VOLUME V, PART THREE
How Law Treats an Ordinary Person
The first two parts said what the law is and how the law runs, and both were still reasoning up in the air. This part, two chapters and six layers, walks in close beside one living, ordinary person, and looks at how the most basic things are actually set when the law comes down onto him. However high the reasoning climbs, in the end it all has to land on how one particular person is treated. This part pulls the lens to the nearest possible place.
The part sets its most basic line first, the direction of proof. A person standing before the police, customs, the tax office, a court, does he first have to prove he did no wrong, or does the other side first have to prove that he did. That one line of difference sorts people into two worlds, one living under the pressure of always having to clear himself, the other able to pass his days in peace so long as he does not provoke power. The Chinese world set the direction three thousand years ago on when guilt is in doubt, lean light, that it is better to let a guilty man go than to kill an innocent one. The West made the same layer systematic only in modern times. One and the same vein, worked to different depths.
Follow that line inward and you strike something deeper. Leaning light when guilt is in doubt assumes that guilt and innocence were clear to begin with. But dig further and guilt itself turns out to be a position, not an objective fact. The same act is unavoidable hardship to the one who does it and unbearable bullying to the one it is done to. The same change of dynasty makes the winning side heroes and the losing side traitors. The victor writes the history, and defines the guilt. And if guilt is a position, then a good judge, his real skill is not accurate conviction, it is the trading of places, the ability to stand at once in the positions of the accuser, the accused, society, and the Way of Heaven, so that the judgment he hands down comes near the Way of Heaven.
The last layer of Chapter Seven returns to the plainest of the people's sayings, the law is dead and a person is alive. A dead statute landing on a live person will always make friction, but the root of that friction is not in the law itself. It is in output falling short. Once output falls short, resources grow scarce, the strong write law to hold them alone, and the weak cannot get what they need by the law and break the law if they go without, pushed into a corner where either way is death. See this layer and a person will neither curse all lawbreaking as moral rot nor dress it all up as resistance, but can see the deeper root under it.
Chapter Eight turns the lens onto several hotter words. It presses first on we the people, a grand phrase written into the opening of more than one constitution, and asks whom that people has actually counted in across history, and whom it has kept outside, and sees that any people is only a position and never equal to all the people, and that every widening of the people was never handed down freely but clawed back, inch by inch, by the ones who had been shut out. Then it tells of a hero who vanished into the crowd, an ordinary person who heard, went quietly and did the thing, and finished it without leaving a name, and it fixes the true position of a hero, that the one who does stands higher than the one who speaks. The last section seals the part, drawing its several layers into one web and fixing a clear-eyed stance, defending neither power nor crime, holding one measure, the measure of do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself, to both ends alike.
This part builds from the twentieth layer, the direction of proof, to the twenty-fifth, the clear-eyed choice. It has a heavy side, the ordinary person with no road under scarcity, and a warm side, the road in an ordinary person's own hands to change a thing without spilling blood. Walk out of this part and what you carry off is not any single conclusion but a way of seeing the law, so that the next time you meet a law, an act of enforcement, a verdict, you can ask a few things for yourself. Onto whom did it push the load. In whose position does the guilt it names actually stand. Whom does its endless we actually include.
Contents
Chapter Seven. How the Law Treats an Ordinary Person.
Chapter Eight. Guilt, the People, and a Way of Seeing the Law.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.