VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 3
Wei the More Refined the Harder to Recognize, and the Road of Next Semester
The two sections before stood up the twelve characters, the four corollaries, and the deepest line, that the master is a slave too. This last section walks the whole road once more, from the head, and drives the semester’s final stake. Then it points the way to the road of next semester. This section done, the first semester is closed.
Walk the whole line once more, from the lion
Go back to the very beginning, to the lion in the second chapter of this semester.
A lion brings down a zebra, eats its fill, and the rest of the pride waits at the side. The lion takes the big share. It argues nothing. It does not say it is only right that I eat more. It eats because it is strong, and it says not a word.
Then came the person. The person too took the big share. But the person added a line. It is only right that I take more.
That line is the seed of the whole matter. From it grew every layer in these twelve chapters.
The Shang dragged the person to the altar. It is only right, for these are captives, not people.
Aristotle reasoned it round. It is only right, for some are slaves by nature.
Rome wrote it into the code. It is only right, for in law he is a thing.
The lord took the serf’s grain. It is only right, this is the return for my protection.
The mill worked the five year old. It is only right, he came of his own will, he signed.
The bank draws the thirty years. It is only right, this is a contract freely made.
Look down the whole line. The core never changed. I take more, and it is only right. What changed was only the reason. And the reason grew, layer upon layer, more decent, more delicate, harder to knock down in one blow.
This is the one line that runs through the whole semester. Wei the more refined is the harder to recognize.
The end of the road needs no wicked man
Walk this line to its end, and a thing turns clear that chills the heart.
That position, walked to its most refined layer, needs no wicked man at all.
It needs only a bank clerk who follows the rules and grants a loan. Only an engineer who does his work well and tunes the algorithm one notch tighter. Only a parent who loves the child and sends it to one more cram class. Only a person, off work, worn out, who scrolls the phone two hours to rest.
Not one of them is a bad man. Every one of them is an ordinary person, doing his own duty well, loving his own family.
And these ordinary people, each doing his duty, together keep that position turning, smooth and quiet.
This is the deepest thing in the whole semester. In the age of the Shang, to run that position you needed a king with a knife. Today, to run it you need only a crowd of decent, gentle, dutiful ordinary people.
The knife is gone. The position turns better than it ever did.
Go back once more to the word wei. Wei is the layer made by man. It is not the work of a few bad men. It is the sum of a whole crowd of good men, each doing his own share of what looks entirely right.
That is why the club of cursing is of no use. There is no one at whom to swing it.
So enslavement will not pass away
Here, then, is the line this semester has been walking toward from the first.
Enslavement will never pass away.
Not because men are bad. But because that position, the taking and the laying of the constraint, is woven into the very way people live alongside one another.
So long as people must settle one another, there will be the ceding of the constraint. So long as there is the ceding of the constraint, there are the slave position and the master position.
Look at today. There is the home slave, the car slave, the cat slave, the dog slave, the child slave, the wealth slave, the wealth-guarding slave, the obedience slave, the algorithm slave. This crowd, living and breathing, will go on forever.
Enslavement was not abolished. It only changed its skin, changed until you cannot know it again.
Read this line, and do not sink into the cold. This is not a thing to make a man despair. It is a thing to make a man wake. Precisely because it will not pass away, the one thing worth doing is not to dream it gone, but to learn to see it clear.
Three things to carry away from this semester
So this whole semester, laid to the end, hands you three things. Not three conclusions. Three tools.
The first is a pair of eyes. Look at the position, not the person.
Meet any relation, and do not first ask, is this one good or bad. Ask first, in this relation, on this matter, who takes the constraint, and who lays it. Set down the person, and pick up the position.
The second is a rod. Weigh the clear-eyed against the unwitting.
Every ceding, put to this rod. Do I know what I am ceding. What do I get back. Do I own this account. The clear-eyed ceding and the unwitting ceding are two different things, and the whole space of a free man lies in that difference.
The third is one line. Wei the more refined is the harder to recognize.
Whenever a thing looks entirely natural, entirely right, entirely the way it was always meant to be, stop there a moment. The more natural it looks, the more worth turning over once to see what position is set underneath.
These three, carry them, and walk on.
What must not be carried, is hatred
One thing, this semester asks you not to carry away. Hatred.
Twelve chapters spread out much that was cruel. The altar of the Shang, the child at the bottom of the mine, the debt of forty nine years. Reading them, a fire rises in the chest, and wants someone to blame.
Set that fire down.
Not because those things were not cruel. But because hatred blinds the eye. The moment you fix on a villain to hate, you stop seeing the position, and the position is the only thing worth seeing. Pull the villain down, put another up, and in the same seat he does the same thing.
What this volume trains is not a hater. It is a person who sees clear.
Recall the way of walking in close from the last chapter. That old woman guarding her money, walked up to, was guarding not money but her love who was gone. Every person, walked up to, has under him a living person of blood and flesh, with his own bind, his own grief. From far off you see a shadow and stick on a label. Walk in close, and the label will not stick.
Put down the club, keep the eyes and the rod. This is the whole of what the semester asks.
Then where does next semester begin
This semester walked the first of the four institutions, enslavement. Next semester walks the second, capital.
Set here one signpost for the road ahead.
There is a line, well known, that runs like this. The worker makes the product, so the value belongs to the worker. It sounds just, and it warms the blood.
Next semester will take this line apart, and the tool for the taking apart was set ready long ago, in the fifth chapter of this semester, in Sima Qian’s sixteen characters. It waits on the farmer to be eaten, on the ranger to be brought out, on the craftsman to be made, on the trader to be moved along. A thing of value is not brought forth by one pair of hands. It is passed forward through many positions, each adding its share.
From this, next semester will walk three further steps. First, that the worker holds cards too, and his card is scarcity, and where a man is scarce he can lay a constraint. Second, that the capital holder is a slave too, driven by the market as the worker is driven by the wage. Third, that the deepest question is not who digs the scarcity out, but who is let to make scarcity, and here will come the matter of the diamond, a stone not scarce in the ground, made scarce by a hand.
And walked to the bottom, next semester will show a thing. The root of it is not in the economy at all. It goes on down, into the fourth volume, into the political institution, and the institution of thought.
But that is the road of the times ahead. This semester closes here.
The last words of this semester
Twelve chapters, and this thirteenth. From that master who could not cook, to this morning’s alarm at six thirty.
You now have the pair of eyes, the rod, and the one line.
Go and look at your own day. Look at the several seats you sit in at once, the ropes tied to you, the accounts you have and have not reckoned. Do not curse, do not pity yourself, do not preen. Only look clear, at the true weight of the constraint in each of your relations.
The road out was never a climbing higher. It was a seeing clear.
The next chapter of the story belongs to the second institution. Capital. We will meet there next semester.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.