VOLUME V, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 3
The Responses of the Taken, Accept, Resist, Grow Strong
The last two sections walked the deepest depth and the treaty that stamps taking lawful. This section turns fully to the nation on the weak end, the taken, and sets out its responses. There are three, to accept, to resist, to grow strong, echoing at the scale of nations the three roads of the weak inside a nation. And the deepest of the three, the one that alone changes the position, is to grow strong. This section closes Part Five, and closes the international line's account of the taken with the one response that does not merely endure the taking but ends the condition that produced it.
The first response is to accept. A taken nation may yield what is taken and live with the taking, signing the treaty, ceding the ground, opening to the taker's terms, and turning its strength to living as well as it can under the new arrangement. This is not always weakness, exactly as acceptance inside a nation is not always weakness. For a nation with no power to resist and no near prospect of growing strong, acceptance may be the road that preserves the people, keeps them alive and whole to see another age, rather than spending them in a resistance that cannot win. Its cost is real, the taking stands and may deepen, and the nation lives under a standing it did not choose. Its gain is real too, survival, the keeping of the people through an age they could not have fought their way out of. To accept, for a nation, is to change what it can bear rather than the taking it cannot yet move.
The second response is to resist. A taken nation may fight to hold what it has, spending its strength against the taker, refusing the treaty, contesting the ground. This is the response honored in every nation's memory of its own resistances, and it carries the highest possible gain, that resistance sometimes holds the door, throws off the taker, keeps the nation its own. But it carries the highest cost too. Resistance that cannot win spends the people terribly and may deepen the taking rather than ending it, and a nation that resists from too weak a position may lose more than a nation that accepted and waited. Whether resistance is the right road depends on the nation's real strength and real prospect, and the volume does not tell any nation to resist or not to resist, only sets resistance out as one of the three, with its high gain and its high cost, to be weighed from within the nation's own position.
The third response is to grow strong, and it is the deepest, because it alone changes the position itself. A taken nation, rather than only yielding to the taking or spending itself against it, may turn its strength inward and upward, building its output and its force until it is no longer the full house with the weak door, no longer the wealth without the strength to hold it. This is the response that reaches the root, because the taken's position, as the last chapter showed, is produced by wealth or want without the strength to hold what it has or to make what it needs. To grow strong is to change exactly that, to raise output so the shortfall no longer exposes the nation, and to build the force so the door can be held. A nation that has grown strong is no longer in the taken's position, not because the taker relented but because the condition that made it takeable has changed. This is the between-nations form of the deepest road of the weak inside a nation, the road that changes one's own position rather than only enduring or resisting the frame.
See how the three responses echo the earlier layers and complete them. Inside a nation, the weak had roads to accept, to resist, to step outside, and none of them moved the frame of scarcity. Between nations, the taken has roads to accept, to resist, to grow strong, and the third does what none of the inside roads could, it moves the nation's own position by moving its output and its force. Why can the between-nations third road reach what the inside third road could not. Because a nation, unlike a single weak person inside a nation, is large enough to change its own output, to build over generations the capacity that a lone person inside a frame cannot build alone. The nation is both the weak party and, potentially, a maker of output at scale, and so the road of growing strong, which for a single person was mostly closed, is for a nation genuinely open. This is the one place in the whole volume where a party in the weak position has a road that reaches the root, and it reaches it by the volume's own deepest lever, the raising of output.
The discipline holds here too. To set out the three responses is to tell no nation which to choose, and to say of no nation that it is the taken who must now grow strong or the taker who must be resisted. The volume sorts the responses and leaves the choosing, and the judging, to those within each position, under the one measure held to all. And it holds, as throughout, that the positions turn. A nation that grows strong out of the taken's position does not thereby become virtuous forever, and may, having grown strong and meeting its own shortfall in a later age, find itself in the taker's position, feeling the pull the last chapter named. Growing strong changes the position from taken toward strong, and the volume does not promise that the newly strong will hold the measure better than the strong before them. That is the sobering symmetry the honest telling must keep. The road that saves a nation from the taken's position delivers it toward the strong's position, with all the pull that position carries, and whether it then holds the measure is the same open question the volume has asked of every strong party from the first.
So this section sets a fortieth layer, and Part Five closes here. The taken nation has three responses, to accept, to resist, to grow strong, echoing the three roads of the weak within a nation, and the deepest is to grow strong, because it alone changes the position, raising output and force until the nation is no longer the full house with the weak door. This is the one place a party in the weak position has a road that reaches the root, and it reaches it by the volume's deepest lever, output, because a nation, unlike a lone person, can build its own output at scale. The volume tells no nation which road to walk, holds that the positions turn, and keeps the sobering symmetry, that the road out of the taken's position leads toward the strong's, with all its pull.
Now set Part Five together. It followed the line the fourth part opened, the space between nations where the scarce thing is contended for with no lawmaker over it. It sorted the taking into five depths, named the positions of taker and taken by output and force rather than by character, walked the deepest depth of occupying a position and its strange two-way running in the Chinese line, watched the treaty stamp the taking lawful from old centuries to the present charter, and set out the taken's three responses ending in the deepest, to grow strong. From the thirty-fifth layer to the fortieth. Through all of it the volume held one discipline hardest of all, to sort the structure of the space between nations and hand no nation a verdict, boasting of none and smearing none, handing only the frame and the one measure, what you would not want done to yourself, held to every nation alike.
The next part is the last, a single chapter, and it carries the whole volume to the present's sharpest edge, a new output rewriting the map, and the law's last and hardest chase after it. Let the reader carry this account of the taken, and the whole international line, into Part Six.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.