VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 1
Picking at Details, and the Runaround
The first three chapters took torment apart. What it is, how it happens, where its root sits in the heart. From this chapter on, the camera moves off the heart and onto the hands. What are the actual moves? Across three sections, this chapter names the five most common of them. Why bother naming them? Because once a thing has a name, the next time you run into it something in you clicks. Ah. That is that one. And once you can see it, it can no longer lead you around by the nose. Today, the first two. Picking at details, and the runaround.
Before the naming, one thing has to be said. Torment is among the most familiar things in a life. Getting an ID, a license, getting into a school, seeing a doctor, buying a home, crossing a border, filing taxes, finding work, the whole road down, and who has not been tormented dozens of times, hundreds? And here is the strange part. A thing that common, that everyone has met hundreds of times, and almost no one ever gave it a name, sorted it into kinds, sat down and studied it in earnest. You have been tormented and cannot say quite how. Next time you are tormented, still cannot say. And the day you yourself sit down in that seat and run the same few moves on the next person at your window, you still cannot say. That is culture at its deepest point of failure. A thing that happens every day, that everyone knows, and no one has a name for. No name, so it cannot be seen clearly. Not seen clearly, so it just goes on, one generation to the next.
So what this chapter does is plain. Not to invent anything, but to name. It gathers a lifetime of being tormented into the five most common forms. Not that these five exhaust it. They are the ones that matter, and once you have these, the other tricks you can work out for yourself.
The first form is the most common of all. Picking at details.
Here is how it runs. The one doing the tormenting holds a rule. The rule itself is written down, plain, in black and white. The person doing business follows the rule, gets his materials in order, brings them to the counter. And the one behind the counter says, you are off by a hair here. Your signature is in the wrong spot. This stamp sits crooked. Your date is in the wrong format. Listen to the back and forth. The person explains, I filled it out exactly as the form asked. The clerk says, you filled it out wrong, go redo it. The person asks, wrong where, exactly? The clerk says, you filled it out wrong, go redo it. The person says, I honestly cannot see it. The clerk says, that is your problem.
From end to end, the materials the person brought would, in plain fact, do the job. And the rule itself never said those details had to be exact to the hair. But the clerk seizes on the one fuzzy gray patch in the rule and turns a thing that would work into a thing that will not. That is what a rule is really for in the hand of a person who torments. The rule is a tool, and he uses the tool to block you and leave you with nothing to say, because there it is, the rule, written in black and white.
This move is old. Two thousand one hundred years ago, in the Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian set down how a harsh official of the Han named Zhang Tang tried his cases. He did not judge by the evidence. He judged by what the throne wanted the outcome to be. If the throne wanted a man convicted, he handed the case to the subordinate who judged hardest. If the throne wanted a man let go, he handed it to the one who judged softest. In his hands the rule was not a thing to carry out. It was a stepping stone to bring an outcome that had already been decided down off its high shelf.
That move, twenty-one centuries old, moved to a counter today, changes its clothes and keeps the law of the position exactly. The one behind the counter has already decided, today you do not get this done, and only then turns back to hunt up a detail to stand on. The person mostly never sees this layer, and thinks he really did make a mistake, and goes back to fix it, and returns, and gets a fresh detail found on him, and is blocked. Three trips, five, and the person breaks. And the moment he breaks, the one behind the counter has won, and that thin sense of position gets its confirmation.
The second form runs a layer deeper. The runaround.
Here is how it runs. This trip does not work, so the person comes back the next. Next trip, he is told one document is short. The trip after, the materials are complete, but the policy just changed, so he needs one more. That done, it needs the supervisor's signature, but the supervisor is not in today. Come back tomorrow, the supervisor is in, but first it needs another stamp. That stamp done, he comes back, and the first document has now expired, so he must do it over. The person runs three trips, five, and each time a fresh requirement, newly surfaced, turns him away. Look at any one requirement alone and it seems not to break a rule. But add them all up, and the person simply cannot get it done.
Where is the knack in this one? Right here. The clerk never, ever tells you all the requirements at once. Each time, he lets out one. You finish that one, and next time he lets out the second. You finish that, and he lets out the third. Each one, alone, has its reason. All of them together, you could not finish in a lifetime. And the law of the position behind it runs like this. If he told you everything at once, you would handle it on the spot, and then his hand would be empty of cards. But by splitting it across many rounds, one card a round, he always has the next card still in his hand. His sense of position hides inside that holding of cards. A card in hand, the position is there. The last card played, the position is gone. So he has to let them out one at a time, and he has to make sure there is always a next one.
There is an old line some readers may think of here, that the people can be led to walk the road, but it is hard to make every one of them understand why. In its own place it meant something plain, that ordinary people can be brought to follow a way even where not every one of them can be made to grasp the reasoning behind it. But later, some who sat in positions read it crooked into this. Do not let the people see the whole road, so that I can dole it out to them a step at a time. A perfectly good old line, bent by that card holding seat into a tool. That, too, is a fate no old text escapes, and it is worth keeping in mind.
So here is where this section leaves us. Two forms, named. The first, picking at details. He holds the rule, works the one fuzzy patch in it, and turns a thing that would work into a thing that will not. Sima Qian's Zhang Tang, twenty-one centuries ago, judged the very same way. Settle the outcome first, then find the detail to stand it on. The second, the runaround. He never tells you everything at once, lets out one requirement a round, and always keeps the next card in his hand. Card in hand, position intact. These are the first two faces torment wears on the hands. And they share one thing. Neither one lifts a finger, neither one says a word against any rule, and both can grind a person down until he breaks. The next section takes the third and fourth forms, two that cut deeper and leave even less of a mark, the cold shoulder with its sting, and the hoarding of information with its after the fact sneer. These no longer work by the rule. They work by a face, by a tone, by that little edge of I understand and you do not. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.