VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 1
Why Great Power Does Not Torment
The last chapter closed on a question. If it is the small power people who torment the hardest, and the great power people who mostly leave you alone, why? This chapter answers it, across three sections. This first one looks at the reverse side, at why the great power people do not torment. The second flips to the front, at why the small power people torment hardest of all. The third brings in Xunzi, who drove the whole thing home with a single word more than two thousand years ago. We start from the reverse, because once the reverse is clear, the front stands out sharp.
Put the odd thing on the table first. The way most people figure it, the more power a person holds, the more he can push you around. A king's word can end a life. A judge's gavel can settle guilt. Whoever holds the big power throws the big weight. And yet, when the last chapter counted up a lifetime of being tormented, every single one turned out to be a small clerk, a small nurse, a small guard, a small office worker. Not one big figure among them.
Which is strange. The people with great power clearly have more to torment you with, and they do not. The people with almost no power, holding a thing so thin it is pitiful, block you dead. This section takes four angles on why the great power people leave you alone. And notice, from the start, that not one of the four is that the great ones have high character. Just the opposite. There is not a word of morality in any of it. It is the position itself that leaves a great power man with no need, and no appetite, to torment you.
The first angle is his field of view. Think about how a real mayor spends a day. He wakes to the business of a whole city. Which district gets its roads repaired. How this year's budget gets split. How to receive the foreign delegation tomorrow. Which streets last night's storm put under water. From morning to night his eyes are on a board that wide. Against a board that wide, your trip to renew an ID, one document short, does not land in his eye at all. It is not that he refuses to deal with you. It is that in his field of view there is no square for you. The things filling his head are too large and too many for your one small errand to take even a corner. And a man who does not so much as know whether you are in front of him cannot set out to torment you. Torment means fixing on one person and going out of your way against him. The great power man has his eyes up in the sky and never looked down far enough to see you. That is the first reason, and it is plain. He cannot be bothered.
The second angle is cost. The higher the seat, the more it stands in the open, every move under watching eyes. Suppose a mayor, to spare himself the stamping of one form, sends an ordinary citizen off on a wasted trip out of spite. Let that get out, and it may be in tomorrow's news, and the day after there may be a complaint lodged over his head, and after that whether he keeps his job at all is an open question. The greater a man's power, the larger the price gets blown up for one small wrong. Torment is a low little tactic. On a small seat it costs next to nothing. On a great seat the cost turns terrifying. The great power man knows how to run that arithmetic, and because he can run it, he does not touch it. So small a treat, at the risk of so large a seat, and no one finds it worth the trade. Not that he would not like to. He cannot afford it.
The third angle runs a little deeper. It is his sense of position. A man who has climbed to a great seat mostly has a feel, in his gut, for one fact. Positions change. He came up a long road and saw plenty of rises and falls. He knows the chair he sits in today he may be out of tomorrow. He knows that the small citizen bowing and smiling in front of him now may, thirty years on, have a son who sits in a seat like his, who may even be the official at his own door. With that feel in him, he neither dares nor cares to grind the person below him into the ground. Because he knows, in his bones, that positions are running water and people are iron. Up today is no promise against down tomorrow. And this feel, that positions change, is the very thing Confucius meant in the last chapter by trading places. The great power man, having seen more, understands that trade better than the small power man does. Hold onto this one, it matters. The more a person grasps that positions change, the less he torments. The more a person believes he will sit in this chair forever, the harder he dares to torment.
The fourth angle is the deepest. It is where his satisfaction comes from. Why does anyone torment anyone? At bottom, because torment hands him a little hit of satisfaction, a little rush of I can do this to you. But the great power man draws his satisfaction from sources too many and too large for that. He signs off a great project, and that is a rush. He moves a great policy, and that is a rush. He changes a law and lifts a whole region, and that is a greater rush still. His life is full of things that let him stand up straight and feel he has weight. Set against all of that, the petty little pleasure of blocking one citizen at a counter is beneath his notice, and never even crosses his mind. Whether the person at the window gets his errand done today does not make it onto the great man's list of satisfactions. It does not even qualify to stand in line. So the fourth reason is this. His joy is simply not in torment at all. He has large joys to chase, and cannot spare a thought for so small a one.
Set the four side by side. The great power man does not torment. One, his view is up in the sky, and he cannot be bothered with you. Two, the cost is too high, and he cannot afford it. Three, he grasps that positions change, and dares not grind you down. Four, he has large satisfactions to spare, and looks down on so small a pleasure. Put the four together and you reach a conclusion worth holding tight. The great power people do not torment, start to finish, not because their character is high, but because the position itself leaves them no need, no cheap cost, and no appetite for it. This whole chapter passes not one word of who is good and who is bad. It only watches the position. Wherever the position sits, the person walks.
Now turn each of the four the other way. Suppose a view that is not up in the sky but narrowed down to a single window. Suppose a cost that is not too high but almost nothing. Suppose no feel at all that positions change, only the sense that one will sit here forever. Suppose not one large satisfaction anywhere, only this one scrap of power in hand. Turn all four over, and a man who torments as hard as a man can torment stands up alive in front of us. The next section turns them over, one by one, and looks at why the small power people torment the hardest of all. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.