VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 2
The Lion King and the Pride, a Position the Group Lifts Up
Last section set down one sentence: a position is lifted up by the group. This section fixes its eye on that word, lifting, and looks at it layer by layer. We put the hardest question. When a man declares himself king, does it count? The answer draws out a whole set of laws, five of them, the ground the rest of this volume stands on.
Return to the grass from last section. Suppose a young male lion roars across the plain and declares himself king. But every female turns and walks off, the cubs following their mothers. No other male comes to challenge him, none comes to follow. He stands alone on the grass, his roar large, his bearing grand. Is he the lion king?
He is not. He is a male lion standing alone on the grass, roaring. The position of lion king means something only with a pride. Take the pride away and the two words dissolve. In a few months, what becomes of this lion? Either he starves, because lions hunt as a team and a lone one rarely lasts. Or another pride drives him off as an intruder. Or he goes to challenge some other pride's sitting king, and only by winning does he become that pride's king. The declaring itself did nothing. It did not change his situation, and it brought him no real position at all.
People are the same. History has men who declared themselves king, emperor, leader. If a real group's acceptance stood behind them, they held the position. If nothing stood behind them, if only one man stood there declaring, they were nothing. At the end of the Qin, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang rose at Dazexiang. Chen Sheng was raised up as king, and that position was not one he declared. Some six hundred conscript soldiers, unwilling to obey the Qin any longer, raised him up together. This group accepted him, so he was king. Later Chen Sheng was killed in an internal turn by his own charioteer, and the charioteer announced he was taking the force. But the other commanders did not accept the charioteer, and the charioteer was killed almost at once by another commander. Same force, same leader's seat. Whoever is accepted holds the position. Whoever is not accepted vanishes on the spot.
Take one example from overseas. After Haiti won independence, a general named Dessalines declared himself emperor of Haiti. For a time he truly held the position, because an army and part of the people accepted him. Two years on he was ambushed and killed by his own subordinates, because a sizable part of the army and the people had already stopped accepting him. The same man, the same imperial robe, an emperor one moment and nothing the next. A position lives in the group's acceptance. The group withdraws it, and the position vanishes.
Take this a layer deeper. Enfeoffment is not only the moment of becoming a lord. Enfeoffment happens every second, every instant. A king on his throne is, every second, being accepted by the subjects, officials, army, and nobles of that instant. The acceptance is not a single event. It is not that they accepted on coronation day and so accept forever. The subjects may stop paying taxes one day. The officials may stop carrying out orders. The army may stop guarding the palace. The nobles may join to raise a new king. At any instant the group can withdraw its acceptance, and the second it does, the man on the throne is no longer king. He is a man sitting in a chair.
It is a little like walking a tightrope. It looks steady, the wire pulled taut, but the steadiness is a moving one, balanced by the pole every second, and stop for one second and you fall. The person in the position is the same. Every second he is held up by some moving balance of the group's acceptance, and stop for a second and the acceptance begins to loosen. This is why a self-declaration cannot last even a second. It tries to skip the continuing process of being accepted by the group, to fix a position onto itself. But the position was the group's to lift up all along, and away from that lifting the position simply does not exist. It is like a man trying to lift himself, his left hand hauling his right, his right hauling his left, and however loud he shouts he never leaves the ground.
This law strips the ceremony off many a solemn political pose. History is full of the scene. Someone, right after a change of hands, throws a grand coronation, dons the crown and the robes, has the officials perform the great rites, has the historians record the day of enthronement. The fuller the ceremony, the steadier the position looks. But all of that is surface. What truly decides whether he is king is not the ceremony. It is whether those officials, that army, those nobles at the ceremony truly accept him. If they truly accept, he is king with no ceremony at all. If they do not, no ceremony however grand makes him king. So a coronation is not the act of making him king. A coronation announces, out loud, that the group has already accepted him. Hold these eight words: ceremony confirms acceptance, ceremony does not create it. This cuts both ways. A grandly crowned king, awesome to behold, if the group has already quietly withdrawn its acceptance, then the grander the ceremony the more clearly it shows how hollow the acceptance has become. And a leader who never held any ceremony, unremarkable to look at, may have real acceptance behind him. A man a whole village agrees on, who never wore a crown, holds his place in that village more steadily than any crowned king. Keep many ceremonies apart from a steady position, and keep no ceremony apart from an unsteady one. Ceremony is ceremony, position is position, and there is no necessary link between the two.
