VOLUME V

VOLUME V

Afterword

With this, the fifth volume, Legal Institutions, is fully set out. Closing it, the thing most worth saying plainly is what this volume did, and what it deliberately did not do.

From the first page to the last, this volume did one thing, it set out positions. Forty-three layers, from the highest position of the law, natural law, all the way up to the unlicensed trainer in the age of artificial intelligence, and each layer answered only one question, where is the real position of this thing. It did not answer the other question, then what do we do. That is not laziness, it is discipline. Rush to write a prescription before the position is seen clearly and the medicine you write will mostly be the wrong medicine. A person has to see first where he stands, where others stand, and who set the rules of this game, before there is any talking about which way to step next. So this volume would rather leave the reader standing at one hanging position after another, and even leave him standing before a paradox it lays down and does not resolve, than hand him a cheap answer. The real way out is the business of the next volume.

This volume also held to another line on purpose, it takes no side and hands down no verdict. When it speaks of the strong writing law to hold the scarce thing alone, it is not asking the reader to hate the strong, for writing law is the position of the strong, and set the weak in that seat and they would write it the same way. When it speaks of the weak being taken from and taken over, it is not asking the reader to cry out on their behalf, for crying out does not solve the root of output falling short. When it speaks of America's four tools, it does not smear America, and when it speaks of China's four tools, it does not boast of China, and when it speaks of the taker and the taken, it crowns no one the evil man and no one the good. This volume trusts one thing, that setting both sides of a position down as they are is more useful, and more respectful of the reader, than making any moral judgment for him. The judgment is the reader's own. This volume only wipes the table clean and sets the pieces straight, one by one.

Look back over the forty-three layers and they are, in truth, saying one root again and again. The law is not a justice that fell from the sky, it is a tool that grew up out of the ground, and the direction the tool takes is decided, in the end, by output and by position. Output falls short, so there is scarcity. There is scarcity, so there is struggle. There is struggle, so rules are set. The one who sets them is the strong, and the strong secure their own share first. That one line of logic takes in a nation and the space between nations, takes in the ancient and the present, takes in East and West, takes in land and artificial intelligence. See through that one root and the thousand tangled phenomena of the law will no longer lead you by the nose with their surface clauses and their surface talk.

And yet, after saying so many cold and heavy things, what this volume most wants to leave with the reader, at the very end, is one warm thing. Self-discipline. The outer law is never perfect and will always be bent by power and appetite, but there is one thing no one can take and that a person decides for himself, the line a person draws for himself, do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Hold that line, and a person may not be able to change this world, but he can keep from living himself into the very kind of person he most despises. That is the last footing this volume has, and the reason that, after going the whole way through the strong and the weak, scarcity, taking, and replacement, it still will not let the reader fall into despair.

Almost none of the layers in this volume is a new thing. Laozi, Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Han Fei, Zhuangzi, Guan Zhong, Shang Yang, Huang Zongxi, Sima Qian, Wang Yangming set these positions out, one by one, more than two thousand years ago. All this arranging did was take what the ancestors had already said, put it in the plain speech of today, join it to the affairs of today, and say it once more. So the credit for this volume was never with the one who arranged it. It is with these ancestors who said it all through, thousands of years ago. And if a single line here is said wrong, a single position set askew, a single word used in error, that is the poor craft of the one who arranged it, and has nothing to do with the ancestors.

That is the meaning of the line at the end of every section, and the last line this volume wants to leave.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.