VOLUME V, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 3
What the Weak Are to Do. The Several Ways Ordinary People Rescue Themselves
The previous section showed that vested interests are law's largest customer, and that law automatically tilts toward those who already have plenty, leaving the weak with little chance of protecting themselves through law alone. So what can the weak actually do. The weak lack the resources to use law, but the weak have other roads. History shows five roads the weak have walked, retreat, banding together, giving up on law, violent resistance, and cultivating oneself. Reading this section, there is no need to ask which road is best, because none of them is universally best. There is only one question worth asking, which road fits my own position, in my own time.
One. The First Road, Retreat, Bo Yi and Shu Qi Are the Earliest Sample
Around 1000 BC, at the turn from Shang to Zhou, there lived two virtuous men, Bo Yi and Shu Qi. When King Wu of Zhou raised arms to overthrow the Shang dynasty, they objected, believing that overthrowing a ruler, however just the cause, still betrayed the duty owed a subject. Once King Wu had succeeded, they refused to serve, fled to Mount Shouyang, and lived as hermits, refusing to eat Zhou grain, surviving on wild fruit, and eventually starving to death on the mountain.
The road Bo Yi and Shu Qi walked is called retreat. When the weak cannot change a system, one choice is to leave it, to go somewhere the law cannot reach, fleeing famine, fleeing persecution, emigrating, living in seclusion, all belong to this category. Hermits throughout Chinese history who refused to serve most often walked this road, refusing to cooperate with a regime they believed unjust, willing to lay down fame and position rather than surrender their principle. The benefit of retreat is holding onto one's own principle and dignity. The cost is giving up the protection and convenience of society, and Bo Yi and Shu Qi paid even that cost with their lives. The price is not small, and yet for some people it is the only life they can accept. Confucius, twenty-five hundred years ago, already expressed respect for these two men, even though he himself never chose this road. Retreat is often mistaken for cowardice, but for a person unable to move the larger tide, withdrawing whole and refusing to mix with what he believes wrong is, in itself, a kind of resolve. It does not fix the system, but it holds onto the person.
Two. The Second Road, Banding Together, a Line from Confucius Pins It Down
Around 500 BC, Confucius said a line.
Virtue is never alone. It always has neighbors. Confucius, The Analects, Li Ren.
A person of virtue is never alone, others of like mind will always draw near. Confucius is speaking of banding together. When one weak person alone cannot bear the weight of a system, one choice is to find people who share his convictions and organize with them, so the weak person is no longer isolated, but part of a group, and a group's strength is often far greater than any single weak person's.
Chinese history has seen many such groups arise spontaneously among the people, clans, guilds, native-place associations, and in more recent times, labor unions and professional associations, all belong to this category. A single worker is weak, but an organized union can negotiate with an employer. A single farming household is weak, but a banded-together village can coordinate irrigation, disaster response, and mutual aid.
What banding together achieves is subtle, it does not change the system, but it changes the weak person's own position inside the system. An organized group can no longer be casually ignored by a vested interest the way a lone weak person can. The cost is having to merge into a collective, surrendering some personal freedom, and following the group's own rules in everything. But for most of the weak, this is a very practical road, because personal freedom, with no protection behind it, rarely ranks first in priority.
Three. The Third Road, Giving Up on Law, Zhuangzi Put It Most Clearly
Around 300 BC, Zhuangzi said a line.
The use of the useless is the greatest use of all. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, In the World of Men.
A thing that looks useless may, in that very uselessness, hold the greatest use of all. Zhuangzi's road here is giving up on law. If law does not serve the people, the people stop counting on it, and find their own way instead, regulating one another through tradition, custom, and human decency, calling on law only as a last resort.
This road was, in fact, the ordinary condition of societies where law was not yet well developed, people restrained by custom and morality, and the weak not tangled up in law's complexity. But its cost is just as large. With no legal backstop, the weak rely entirely on human decency, and the moment someone abandons that decency, the weak have nowhere to appeal. So this road only really works in a society where human decency runs thick and wide enough, and the thinner that decency grows, the less this road works. Still, it points to something worth remembering, law was never the only rope tying person to person, and when that rope snaps, there are other ropes to hold onto.
Four. The Fourth Road, Violent Resistance, Chen Sheng's Eight Words
Around 200 BC, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang rose in revolt at Daze Village, with the line quoted earlier.
Dying either way, why not die for the state? Chen Sheng, Records of the Grand Historian, Hereditary House of Chen She.
Dying either way, why not die for the state. This is violent resistance. When the weak can no longer bear their situation, one choice is armed uprising, overturning an unjust system by force. History carries countless uprisings large and small. The benefit of violent resistance is the real possibility of actually changing a system, and though Chen Sheng and Wu Guang ultimately failed, they stirred a spirit of resistance among the people.
