VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 3
Selective Enforcement, and the Five Gathered
The last two sections named four forms, picking at details, the runaround, the cold shoulder, and the hoarding of information. This section takes the last one, the deepest of the five, selective enforcement. And once it is named, it gathers all five together and looks at how much damage they do added up, and why, of all things, not one law can reach them. This is the chapter's close.
The fifth form is selective enforcement. One line breaks it open. The same set of rules, to a person you know, is thin air, and to a stranger, a wall.
Set it out. The same person, with the same materials, walks into the same office. Say this person and the one behind the counter happen to share a mutual acquaintance. A phone call goes through, the person says, so and so told me to come to you, and the one behind the counter puts on a different face on the spot. Oh, a friend of so and so, easy, easy, let me have a look, a small thing like this, I will take care of it for you. Ten minutes, done. Now the same person again, with no phone call, the same materials, the same counter. The one behind, looking at a stranger, lets his face sink. This will not do, that is incomplete, go back and come again. Three trips, five, and it never gets done.
Look. The rule did not change. The materials did not change. The counter did not change. What changed? The relationship between the person and the one behind the counter.
This is the deepest of the five, because it strikes straight at equal treatment under the rules, one of the most important stones a modern society is built on. A rule is meant, at bottom, to give everyone the same treatment. But the moment a rule is handed to a particular person to enforce, that person begins to set how tight or how loose he holds it by how close the tie is. And equal treatment under the rules quietly turns into the connected go first. That is the deepest working of what gets called a society that runs on who you know.
Two thousand three hundred years ago Mencius saw this too. He wrote a line about extending, from the thing one does not care for, on to the thing one does. In its own place it described a heartless ruler letting harm spread from what he held cheap to what he held dear. Borrow the closeness and distance in it and lay it on selective enforcement, and it fits. A person takes the torment he would never lay on his own people and saves it up special for the outsider, the stranger. That is the root of what Mencius called being without human kindness. Two thousand three hundred years ago he had already seen it. The root of selective enforcement is not in the rule. It is in closeness and distance. The rule is the surface. Closeness is the lining. All torment, once it reaches selective enforcement, circles back to that one plainest position of all, the pull of who is near and who is far.
But here a line has to be drawn. Mencius spoke of being without human kindness, and that is a judgment passed from the moral end. Here, with selective enforcement, the work is only to lay the position out and pass no judgment. Why no judgment? Because every person, hand on heart, ask yourself. Over a lifetime, how many times have you made the call that says, so and so told me to come to you? And how many times have you taken the call that says, so and so is sending someone over? Does the position lean all one way? It does not. Over a lifetime, on both ends of the favor, the asking and the being asked, you have stood. So seeing this position clearly goes deeper than standing up on a height to condemn anyone.
Now all five forms are told. Gather them, and look, and a surprising thing turns up. Not one form of torment uses violence. Picking at details, no violence. The runaround, no violence. The cold shoulder, no violence. Hoarding information, no violence. Selective enforcement, still no violence. And yet a lifetime of being tormented, all of it added together, cuts deeper and lasts longer and reaches wider than the few brushes with violence a person may ever meet. That is the proposition from the first chapter, proven now in this one. Torment is an invisible evil. But it happens ten thousand times more often, its total damage runs ten thousand times higher, and no institution anywhere can govern it.
And bring the heart from the last chapter back for one last look. These five forms are the work of the hands. But which way the hands push their force is set by the resentment and the scorn in the heart. To the one who pulled up in the fine car, the five forms come down with special care, and that is the resentment pushing. To the one with dirt still on his hands, the five forms fall with special ease, and that is the scorn pushing. The craft, plus the direction, is what makes a full and complete torment.
So a question rises. If these five forms are this wounding, why is there no law that can reach them? Think about it. The law governs violence. The police govern violence. The prison governs violence. But the law cannot govern picking at details. The police cannot govern the runaround. The prison cannot govern a cold face. Why not? Because each of the five, taken out and looked at on its own, is compliant. The detail he picked, the rule really does contain it. The document he demanded, the procedure really is short of it. His cold face broke no law on any book. The information he held back violates no clause anywhere.
And it is exactly for this reason that torment falls into this volume, the one on culture, and not into the fifth volume, the one on law. Torment is the position the law cannot reach. And what the law cannot reach can only be held up by something else, the character that lives inside a culture. What holds it up? Confucius, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Mencius, and the reverse of extending harm from the far to the near. Yan Zhitui, not showing off what you can do or flaunting what you know. Not one of these is a clause of law. Every one of them is a thing that lives in a culture. Where the culture is present, torment is less. Where the culture is thin, torment is more. And whether a society's culture is any good, you do not measure by its museums, and you do not measure by its opera houses. You look at one thing. How the clerk behind the counter treats a stranger who has come to get something done. Look at that one thing, and you have looked at enough.
That closes the fourth chapter. Pull together what it has set down. This chapter moved from the heart to the hands and named the five most common forms of torment, one at a time. Picking at details, the runaround, the cold shoulder, the hoarding of information, selective enforcement. Not one of the five uses violence, and their combined damage runs deeper and wider than violence does. They are exactly the place the law cannot reach, and only culture can hold them up. That is the fourth stake this chapter drives. Torment has its five concrete forms, the work of the hands, and these forms hem a person in his whole life long, and no law governs them, and only culture holds them.
And up to here, everything has been torment that comes from the outside. Others block you, you block others. But torment has a second direction, deeper and far more unexpected. It comes from within. A person takes some law that others laid down, turns it around, and torments himself with it, day and night, all his life, binding himself so tight he never gets free. The next chapter strikes at that plainest and deepest position, and it starts from the reactions of the body. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.