VOLUME V, CHAPTER 12, SECTION 2
The Position of the Taker, Output Falling Short and a Strong Army
The last section sorted the taking between nations into five depths. This section turns the lens onto the one who takes and asks the plainer question. What puts a nation into the position of the taker. It is easy and lazy to answer, wickedness, greed, a bad national character. The volume answers differently, from position, not from character. Two things together put a nation into the taker's position, output falling short at home, and a strong army in hand. Neither alone is enough. The two together make the taker.
Start with why character is the wrong answer. To say a nation takes because it is wicked explains nothing, because nations that took in one age were taken from in another, and the same people, the same culture, stood in both positions at different times. If it were character, the character would have to change with the position, which is only to say that the position, not the character, is doing the work. The volume has held this from the first, that behavior comes from position, not from a fixed good or bad in the actor. Between nations this holds as plainly as within one. A nation takes not because it is a taker by nature but because it stands, at that moment, in the position that produces taking. So the question is not what kind of nation takes, but what position produces the taking, and the answer is two conditions meeting.
The first condition is output falling short at home. This is the volume's root, appearing now at the scale of nations. A nation whose output meets its needs has no strong drive to take from others, because it has enough. A nation whose output falls short of its needs, whose people press against a ceiling of what the land and the making can provide, feels the pull to make up the shortfall from outside, to reach for the scarce thing beyond its borders. This is not the nation being wicked. It is the nation being short, exactly as a person cornered by scarcity is driven to the wall. Output falling short is the pressure behind the taking, the same pressure that, inside a nation, drove the contention the law arose to govern. Between nations there is no such law, so the pressure of falling short pushes outward, toward the taking, with nothing above to check it.
But output falling short alone does not make a taker. Many nations fall short and do not take, because they cannot. This is the second condition, a strong army in hand. To take from another nation, a nation must have the force to do it, the army, the ships, the means to reach across a border and seize and hold. A nation that falls short but has no strong army cannot become a taker, however much the shortfall pushes it. It becomes, instead, a candidate for being taken from, which the next section opens. So the taker's position requires both, the shortfall that pushes and the army that enables. Falling short without the army yields a weak nation that suffers its shortfall or is taken from. An army without the shortfall yields a strong nation with less drive to take. The two together, a nation both short and armed, is the nation put into the taker's position, pushed by its shortfall and able, by its army, to act on the push.
See how this joins the whole volume. Inside a nation, the strong write law to hold the scarce thing, and the strong are those with output enough and force enough to make and enforce the rule. Between nations, the taker is the nation with force enough to take and shortfall enough to want to, and there is no rule over it at all. It is the same structure, the strong reaching for the scarce thing, raised to the scale of nations and stripped of the law that, inside a nation, at least dressed the reaching in a robe. The taker between nations is the strong inside a nation, writ large and unrobed. And just as, inside a nation, the volume did not curse the strong as wicked but named their position, so between nations it does not curse the taker as wicked but names the two conditions that put a nation in that position.
Here the discipline holds, and hard. To name the two conditions of the taker's position is not to point at any nation and say, you are the taker, you are short and armed and therefore taking. The volume names the structure and assigns no nation to it. Any nation, in any age, that stands in that position, short at home and strong in arms, feels the pull the position produces, and whether it acts on the pull, and how deep it takes, the reader judges case by case, holding the one measure to every nation alike. And the volume holds, again, that the position is not fixed. A nation short and armed today may be neither tomorrow, and the taker of one age is the taken of another. The two conditions are a lens for reading any nation's position at any moment, not a brand burned onto any nation forever.
There is a sobering turn here that the honest telling must include. Because the taker's position comes from output falling short, the deepest cure for the taking is not to condemn the taker but to end the shortfall, to raise output so that no nation is pushed by scarcity to reach beyond its borders. A nation with enough has far less drive to take. This does not excuse any particular taking, and the reader still judges each by the measure. But it locates the root, and the root is the same root the whole volume has struck, output falling short. The taking between nations, like the contention within one, rides on scarcity, and reaches its end not mainly through condemnation or even through force arrayed against the taker, but through the day there is enough that the shortfall no longer pushes. That day this volume only points to. The volume on saving people walks toward it.
So this section sets a thirty-sixth layer. What puts a nation into the position of the taker is not wickedness of character but two conditions meeting, output falling short at home, which pushes, and a strong army in hand, which enables. Neither alone makes the taker, the shortfall without the army yields a nation taken from, the army without the shortfall yields a nation with less drive to take, and the two together yield the taker. This is the volume's root at the scale of nations, the strong reaching for the scarce thing, unrobed because between nations there is no law over the reaching. The volume names the position and assigns no nation to it, holds that the position runs both ways across history, and locates the deepest cure not in condemnation but in ending the shortfall that pushes. The next section turns to the other position, the one taken from, and finds its deepest danger named by Laozi long ago, a house full of gold and jade that none can keep. Let the reader carry these two conditions of the taker into the section that follows.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.