VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 2
A Little Power Pushed to the Limit
Count back over every time in your life someone tormented you, and a strange thing turns up. Not one of them was a person of great power. Never the head of state, never the tycoon. Every one was a small clerk, a small guard, a window, a desk. The people with the most power to push you around are the ones who left you alone, and the people with the least are the ones who blocked you dead. The last chapter ended on that oddity. This chapter answers it, across three sections, and it does the whole thing without passing one word of who is good and who is bad. It watches the position, and only the position.
The first section looks at the reverse side, at why the great power people mostly leave you alone, and it finds four reasons, none of them character. One, the field of view. A real mayor spends his day on a whole city, and your one small errand never rises into his eye, so he cannot be bothered. Two, cost. The higher the seat, the brighter the light on it, and a great man who torments one citizen for spite may find it in tomorrow's news and lose far more than the small pleasure was worth, so he cannot afford it. Three, the sense of position. A man who climbed a long road has felt positions rise and fall, knows his own chair is running water, and grasps, better than most, the very trade Confucius spoke of last chapter, so he dares not grind anyone down. Four, satisfaction. His joys are large, the great deal, the great policy, and the petty pleasure of blocking one citizen at a counter is beneath his notice.
The second section turns all four the other way and finds the small power person standing there. His view is narrow, down to a single window, and the people at that window are the only thing he can spend any power on. His cost is near zero, a complaint letter filed and forgotten, so the blocking is nearly free. His sense of position is thin, he feels he will sit in this chair until he retires, and the trade never enters his head. And his satisfaction has nowhere else to go. He signs no great deal, makes no discovery, reaches no headline, and the one thing that lets him feel some weight in his hand is that a stranger must, on his one word, come back tomorrow. Seen this way, torment is not one lone bad man. It is a man poor in position, at the one spot on earth where he can prove he still exists, grabbing that proof with everything he has. Which is worth a little pity, though pity is not the same as letting it pass, because every person will one day sit in a seat like this, and whether the gears turn smoothly then is the work culture does, later in this book.
The third section brings in the ancestor who pinned the whole thing more than two thousand three hundred years ago. Xunzi looked at a person and asked first not whether the heart was good or bad but what position the person stood in. His word for the force a position carries is shi. A person sits down into a position and does the things that position does. It is not the person choosing, it is the position doing, and the four gears are all that one force turning. Mencius said the same from another side, that the young turn idle in fat years and violent in lean ones, not from different natures but from what sank their hearts. The modern West reached near it too, Zimbardo with his prison study and his Lucifer Effect in 1971, Foucault with his micro power in 1975, and each fell a layer short, one keeping his eye on the person gone bad, the other carrying a stance of oppression and resistance that could not see the lowest clerk tormenting an even lower person at his window. Xunzi laid the position down with no experiment and no stance, more than twenty-two centuries before either, and the credit is his.
So the second stake is driven. It is not the person who torments, it is the position. And that leaves the one question this chapter cannot answer on its own. Sit two people behind the same window, the same four gears turning, and why does torment go especially hard at the rich and especially easy at the poor? That is not the force of position. That is a turn of the heart, and the next chapter opens it.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Why great power does not torment
SECTION 2 Why little power torments hardest
SECTION 3 Xunzi and the force of a position
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.