VOLUME V, CHAPTER 3
Law Inside the Web, and How a Person Lives Within It
The two chapters before this one dug the law from its highest position down to its deepest base and laid seven layers. This chapter does two things. It puts the law back inside the larger web it actually belongs to, and then it asks how a person is supposed to live inside that web, and with that it closes Part One. The earlier chapters took the law apart to see it clearly. This one puts it back together inside the whole it lives in.
The first section is about four institutions that hold one another up. Culture, economy, politics, and law each have their own work to do and lean on the other three, and not one of them stands higher or nobler than the rest. The law is never a thing off by itself. This is the eighth layer.
The second section traces back one more step, to a claim the law makes about itself every single day. The law says it protects rights. But the root of a right is not in the law. It is in nature. The law can confirm a right, and the law can violate a right, but the one thing it cannot do is create a right out of nothing. An American reader has met this before, in the belief that certain rights are unalienable, granted by no government and so cancelable by none. Seeing this layer is exactly what lets a person keep standing up straight in front of a law that has gone bad. This is the ninth layer.
The third section is the living law. Once a person knows what the law is, how does he actually live inside this web with his eyes open. Not by memorizing more of it, but by three plain tools of his own, each older than any statute. Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. Know the strong side, and keep to the gentle side. Unite what you know with what you do. These are a person's own cultivation, carried inside him, not something the law hands out at a counter. This is the tenth layer, and it draws all ten layers of Part One together into one whole web.
These three sections build from the eighth layer to the tenth, and Part One closes here, the ground under the question what is the law now fully laid. Walk out of this chapter and you hold two things at once, the whole web for seeing the law, and a fixed point for standing inside it. Everything Part Two says next about how the law runs comes to rest on this ground. The stance has not shifted. It lays out the positions and draws no conclusion, and leaves the judgment to you.
Contents
Section One. Four Institutions That Hold One Another Up. Culture, Economy, Politics, Law.
Section Two. Rights Are in Nature, Not in the Law.
Section Three. The Living Law. How a Person Lives Inside the Web in a World Where No One Is Perfect.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.