VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 3
Xunzi and the Force of a Position
The last two sections took both sides, why great power does not torment and why small power torments hardest, and pulled all four reasons apart. Pulled all the way down, they come to one line. It is not that the person is bad. It is the position doing the work. That line may sound like something discovered here. It is not. More than two thousand three hundred years ago an ancestor pinned it with a single word. The ancestor is Xunzi. The word is shi, the force of a position.
Start with a plainer word of his first, the word for position itself, or as Xunzi put it, fen, the dividing of positions. Xunzi wrote, in one passage, that a person cannot live except in a group. And a group with no dividing of roles falls to fighting. Fighting brings chaos. Chaos scatters them. Scattered, they grow weak. And weak, they can no longer hold their ground among the things of the world. The dividing he means is the parceling out of positions. Who stands in which place, who does which share of the work, each with a share of his own. Xunzi saw it clearly. For a great crowd of people to live together in any peace, everything rests on this dividing. Each person stands in his own share of position and does his own share of the work. Get the positions parceled out and the group can hold. So mark where Xunzi begins. He looks at a person and does not first ask whether the man's heart is good or bad. He asks first what position the man is standing in. Position is the first thing his eye goes to.
With the positions parceled out, Xunzi reaches his weightier word. Shi. In another passage he wrote that when the force of position is level between people, and what they want and what they hate is the same, and there is not enough of the thing to go around, then they are bound to fight. Lift out the two words at the center of it, the force of position. Xunzi sets the force of position at the thing that decides how a person acts. Whether a man fights, and how he behaves, is not read first off his heart. It is read first off the force of his position. Wherever the force of position is set, the behavior is largely set with it.
That word, shi, is the force a position carries. Put it in the plainest line this chapter has. 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 person is only the one who carries it out. And that is the deepest root of torment. The four gears the last two sections counted, view, cost, sense of position, satisfaction, are in the end all that one force turning. The man behind the window is not a man born wanting to torment anyone. It is the force of the position behind the window that makes him torment. Swap in another person, and as long as he does not understand this and does not do the work, he torments just the same. The position does not change, so the behavior does not change. Xunzi saw all the way through it two thousand three hundred years ago.
Where Xunzi spoke of the force of position, another ancestor, Mencius, added a plain line from a different angle. In a year of plenty, he wrote, the young are mostly idle. In a year of famine, the young are mostly violent. Not because Heaven handed them different stuff, but because of what sank their hearts to where they are. Weigh that, and it is the same thing Xunzi is saying. The idleness of the fat years and the violence of the lean ones are not two batches of young people with better and worse natures. It is that the positions they stand in, the circumstances around them, carried their hearts to different places. Not that the raw material Heaven gave them differed. That the circumstance which sank their hearts made them what they became. This is how the ancestors always look at a person. Position first, then the person. See the position clearly and the behavior comes largely clear. Fail to see the position, keep your eyes only on the person, and all you will ever feel is why is this one like this, why is that one like that. It was never this one or that one. It was the position each of them stood in.
This idea, that position decides behavior, has been reached in the modern West too, and reached famously. Set two of them next to Xunzi and compare. In 1971 a psychologist at Stanford, Philip Zimbardo, ran a study that many readers will know. He took a group of ordinary college students, split them at random into two lots, one to play guards and one to play prisoners, and shut them in a mock prison in a basement. Within a few days the students playing guards had begun, in earnest, to abuse the ones playing prisoners. The study was meant to run two weeks. They had to call it off on the sixth day. Out of it Zimbardo built a theory he called the Lucifer Effect. Good people, placed in the wrong situation, turn into people who do evil.
The other is the French philosopher Michel Foucault. He wrote of micro power, of how power soaks into every corner of daily life and shapes a person, little by little, into the disciplined shape it wants.
Are these close to Xunzi and his force of position? Very close. But both fall a layer short. Zimbardo leaned on one experiment and one set of numbers to say the situation changes a person. He saw one extreme role, the prison guard. He did not see the small, unremarkable positions of ordinary life, the window, the desk, the counter, quietly turning people into tormentors every day. And his landing point is that the person went bad, his eye still on the person. Xunzi's landing point is that the force of position is doing it, his eye on the position. That one layer of difference, and the sense of position thins by a notch.
Foucault comes in already carrying a drive to critique, to resist. The power under his pen is a machine of oppression, a thing to be fought. That drive is a stance, and with the stance in place he cannot see a plainer thing. Most torment is not a ruler crushing the people at all. It is the lowest little clerk against an even lower person at his window. That will not fit inside a frame of oppression and resistance. Xunzi speaks of the force of position with no experiment behind him and no stance in front of him. He simply lays the position down. The position is there, so the force is there. The force is there, so the behavior is largely set. No verdict, no stance, only the position laid out. Zimbardo set down the Lucifer Effect in 1971, and Xunzi came more than twenty-two centuries before him. Foucault set down micro power in 1975, and Xunzi came more than twenty-two centuries before him too. All that is done here is to lay out again, in plain talk, the position the ancestor set down long ago. The credit is Xunzi's.
That closes the second chapter. Pull together what it has set down. The chapter answered the question the last one left. Why do the small power people torment hardest. The answer is four gears. The view is narrow, the cost is near zero, the sense of position is thin, the satisfaction has nowhere to go. Let the four gears mesh, let the position arrive, and torment starts on its own. And those four gears, at bottom, are all Xunzi's one word turning, the force of a position. That is the second stake this chapter drives. It is not the person who torments. It is the position that torments. A person sits into a position and does the things that position does. Zimbardo and Foucault reached something near it, each a layer short, and give way to Xunzi.
That much settles how torment happens. The position arrives, and it starts on its own. But one thing is still left over. Sit two different people behind the same window, with the same four gears turning, and why does torment go especially hard after two kinds of person? It blocks the rich and powerful with a particular relish, and it treads on the poor and weak with a particular ease. That is not something the force of position alone can explain. Behind it lies a certain turn of the heart. The next chapter opens up that turn of the heart, the one that has gone three thousand years without being named straight out. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Chapter 3 Resenting Another's Wealth, Grudging Another's Want