VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 2
Why Little Power Torments Hardest
The last section looked at the reverse and saw why the great power people do not torment, four reasons, view, cost, sense of position, source of satisfaction. This section turns each of the four over and looks at the front, at why the small power people torment the hardest of all. Turn them over and one thing comes clear. The person behind the window blocking you is not born bad. The seat he sits in has flipped all four.
Turn the first, the field of view. The great power man's view is up in the sky, too wide to hold your one small errand. The small power man is the exact reverse. His view is narrow, narrowed down until only this one window is left in it. Think about how a records clerk spends a day. He comes in the morning and sits down behind the window. He leaves at night and stands up from behind the window. All day long, what his eyes take in and his hands can touch is the line of people walking up to his window, one after another. His whole world is that big.
And here is what that brings with it. The people walking up are the only objects in his narrow view he gets to use any power on. Nowhere else. A mayor has power to spend in a hundred places, and one more or fewer of you changes nothing. This small clerk has only this one patch of ground, these few people at his window, and that is the whole of what he has to work with. So this one window matters to him enormously, matters enough that he grips it tight and will not loosen his hold by an inch. That is the first gear. The view is narrow, narrowed until the people at the window become the only thing he can spend any power on.
Turn the second, the cost. Great power torments at a terrifying price. Small power torments at almost none. The clerk behind the window sends you off on a wasted trip, and what can you do to him? Curse once, at most. Write a letter of complaint, at most. And that letter goes into the bottom of a filing cabinet where no one will ever look. The next day he is behind the same window, sending off the next person. No news reports him. No magnifying glass turns on him. Not one ounce of cost comes down on his head. The last section said a small tactic carries a small cost. But here the cost is not small, it is near nothing. When a thing can be done at almost no cost, the gate that might stop a person from doing it may as well not be there. Torment, on a small seat, is nearly free. And a free thing gets used freely. That is the second gear. The cost is near zero.
Turn the third, the sense of position. The great power man, having watched things rise and fall, grasps that positions change, and so dares not grind anyone down. The small power man mostly has no such feel. He sits in this chair ten years, twenty years, very likely his whole working life, behind this one window, until the day he retires. He will never feel, the way the mayor feels, that positions are running water. In his own lived sense, this chair is his, steady, and it will not change. Nor does he stop to think that the person doing business in front of him today might sit in his seat tomorrow. A thought like that never enters his head. The trade Confucius spoke of in the last chapter, in him, is simply absent. Let the sense of position thin out, let the thought of the trade go empty, and torment loses one more gate that might have held it back. The great power man still has that trade to check him a little. The small power man does not even have that check. That is the third gear. The sense of position is thin, thinned down until he feels he will sit here forever.
Turn the fourth, and it is the deepest of the four, and the one that sits heaviest in the chest. The great power man has more large joys than he can count. Turn it over, and the small power man may have no other source of satisfaction in his whole life. Say it honestly. He is not a mayor, he signs no great projects. He is not a scientist, he makes no great discoveries. He is not an entrepreneur, he brings in no great money. He is not a famous man, he never reaches a headline. The one thing in his life that lets him feel there is some weight in his hand may come down to just this. He can make a stranger, on his one word, take a wasted trip. On his one word, come back tomorrow. On his one word, go home and redo the paperwork. And in the second he says that word, the little scrap of position in his hand is at its very heaviest. If he does not say it, if he does not block, that weight vanishes in an instant, and he turns back into the nobody no one sees and no one cares about. So he has to say it. He has to block. He has to block to the last degree. The harder he blocks, the more solid that weight feels, and the deeper the little assurance runs that he is still good for something.
And here, telling it, something uneasy may rise in the chest. Something, maybe, close to pity. Yes. See this gear clearly and you understand. Torment is not one lone bad man doing evil off by himself. It is a man poor in position, at the one spot on earth where he can confirm that he still exists, grabbing at that proof of himself with everything he has. That is the fourth gear, and the deepest. The satisfaction has nowhere to go, and only this one window can tell him he is still here.
Set the four gears together. The view is narrow, down to a single window. The cost is near zero, the blocking near free. The sense of position is thin, so he feels he will sit here forever. The satisfaction has nowhere to go, and only this window confirms that he exists. Let the four gears mesh, let the position arrive, and torment starts up on its own. No one has to learn it, no one has to teach it, no one has to give the order. A person sits down into the seat, and the gears begin to turn.
One thing has to be said with care here. To feel a little pity, having seen these four, is right. But pity is not the same as letting it pass. Seeing the position clearly is not meant to excuse the tormentor, to sigh that he is a poor soul too, so let him block away. Just the opposite. Seeing it clearly is meant to keep you from being carried along by the position. Because every person, in a lifetime, has either sat in a seat like this already or will come to sit in one. And once you are in it, whether you can keep those four gears from turning quite so smoothly, that is the work culture does, and it comes later in this book.
So is there an ancestor who long ago caught this whole business of the position arriving and the person changing with it, and pinned it with a single word? There is. The next section brings in Xunzi, and his one word, the force of a position, to drive the foundation of this chapter home. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.