VOLUME V, PART TWO
How Law Runs, and the Highest Point Is Self-Discipline
Part One set what the law is and laid ten layers of foundation. But knowing the principle does not lift the weight off a reader's chest, because a knot is still sitting there. Why is it that in the real world the law so often runs one way while the page reads another. This part, three chapters, answers that question of how the law runs. It starts in the heaviest place and walks, and it ends at the highest and brightest position of all, self-discipline.
The part sets its deepest cord first, the strong and the weak. The real direction of the law is not set by its words. It is set by the structure of power. Power by its nature reaches to protect and enlarge itself, and unless something real stands over its head, the law drifts, steadily, toward the strong, toward those who already have more than enough. This is close to a rule, not the accident of one person or one country. See that cord and the sections that follow, on public legal education, on lawyers, on vested interests, all have something to hang from.
Then it walks downward to the first positions an ordinary person runs into once the law is in motion. A law, once made, still has to be carried to the people it will bind, and that carrying is called public legal education. But made public is not the same as made plain. A law only specialists can read is public in name only to everyone else, so ordinary people are left paying to lean on lawyers, while the whole profession has a standing reason to keep the law complex. And a lawyer is not the same as justice secured, because knowing the words of the law cold and understanding the law are two different things. The first is mastery of a tool. The second is grasp of a purpose.
Chapter Five pushes the lens deeper and heavier still. It asks first where the lawmaker himself comes from, by inheritance, appointment, election, or self-appointment, and finds that whatever road he arrives by, taking the seat means facing one question, how to answer to the people, and that the answer runs on the people's voice and force, two things spread unevenly from birth, loud and strong in the hands of those with more than enough, faint and weak in the hands of those with less. Then it looks at vested interests, the standing residents of the room where law is made, who are the law's true largest customer, so the law tilts toward them on its own, no plot required, a web with no mastermind. And it ends on the weak, who facing that tilt have several roads, to flee it, to band together, to abandon the law, to strike back with force, or to cultivate the self, and whose acts of self-rescue sometimes, without their knowing, do the current order's work for it.
By here a reader's heart is bound to sink. But the part does not stop in the heavy place. Chapter Six turns, and raises the highest position the law can reach, self-discipline. The outer law is never perfect and will always be bent by power and appetite, but there is one law that need not be, a law entirely in a person's own keeping, that does not wait on whether the system is good or whether others are fair. That is self-discipline, the highest law a person gives to himself. Push it up one more layer, and if not one person but everyone governs himself, you arrive at what Confucius called the state where disputes never reach the court, where the quarrel simply never arises, the highest condition the law can reach. But a true version of that state needs three layers biting together, everyone self-governing, output greater than need, and no one tormenting anyone. Take away one layer and it will not stand. And the last layer is the deepest and the hardest, the law within the heart, which completes the third, torment no one else, and torment not yourself either, do not pick up a measure that was never yours and beat yourself with it.
This part builds from the eleventh layer, the strong and the weak, to the nineteenth, the law within the heart, heavy in the first half and bright in the second. It first lets the reader see the force that pulls the running law toward the strong, and then puts back into the reader's hands one thing no one can take and no one else decides. Only once that force is seen does it become clear why self-discipline is the highest law, because it is the one position in the whole structure that the structure cannot move.
Contents
Chapter Four. The Strong and the Weak, Public Legal Education, and Lawyers. Three Positions Where Law Runs.
Chapter Five. The Lawmaker, Vested Interests, and the Roads Left to the Weak.
Chapter Six. Self-Discipline, the Highest Reach of Law.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.