The Chinese ancestors saw this layer through. Twenty-seven centuries ago, Guanzi, in the Guanzi, taught that a politics rises because it moved with the will of the people, and falls because it moved against it. The will of the people is exactly this acceptance by the group. It is not the crowd's mood of a moment. It is the acceptance the people give across a stretch of time, the obedience, the willingness to hold the one in the position up there. When the will moves with him, the politics is steady. When it turns against him, the politics loosens. Guanzi taught this as chief minister to Duke Huan of Qi. That Duke Huan became the first hegemon of his age rested not on force alone, but on this very layer, moving with the will of the people, so that Qi's subjects were willing to keep accepting his position, and the lords of the other states willing to keep accepting his leadership. But in his old age Duke Huan lost his checks, favored a few treacherous ministers, and the court fell into disorder, and the acceptance began to drain. There is a deeper truth folded in here. People age, ability wanes, and acceptance drains with it, and this is a life-level law that no institution can fully cancel. When Duke Huan died his sons fought over the seat, Qi fell into chaos, and his body lay on its bed sixty-seven days before anyone laid it out. Once a position loses the group's acceptance, even a decent burial is beyond it. Guanzi's line, that a politics falls when it moves against the will of the people, is not a piece of moral advice. It is a cold law.
Look back now at the layer this section sets. Enfeoffment is a life-level law. Life-level means the law does not pick an era, a culture, a form of politics. So long as life forms a group, and the group must produce a front-most position, this law is at work. From the hive to the pride, from the earliest tribe to the modern state, from the family to the company to the government, no exception. The law has five parts.
First, a position must exist. Wherever there is a group, there must be that front-most pivot, be it one person, a few, or a committee, but there must be a where the decision is made. A group with no pivot at all cannot hold. Meetings cannot open, resources cannot move, nothing can meet the outside world.
Second, a position must be accepted by the group. The pivot cannot crown itself. It must be accepted, continuously, by a substantial part of the group. The acceptance can come by the threat of force, by the habit of a bloodline, by the process of an election, by personal charisma, in many ways. But the act of being accepted cannot be skipped.
Third, acceptance is dynamic, not static. Being accepted is not settled once. It refreshes every second. Accepted today does not mean accepted tomorrow. The person in the position must keep up the state that makes the group willing to accept, the ability, the record, the standing, the sharing out of benefit, the power to hold things together, and let any of these fail for long and the acceptance begins to drain.
Fourth, when acceptance drains past a point, the position vanishes. This is the cruelest face. A position can look immovable while the acceptance beneath it has already drained most of the way, held up by inertia alone, and one day the last of that inertia is withdrawn and the position is gone overnight. On the eve of a dynasty's fall the king is still holding grand banquets. On the eve of a company's liquidation the head is still holding strategy meetings. The moment of collapse often comes as a surprise, but look back and the collapse did not begin at that moment. It is the long draining of acceptance reaching its last step.
Fifth, a new position necessarily arises. After a position vanishes, a group does not stay long without a pivot. Someone is pushed up, or forces his way up, or a few form a new committee. From the beaten lion king to the new one, from the fallen dynasty to the founded one, there may be a stretch of chaos between, but after the chaos a new pivot must appear. Because without a pivot the group cannot live, the position is necessarily filled.
So here is the position this section lays down. The political running of a life-level group has five laws: a position must exist, a position must be accepted, acceptance is dynamic, when acceptance drains past a point the position vanishes, and a new position necessarily arises. With these five set, last section's line, that a self-declaration cannot last a second, has its full account. Self-declaration breaks the second law, for there is no act of acceptance by the group. It breaks the third, for it is a one-time declaration, not a continuously lifted state. And it cannot draw out the fifth, for it did not grow from the group's need, and the group will not keep it going on its own. So it must come to nothing, fast or slow, the ending the same. Enfeoffment must come from the group. An enfeoffment with no group behind it is not enfeoffment at all.
So the question follows. Since enfeoffment must come from the group, what exactly does the group enfeoff onto the person in the position? A stretch of land, an office, or something else? The next section comes down to earth and looks at the two oldest and most common kinds, enfeoffing land and enfeoffing office.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.