VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 3, SECTION 2

VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 3, SECTION 2

Scorning Those Who Have Less, the Footstool and the Fear

The last section took the upper half of this heart, resenting those who have more. This section takes the lower half, the colder one, scorning those who have less. Why colder? Because resentment at least tilts the face upward and hides a thread of envy in it. Scorn hides nothing. It looks down. This section pulls it open, and then Confucius and Mencius each set a position against it.

First, see what this scorn looks like. At the sight of poverty, scorn rises. The other person is weaker than you, lower than you, no threat, cannot get anything over on you, cannot take your place. By the plain run of human feeling, the sight of someone that poor and that hard pressed should lift sympathy in you. And what lifts instead is scorn. A line runs, unspoken. How did he let himself end up like this. You see the muddy hands, you hear the heavy accent, you see the shabby clothes, you see the one at the very back of the line who filled the form out wrong, and in that second what rises is not he has it hard, but this kind of person, nothing but trouble.

Set this scorn beside the resentment of the last section and you feel why it is colder. Resentment still hides a thread of envy. You resent the man because you want the thing in his hand, which means you have admitted his position sits higher than yours. Resentment looks up. Scorn hides nothing at all. The other person holds nothing you want. So the scorn looks straight down, plain and pure, a foot coming down. The malice that looks up can at least explain itself away as I just cannot stand to lose. The malice that looks down has no explanation at all. And precisely because it cannot be explained, it hides the deepest, is denied the hardest, and runs the coldest.

The last section walked a day through resentment. Walk one now through scorn.

Morning, on the way to work, a street sweeper pushes a cart across the walk in front of you. A line lifts. Watch where you are going.

Late morning, at the bank, an old man ahead cannot work the ticket machine, and the teller calls the number twice with no answer. Down the line there are sighs, and you sigh too.

Noon, you order in, and the delivery is eight minutes late, and on the phone the driver has a heavy accent and keeps apologizing. You hang up, and the finger that wants to leave one star hovers three seconds.

Afternoon, you are behind the window, and a laborer who queued all morning finally reaches his turn. The papers he hands over are creased, out of order, and his hands still have dirt on them. Materials incomplete, come back tomorrow, and it comes out smoother than it does for anyone, smoother even than it did for the man in the fine car.

Notice that difference. For the man in the fine car, before you block him you have to weigh it. Will he complain? Does he know someone? For this laborer, there is nothing to weigh. He will not complain, would not dare, and if he did, no one would listen. Treading down on him not only costs nothing, it goes down extra smooth.

Evening, in the family text thread, a poor relative sends a message. Before you even open it a line lifts. Here he comes asking for money again.

Five times again. Not one of them a person who wronged you. And still the scorn lifts, time after time.

Why does treading down go smoother than blocking up? Pull it open, and there are two workings inside.

The first is the footstool. A person poor in position, looked down on his whole life, fears one thing above all, that he stands at the very bottom. So what does he do? He stamps someone lower than himself hard into the ground, and his own position seems to rise an inch. My pay is not much, but I am still better than him. I have made nothing of myself, but at least I am not like that. Hear it clearly. Scorning the poor is how he props himself up. What he is really stepping on is not the laborer. It is the assurance, to himself, that he is not the one at the bottom.

The second working runs deeper. It is the pushing away of fear. In the second he sees a poor man, something deeper than scorn flashes through him. Fear. The fear that he too, some day, could come to that. That fear is too much to sit with, and it cannot be left in the chest. The fastest way to be rid of it is to pin a crime on the other man's poverty. He is lazy. He is stupid. He never tried. He had it coming. Pin the crime, and the man is safe. I am not lazy, I am not stupid, I do try, so I will never sink to where he is. Scorn becomes the way he shoves the fear back out of sight. And here is a thing worth keeping. The harder a person scorns the poor, the deeper the fear runs in him that he might become poor himself.

These two, the footstool and the pushing away of fear, set on top of the four gears from the last chapter, where the cost is near zero, make treading down almost free. And that is why the come back tomorrow behind the window comes out smoothest of all at the laborer.

So must scorn rise at the sight of a poor man? It need not, either. Twenty-five centuries ago Confucius and his student Zigong had an exchange that laid out both ends of this at once. Zigong asked, a man who is poor but does not fawn, rich but not arrogant, how is that? Confucius said, it will do. But not so well as poor and glad, rich and loving courtesy.

Look at how it stacks the two ends. On the poor end, the first level is not to fawn, not to bow and scrape because you are poor. The higher level is gladness, a position that is poor but a heart that is not. On the rich end, the first level is not to be arrogant, not to tread down because you stand higher. The higher level is loving courtesy, a position that stands high but grows only more respectful toward the one standing low.

Now bring that skill back to scorning the poor, and the whole thing turns on how you read one word, rich. The rich Confucius means is not only great wealth. It is any moment at all when you stand in the higher position. The one inside the window, to the one outside it, stands in the rich position. The one behind the counter, to the one in front, stands rich. The one with the local accent, to the one with the out of town accent, stands rich. In that moment, whether you have the skill of no arrogance, whether you have the skill of courtesy, is the fork on which the scorn either fires or does not.

And here is the finest point in it, worth holding onto. The ones who scorn the poor the hardest are mostly not the truly rich at all. The truly rich, seeing a laborer, mostly pass him by flat, because the gap in position is so wide the contrast never even forms. The ones who scorn the hardest are exactly the ones who stand only a little above the poor. Because it is only by treading down that the little bit of height they have can be seen at all.

Confucius set out the skill for the one who might tread down. Mencius turned the other way and set a position for the one being trodden on. He wrote the line about the great man who stands. Wealth cannot corrupt him, poverty cannot move him, force cannot bend him. Take the middle of it, poverty cannot move him. The position may be poor and low, but the heart in him does not waver and does not sink because of it. Mencius sets, for every person who is scorned, one position. Poor does not mean low. The laborer outside the window with dirt on his hands stands in a position that differs from the one inside only by the division of the work, with no high and no low between them.

Mencius said a plainer thing too. The wince that cannot bear another's suffering, he wrote, is the sprout from which all humaneness grows. At the sight of a person in distress, the first thing the heart lifts in its first second should be that wince, that cannot stand to see it, and it is born in us, every one of us has it. So what, then, is scorning the poor? It is that inborn wince, pressed down by the two workings, the footstool and the pushing away of fear, and swapped out for scorn. Keep this above all. It is not that you have no wince of compassion in you. It is that your compassion has been pressed down. And seeing that clearly matters more than anything. Because a thing pressed down can be let up again.

So here is where this section leaves us. Scorning those who have less is colder than resenting those who have more. Resentment still hides a thread of envy and looks up. Scorn hides nothing and comes down. Inside it are two workings. The footstool, treading someone lower to confirm you are not the bottom. And the pushing away of fear, pinning a crime on the other's poverty so you feel safe. Confucius set out both ends of the skill, poor without fawning, rich without arrogance, where rich is any moment you stand higher than another, and the ones who scorn hardest are exactly those who stand only a little higher. Mencius set a position for the scorned, poverty cannot move him, poor is not low, and named the truth beneath it all, that the wince of compassion is the inborn heart, and scorn is that heart pressed down.

By now both halves of this heart, resentment and scorn, stand firm. But two whole sections have gone by seeming to talk only about other people. The clerk behind the window, the one who resents, the one who scorns, as if none of it had anything to do with you. The next section turns the mirror around and holds it up to your own face. See you there.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.

SECTION 3  Turning the mirror around, you have sat on both sides