VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, CHAPTER 43, SECTION 1
Not One Has Been Thrown Out
The first three chapters laid the ground of this semester. Four running at once, set on one account. Four hung at once on one person, from light to dark. Four dividing the stretches and changing the shift, holding one person from birth to death. All three chapters told the same one thing: they are all there.
From this chapter the lens turns to the other side. No longer what each is doing on its own, but what stands between them. The first question is the plainest, and the hardest to answer: two thousand years gone, why has not one come up short? Every one of the four has been declared finished, every one has been seen off, every one has had its eulogy written, and yet one by one they all still stand on today’s account. This section answers that line.
One, all four have been sentenced to death
Lay these verdicts out, one at a time. Slavery was sentenced earliest and most wholly. Law after law came down, and no country in the world will own it on paper now. In law it died clean long ago, and even to bring it up, people add by habit: that is a thing of the past.
Capital has been cursed a hundred years and more. Every great upheaval, someone says this time it will not pull through. In a hundred years and more this verdict has been passed many times, every time with great sureness. The names on that row of books in the shop change with each decade; the saying stays much the same.
Labor has taken its verdict too. They say it is cold, that it turns a person into a machine that reckons numbers, that it makes a man see only his own grid of figures and nothing else. These words did not come from nowhere; the ones who say them have mostly seen with their own eyes some things that grate.
Need takes the least kind verdict: a daydream, a keeper of idlers, a thing that sounds fine and falls apart the moment it is done, fit only for paper. Of these four verdicts, the hottest is often not the outsider; it is the very batch that once believed it most. Four things, four verdicts, each with its own reason, each with its own heat. Yet two thousand years, and not one of the four has walked.
Two, why slavery was not cut off at the root
First the one sentenced hardest. What the law forbade is its name, and the name forbidden, it changes a name and goes on. The first semester set a line: this thing does not vanish, it only changes skin. What skin it wears today the earlier chapters have touched: a contract forbidding a man three years to do the same work elsewhere, a debt that comes down the moment he lifts his foot and dares not quit, an order that only a certain few houses may do this trade. None of these is called slavery, and no one calls it so, yet they do the same one thing: fence a man at some position and forbid him to move. The more decent the name, the harder it is to know.
Why can it not be cut off at the root? Because the thing it faces is real: there are always people in this world who would save themselves the effort. Chapter forty said, to set force to prop the other three straight matters is the least effort in the short run and the deepest wound to the root in the long. Saving effort, as long as a person is a person, will not vanish, and as long as it does not vanish, that wall is always something someone will want to raise. The one raising the wall mostly does not feel he is raising a wall; he only feels he is getting the thing done a little faster.
So this thing stayed, not because the law was lax, but because that thought is in the human heart. The deed can be forbidden; the thought cannot. This is why it comes back in a changed skin time after time, and why every generation to come must keep watch on it.
Three, why capital did not fall
Now the one cursed most. It stayed the same way, because it faces a real thing: a shop must have someone willing to stake the money to raise it, a machine must have someone willing to pay to buy it, a thing with no shadow yet must have someone willing to put money down first to try. These few matters, no year and no place can dodge.
This matter itself has nothing to do with what it is called. In the twentieth century several places tried to pull this thing out whole, pull it clean, forbid even the name. Yet pulled out, the matter did not vanish with it: the shop still had to be raised, the machine still bought, and a loss still had to fall on someone. The matter did not walk; only the one carrying it changed, from that man who could not sleep at night to a government office, a sheet of plan.
The one carrying it changed, and that share of risk did not shrink by a cent; it only moved from one man’s ledger to another. When the loss came, what was lost was still true gold and silver, still years of work and the strength of tens of thousands. The account moved its place; the risk moved not at all. This section does not judge which way of carrying is better; that is not this section’s business, nor a verdict this volume should pass. This section sets one position only: that matter cannot be pulled out. Chapter forty’s line takes force a second time here: all four matters are real, so no one of the four rules can be pulled out. What is pulled out is the name; what cannot be pulled out is the matter.
