places in his heart, and torment cannot happen.
That is the first stake this chapter drives.
And it leaves a fresh question standing. If the big power people do not torment, and it is precisely the small power people who torment hardest, why? Why does that one scrap of power have to be pushed all the way to the limit? The next chapter is about exactly that, a little power pushed to its last degree, and it lays out the four reasons, one at a time, slowly. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.