VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, CHAPTER 43, SECTION 2
No One Can Stand Alone
The last section answered the first question: all four cannot be pulled out, because each faces a real matter. Answered, and at once a second question is bred in the heart, and this one is more pressing than the first: since all four stay, can one be let to have the say, and the other three follow, take the word?
This thought nearly every person who wants to get a thing done has moved. One rule is the least trouble, one reason carried to the end the most satisfying, one set of ways handling all the easiest to answer for. This section looks at why, among these four, not one can stand alone to the end. What is to be made clear: what blocks them from standing alone is no one’s moral counsel; it is the matters that rule cannot measure.
One, first make clear what standing alone means
Standing alone does not mean which one weighs heavy. The four were never even to begin with. The last chapter saw it plain: the middle thirty and forty years labor keeps the house, the two ends need keeps the house. This is keeping the house by stretch, not standing alone. The stretch it keeps passes, and it hands the stage to the next rule.
Standing alone means another thing: one rule is taken to measure all matters, the other rules not let on the stage, or on it and given no say. The matter it handles it handles as before; the matters it cannot handle fall to it too; and when what it measures out is absurd, that still falls to it, and no one may swap in another rule to try.
Plainer still: keeping the house is this stretch is mine; standing alone is all stretches are mine. Keeping the house has a bound, and past that bound it steps down of itself. Standing alone has no bound, hits a wall and does not step back. So what follows looks not at which one is too heavy, but at which one stepped past its bound, and what it hit after. Look at each of the four, and you see four ways of falling.
Two, four ways of standing alone, four ways of falling
Force standing alone falls fastest. The stock comes off slow, and down comes an order forbidding a man to leave. The thing will not sell, and up goes a wall forbidding other houses to make it. The words grate, and no one is let to speak. The first few months look the most full of yield, the order comes down and the matter moves. But the person still stands there, his hands still move, his heart no longer in it. What is made grows worse year by year, the ones willing to put their heart in walk off one by one, and at the last there is a crowd shifting to command and a heap of things no one will have. 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. This is the scene it spoke of.
Capital standing alone falls at another end. Every matter is asked one thing only: is it worth it? Is a schoolroom worth it, a hospital worth it, keeping an old one worth it, a road up the hills worth it? Reckoned out, the worth-it ones stay, the not-worth-it ones are cut. But the last chapter counted it: near half a person’s life is not worth it—the infant not worth it, the old not worth it, the sick not worth it. This one standing alone, the first to drop are this half of the people, and this half are the very parents and children of every one who reckons the account. Reckoned to the end, the abacus lands on his own kin.
Labor standing alone falls least loud, and wounds the heart most. Do how much get how much—it sounds past reproach, yet once it stands alone what it measures is not only the work; it is the person. The man who can work no longer becomes a useless man; the man who can put out no strength becomes one eating idle bread. The last chapter spoke of that shame: a strong-willed old man who at the day he can work no longer cannot lift his head, feeling he eats idle bread—that is the fruit of this rule out of its bound. Measured by one rule a whole life, at the last a man measures himself by it.
Need standing alone falls slowest, and looks the most like a good thing. Ask not what is put in, everyone has a share—the first year all say good. But the second year someone finds more done and less done come to the same, and the third year the few willing to do more stop their hands too. The rice in the pot thins day by day, the ladle is still that fair ladle, only there is nothing left to scoop. Chapter forty’s line lands here: a way of sharing answers how to share; it cannot answer whether there is anything to share. No rice in the pot, and the fairest ladle scoops out no rice.
Three, standing alone is not blocked by anyone, it is pushed back by the matter
Set these four ways of falling side by side, and one common place shows: not one is cut short by another; all four hit their own wall and came back. Force standing alone, what pushes back is the human heart. Capital standing alone, what pushes back is that half of the days at a life’s two ends. Labor standing alone, what pushes back is the man who can work no longer. Need standing alone, what pushes back is the emptied pot. What strikes it is not a rival; it is the very matter it cannot measure and yet would measure by force. The strength of that push-back is very real, keeps no face, and looks at no name.
This is the second layer of chapter forty’s line: each rule has its own position, out of its position it is a bad rule. There it spoke of what comes of taking the wrong rule, a slip of the hand once or twice. This section speaks of what comes of holding this rule and not letting go, a slip of the hand made into the common way.
So what blocks standing alone was never a word of moral counsel. There is no rule written down forbidding some one to stand alone, nor any person with the power to block it. What blocks it is the matter: the matters it cannot measure push back one by one, push until it cannot hold.
Four, the lure of standing alone is that it saves the mind
Since all four ways of standing alone must hit a wall, why does every generation still want a try? Because it saves the mind, and saving the mind is a great lure. Four rules used at once is a troublesome business. Which stretch to which rule, where the bound is drawn, how to pull back what steps past—every one must be talked over, quarreled over, changed year by year. One rule to the end is clean: one reason, one set of ways, one line said and no one need quarrel again.
The queue chapter forty spoke of is another face of this same lure. To line the four into a queue is to want one reason to explain all eras. To use one rule to the end is to want one way to meet all matters. Both are the same thought: change the complicated thing for a simple saying.
But the matter itself will not be simple. Four matters are four matters: say them as one and the saying is satisfying, the doing breeds trouble. This layer too is the hand this whole book guards against from start to end: what is feared was never some one claim; what is feared is taking one rule to measure all people, all matters, all eras.
Five, walk up close and look, nowhere in the world lives by one rule to the end
This is no guess in reason; it can be looked at with the eyes. Nowhere in the world truly passes its days on one rule alone. The place that prizes stake and return most has public schoolrooms too, free vaccines, relief for the hardest batch, and laws blocking men from being worked like beasts, children from being put down the shaft. The place that prizes plan and one command most has people growing greens in their own yards too, and markets, and the reckoning of more done more got. Walk up close and look: all four are there, only the thickness differs wide.
So the true difference was never having or not having some one; it is a different recipe: this one a little thicker, that one a little thinner, this matter to this rule, that matter to that. Chapter forty said, the recipe shifts year by year, the stock is always those four.
See this layer, and many an endless quarrel can land. What is quarreled over is not really whether to have some one; it is what share each takes, where the bound is drawn. This is an account that can be sat down and reckoned slow, not a fight of either-or, you-die-I-live. The account can be reckoned, and the fight is fought smaller.
One more layer to say in passing: keeping the house by stretch is itself the first way of blocking standing alone. The middle thirty and forty years let labor keep the house, the two ends let need keep the house, the risk given to the one willing to carry it, force let only in the narrowest place and watched even there. Every rule has a stretch it keeps and a stretch it should step down from. Able to step down, it will not grow into standing alone. This layer chapter forty-seven will speak of face on, and there it is called the check and balance. This section first sets its seed here: the first step of the check and balance is that each rule itself knows when to step down.
Six, what this section sets
What this section sets is a line: no one can stand alone to the end, not that it is forbidden, but that it cannot hold. Four ways of standing alone, four ways of falling: force standing alone hits the human heart, capital standing alone hits that half of the days not worth it, labor standing alone hits the man who can work no longer, need standing alone hits the emptied pot. The strength that pushes back comes not from another institution; it comes from those four real matters themselves. The last section said not one has been thrown out; this section says not one can stand alone. The two lines together are the skeleton of coexistence.
But coexistence has one more meaning most easily heard crooked. Since all four are wanted and none can stand alone, is it not best to take a little of each and blend a middle value? The next section answers just this, and closes this chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Three, Growing Together Is Not Blending, Not Splitting the Difference