VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 2
To Be Rich Is Human Temperament, Wanted Without Learning
The last section had Sima Qian say that the world comes and goes, all of it for gain. But at once someone will ask, then why is it a person simply wants to be rich. Is this a sickness, does it want curing, can it be cured. Sima Qian’s next line runs only a dozen or so characters, and it seals the question off.
The line itself
To be rich is human temperament, a thing wanted without any learning.
Take it a phrase at a time in plain speech. To be rich, everyone wants it. Temperament, the grain a person is born with, not a thing learned. Wanted without learning, no one need teach it, everyone from birth wants it.
Mark the tone of the line. Sima Qian is not speaking up for anyone, not making an excuse for anyone. He is stating a fact, the way you state that a hungry person needs to eat and a cold person needs to be clothed.
A small child needs no teaching, sees the candy and reaches for it. This is not that he is bad, this is that he is a human being. A person wanting to be rich is the same.
The fiercest thing in this line is that it seals off a way out
The line looks plain, but the moment it is out, it walls off a whole road.
Which road. The road that hopes, by teaching, to scrub the desire out of a person’s heart.
There has always been a most tempting notion. Only teach people well enough, everyone selfless, everyone unquarreling, and the hard problem of distribution solves itself, and the institution need trouble no more. This road, in every age and every land, has been walked again and again.
Sima Qian, in one line, blocks it. Wanted without learning. This thing was not learned, so you have no way to unteach it away. It grows in the bone.
Hold this layer, for the third semester, when the talk turns to distribution by need, will run into it again. A wholly single communist society is a false proposition, because a person has private mind and private want, and this is a rule at the level of life itself. It is not that the morals are not high enough. It is that this thing was there all along.
Two thousand years ago Sima Qian drove that nail in.
Then how did the ancestors treat it
A thing that cannot be scrubbed out, what is to be done.
Not one of the ancestors said to scrub it out. What they said was another word. Nourish. Settle it, guide it, give it somewhere to go.
Xunzi said it plainest, and the first chapter of this semester already drew on it. Nourish what people want, supply what people seek. Desire is not a thing to be shoveled away, desire is a thing to be seen to.
Sima Qian himself spoke a very hard passage, on the five stances the one who governs can take toward the people’s seeking of gain. The highest, to go along with it. The next, to lead it along with an offered good. The next, to teach it with reasoning. The next, to bring it into line with rules. And the lowest, to set himself against it.
Mark this order. To set oneself against human nature, Sima Qian ranks last of all. Not because it is the most wicked, but because it is the most useless. A ruler who spends every day wrestling human nature spends his whole life quarreling with a river. The river will not heed him. What he can do is cut the river a channel.
Wanting to be rich is not wrong, so where is the wrong
Here the words have to be got exact, or the section slips past.
To say wanting to be rich is nature is not to say any way of getting rich will do.
Sima Qian himself, in the Accounts of the Money-Makers, graded the roads to wealth. What is earned by tilling and by craft is the root, the straight road. What is earned by trade and the moving of goods is the branch, and yet it too keeps people alive. As for what is got by crooked and vicious means, that is the lowest. He had a scale in his heart, and he did not hide the scale.
Mark what Sima Qian’s scale weighs. It does not weigh whether a man wants to be rich. It weighs how he gets rich.
Wanting to be rich is nature, and nature is neither right nor wrong. How one gets rich is conduct, and conduct is right or wrong.
These two things must be kept apart. Mix them, and two sicknesses follow. One is to curse the want of riches as greed, and so curse the whole person, while not one thing that needed managing gets managed. The other is to hold nature up as a shield, since everyone wants riches anyway, so however I got mine is nothing to speak of. The first is false virtue. The second is playing the rogue.
Walk in close and look at the woman guarding her money
Said this far, call one person up close.
An old woman, fallen ill, in great pain, and the illness was one that could have been treated. But she does not treat it, she cannot bear to spend the money. She sits over a houseful of money and aches, flatly, and the illness that could have been cured carries her off.
Stand far off and you give her three words. Slave to money, miser, fool. And it is done.
Walk in close, look into the bottom of her heart. That money was not hers by her own earning. It was saved, over a whole hard life, by her love who died long ago, and left to her.
She was not guarding money. She was guarding the man.
To spend it is to scatter what her love left behind, to let go of the last thread strung between her and the one who is gone. She would rather ache to death than let go of this love.
Set this one beside Sima Qian’s line. Wanted without learning speaks of wanting. But this old woman is long past wanting. She dares not let go. She sits in the slave’s position, and the master that locks her is not money. It is a love she cannot set down.
Look at a person, and do not look from far off. Walk in close, look down into what is under him. From far off everyone is a flat shadow, and you slap a label on him, fool, greedy, strange, and once slapped it is done. But walk in close, look down under him, and often you find, under that shadow, a living person of blood and flesh, with his own bitterness, his own bind, his own grief he cannot speak out loud.
So which slot does this position of nature go into
Draw the section in.
Wanting to be rich is nature. It is the same kind of thing as hungry needing to eat, sleepy needing to sleep. It comes without learning, cannot be scrubbed out, and should not be scrubbed out. Set that slot, and two things follow.
The first. An institution cannot be built on the assumption that everyone is selfless. Build on it and it will surely fall, because the assumption is false.
The second. Nor should an institution suppose that to own this nature is to let it run wild. Water running downhill is nature, and still a person builds a dyke. Building a dyke is not cursing the water. Building a dyke is owning the water, and then giving it a road.
Two thousand years ago the ancestors already stood on this slot. They neither cursed the person as greedy nor waited for the person to turn into a sage. They did one thing only. Set the positions right, and let that water run where it ought to go.
What this section set up, and the turn to the next
This section set up three things.
The first. To be rich is human temperament, wanted without learning. Wanting riches is nature, not a sickness, and cannot be scrubbed out. With that nail driven in, the road that hopes to unteach desire away is a road that does not go through. The third semester, at distribution by need, will come back to this nail.
The second. Wanting to be rich and how one gets rich are two things. The first is nature, without right or wrong. The second is conduct, with right or wrong. Mix them and you get either false virtue or playing the rogue.
The third. Walk in close. That old woman guarding her money to the death is, from far off, a slave to money, and up close, a woman guarding a person.
Then the thing a person earns, where exactly does it come from. A thing sits before you, and its value, who made it. The one who tilled, or the one who wrought, or the one who hauled. Sima Qian has a line of only sixteen characters, and it sets down, in advance, the hardest stroke of the whole second semester.
The next section is about, it waits on the farmer to be eaten.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 3. It Waits on the Farmer to Be Eaten, Value Is Passed Down Through Four Positions