Four, why labor and need were not swallowed either
These two are the same, each facing a matter that cannot be pulled out. The matter labor faces is: do nothing and there is nothing, do and there is. Pull this one line out, and the scene chapter forty told appears at once: more done and less done come to the same, and inside three months the stock coming off drops. This is not the heart gone bad; this is what people are. Sima Qian wrote long ago: to grow rich is in a person’s nature, wanted by all without being taught. What is human nature cannot be pulled out, so this rule cannot be pulled out.
The matter need faces is harder still: a person’s two ends of life, plus the few gaps in the middle, near half his days he cannot live by his own strength. The last chapter counted these years. The infant cannot earn his own milk, the old cannot earn their own medicine, the sick cannot weave cloth in a hospital bed. This half of the days cannot be pulled out, so this rule cannot be pulled out.
So the four are all still here, for one and the same reason: each faces a real matter, and of those four matters, not one is false. A person can pull out a name, can forbid a saying, can curse down a claim, yet as long as the matter is still there, that rule will grow back from somewhere else, under some other name.
That these four could stay all along has one more layer of reason: the matter each handles, the other three cannot take over. That share of risk the rule of need cannot measure, for it does not ask what is put in, so it does not ask whose the loss is. That stretch at the two ends of a life the rule of labor cannot measure, for those two stretches have no yield to begin with. The one who puts out strength wants a saying, and the rule of need cannot give it, for it does not ask at all how much you did. Four matters, four rules, no one can take another’s shift. Chapter forty spoke of this layer by swapping the four rules about; this section looks at the same thing from the other end: just because none can take another’s shift, not one can be thrown out.
Five, the ancestors’ line: all things grow together and do not harm one another
This thing the Doctrine of the Mean says in full in one line: all things grow together and do not harm one another, the ways run side by side and do not run against one another. Grow together—look at these two words close. It does not say each bears with the other and keeps out of the way, nor that they line up and yield one to the next. It says each grows its own, at once, together, and none need wait for another to make room. The things under heaven grow just this way to begin with: grass grows its grass, trees their trees, the insect walks the insect’s road, the bird the bird’s, and the four seasons pass as ever. None first talked it over with another; none waited for another to clear a space.
The lower half matters more: the ways run side by side and do not run against one another. The four rules each have their own reason, and these reasons even run opposite to one another. He who does not work does not get, against do not ask whether he worked—set side by side they butt heads. Yet they have lain side by side on the same account for decades and neither has pushed the other out. This is running side by side and not running against.
This line is the whole root of this chapter, and one of the weightiest lines of this semester. Coexistence is not a wish, not anyone’s good heart, not an arrangement reached by splitting a difference. Coexistence is the fruit of those four matters all being real. Whether a person owns it or not, it is there. The matters all real, the rules all there. The rules all there, and a person must learn to let them grow side by side.
Here guard against a mistake. To say the four cannot be pulled out is not to say the recipe before your eyes is a good one, still less that nothing need be changed. What cannot be pulled out is those four matters, not the measure of some one year, some one place. The skin slavery changed into, seen clear, should be blocked. That grid of capital, if it grows thick past all reason, reckoned clear, should be adjusted. The rule of labor, if it measures onto a man who can work no longer, out of its bound, should be pulled back. To own that they are all there is so as to stop spending strength on declaring who is finished, and spend it instead on the few places that truly should be adjusted.
Six, what this section sets
What this section sets is a line: not one has been thrown out, because not one matter is false. Four verdicts were passed, in black and white, with heat enough, yet not one of the four walked, and today each still handles its own matter at its own position. Slavery stayed by changing skin, because that thought of saving effort is there. Capital stayed, because someone must always carry the risk. Labor stayed, because human nature is so. Need stayed, because half a life’s days cannot lean on oneself. A verdict sentences a name; it cannot sentence the matter. A name can be changed in a night; a matter must be dealt with a day at a time.
Read to here, the next question most easily bred is this: since none of the four can be pulled out, can one of them be let to have the say, and the other three follow it? The next section answers just this: why, among these four, not one can stand alone to the end.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.