VOLUME V, CHAPTER 12, SECTION 1
The Depths of Behavior Between Nations, the Taker and the Taken
Part Four ended by opening the space between nations, where the struggle over the scarce thing runs with no lawmaker over it. This part follows that line. This chapter is its head, and this section does the first work, to sort the behavior of a strong nation toward a weak one into depths, from the shallow to the deepest. Because between nations there is no law, the taking runs open, and it runs at different depths, and telling the depths apart is the first thing a person needs to see the space clearly. This part takes no side among nations. It sorts the structure and hands the reader a measure.
Begin with why depth is the right way to sort. Between nations, when a strong nation takes from a weak one, the taking is not all of one kind. Some takings are shallow, touching the surface of a nation's life and leaving its body whole. Some reach deeper, into the nation's substance. And some reach the deepest place of all, where what is taken is not a thing the nation has but the nation's very standing as itself. To lump all of these together as aggression or as taking is to miss the thing that matters most, how deep the taking goes, because the depth decides how hard it is to recover from, and whether it can be recovered from at all. So this section lays out five depths, from the shallowest to the deepest, as a ruler for reading any taking between nations.
The first and shallowest depth is the taking that comes and goes on the surface, the raid, the levy, the extraction that seizes goods and departs, leaving the taken nation's land, people, and standing in place. It wounds, and the wound closes, because the body of the nation remains its own. The second depth reaches into the nation's substance, the taking of its resources and its people over time, draining what the nation produces and who the nation is, a wound that goes deeper and closes slower because it removes not just goods but the nation's capacity. The third depth takes territory, a piece of the nation's ground made the taker's own, a wound in the body itself, harder to recover because ground once taken is held and defended and does not easily return. The fourth depth is the treaty, and here the taking changes character, because the treaty does not merely take, it writes the taking into a form that calls itself lawful, so that the wound is not only inflicted but stamped with a document that says the taken nation agreed, which the next chapter opens in full. The fifth and deepest depth is the occupying of a position, and it is the deepest because what it takes is not goods, not resources, not even territory, but the taken nation's very standing as itself, its place, its being recognized and recognizing itself as its own thing. This is the deepest because from it recovery is hardest of all, since what was taken is not a possession the nation can win back but the nation's own position, and to lose one's position is to lose the ground from which anything else could be reclaimed.
Note the shape of the ladder. As the depth increases, two things move together, exactly as with the scarcities of an earlier chapter. The taking reaches deeper into what the nation is, from its goods to its substance to its body to its very standing. And the taking grows harder to see and harder to recover from, because the deepest takings wear the finest robes. A raid is plainly a raid. But the occupying of a position can be dressed as progress, as order, as the natural rise of the strong and decline of the weak, so that the taken nation may not even fully see that its standing has been taken, may come to hold the taker's account of things as simply the way the world is. The deepest taking is the one the taken nation half-consents to, having absorbed the position from which its own losing looks natural. This echoes the cultural scarcity of an earlier chapter, the holding that lives inside the way people think, now between nations rather than within one.
Here the volume's discipline holds firm, and it must. To sort these depths is not to point at any nation and say, this one is the taker at the fifth depth, that one the taken. The volume sorts the structure and does not assign the roles. Which nation stands in which position, at which depth, in which case, the reader judges, holding the one measure the volume carries, what you would not want done to yourself, and holding it to every nation alike. And the volume adds one thing the next chapter will develop, that the position of taker and taken is not fixed to any nation forever. A nation that took at one time may be taken from at another, and the roles run both ways across history. The ladder of depths is a ruler for reading any case, not a chart for ranking nations. To turn it into a chart, to say my nation only stands here and the others there, would be to judge from one position and call it the truth, the very thing the volume refuses.
There is a further reason the depths matter, and it reaches back to the whole volume's root. Every one of these takings, shallow to deep, is the struggle over the scarce thing running between nations with no lawmaker over it. The raid takes goods, the draining takes resources and people, the territorial taking takes ground, and all three are the scarce thing seized because there is not enough and no law above to govern the seizing. The treaty writes the seizing lawful, and the occupying of a position secures the seizing at the deepest level by taking the standing from which the taken nation might have resisted. So the five depths are not five different things. They are one thing, the taking of the scarce thing, reaching five different depths, and the deepest reaches all the way to the taken nation's power to be itself. This is why the space between nations is the rawest showing of the volume's thesis, the scarce thing contended for with the law stripped away, and the five depths are the anatomy of that contention.
So this section sets a thirty-fifth layer. The behavior of a strong nation toward a weak one sorts into five depths, the surface raid, the draining of resources and people, the taking of territory, the treaty that writes the taking lawful, and the occupying of a position that takes the nation's very standing as itself. As the depth increases the taking reaches deeper into what the nation is and grows harder to see and to recover from, the deepest wearing the finest robes, half-consented to by the taken. The volume sorts these depths and assigns no nation to any of them, handing the reader the one measure held to every nation alike, and holding that taker and taken are positions that run both ways across history, not fixed roles. The next section looks at what puts a nation into the position of the taker, and finds two things behind it, output falling short and a strong army. Let the reader carry this ladder of depths into the section that follows.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.