But this road also carries the greatest cost. Most who rise are crushed, and losing means death. Even when it succeeds, the new system is not necessarily better than the old, Chen Sheng toppled Qin, and yet when Han was established, its methods were, at root, no different from Qin's. So violent resistance is a last, all-or-nothing throw, one that very few people ever truly choose unless every other road has closed. This section only lays it out as a road walked in history, stating its cost plainly, passing no verdict on it and offering no encouragement toward it. When it becomes worth choosing, and whether it is worth the price, is something only the person standing inside that moment can weigh for himself.
Five. The Fifth Road, Self-Discipline, Laozi's Highest Good Is Like Water
Around 500 BC, Laozi said a line.
The highest good is like water. Laozi, Daodejing, Chapter 8.
The highest good is like water, carrying no sharp edge, contending with no one, and yet capable of wearing through anything. Laozi's road here is self-discipline. When the weak cannot change the system outside, one choice is to change himself, raising his own character and ability through self-discipline and cultivation, so that even living inside an unjust system, he can still live with dignity.
This is an inward road, not aimed at changing the system, but at living out one's own worth inside the system's cracks. A person of cultivation can hold his principles amid injustice. A person of real ability can find a way out even when resources run thin. Some teach themselves and rise on their own, some build a footing in business through honesty, some earn the respect of others through their own character, all of these are fruits of self-discipline. Laozi's highest good is like water is not telling a person to meet force with force, it is telling a person to stay soft and unyielding at once like water, steadily improving himself, until the position itself is slowly worn open.
Its benefit is that it depends on nothing outside changing at all. Its cost is that it demands enormous will, overcoming one's own laziness and desire, holding one's principles inside an unjust environment, which is sometimes harder than changing the system itself. But once achieved, a person gains a kind of inner freedom. The hermits and sages of the ancient world, still able to stand upright under absolute rule, drew on exactly this freedom, one that comes from within, not from any system.
Six. Beyond These Five, Many Variations Exist
Some exploit loopholes in the law, finding legal ways around an unjust statute. Some pursue further education, using learning to lift their own position. Some build a business, changing their own fortune through commerce. Some turn to art, using their work to voice the injustice they feel. Some turn to faith, settling their spirit inside religion. The variations are many, but they share one thing in common, each is a way of finding a livable road for oneself once a person has concluded the system cannot be changed for the moment. None of these roads ranks above another. Parents who put a child through college, and a hermit willing to starve rather than bow his head, are both, in their own position, doing their best to live out who they are.
Seven. But the Deepest, and Most Chilling Layer Hides Right Here
These choices all look like self-rescue for the weak, and yet seen from another angle, they are exactly what a vested interest is happy to see. What does a vested interest hope for from the weak most of all. That the weak retreat, so they leave and stop being a bother. Or that the weak cultivate themselves, changing themselves rather than the system. Or that the weak resort to violent resistance outright, giving the vested interest a perfectly justified reason to crush them. Or that the weak place their hope in some faith beyond this life, rather than stirring anything in this one. Or that the weak band together, which he can tolerate just fine so long as the banding never shakes his core power.
So these apparent acts of self-rescue end up, in effect, also maintaining the present arrangement on his behalf. The more unjust a system becomes, the more varied the weak's methods of self-rescue tend to grow, because it forces the weak to scramble for any way to keep living, rather than to overturn it. The worse the system, the more inventive the weak become, while the system itself does not move an inch. From the vested interest's position, this is close to the perfect arrangement, the weak have choices, and it looks like freedom. The weak can go on living, and it looks like dignity. But the weak keep circling forever inside the system, never once touching the root of the vested interest. This is the most hidden part of structural injustice, it has already arranged an exit even for your resistance.
Seeing through this layer is not meant to stop a person from seeking self-rescue, a person still has to live. It is meant to make a person hold, alongside that self-rescue, one more question in his heart, is this road truly my own choice, or has this structure quietly chosen it for me, while letting me believe I chose it myself.
Eight. The Position Set by This Section
This section sets the sixteenth layer. Facing injustice, the weak have several choices, retreat, banding together, giving up on law, violent resistance, cultivating oneself, and their many variations, each carrying its own cost and its own benefit, with no one of them universally the best. There is only the question of which fits my own position, my own era, my own group, best.
What matters most in this layer is not choosing a road for the reader, it is reminding the reader to know clearly, when making a choice, exactly what he is choosing and what it will cost. Not drifting along with the crowd, and not being quietly steered by a vested interest either. Seeing through the fact that even self-rescue can end up working for the present arrangement leaves a person, if anything, more clear-eyed. He no longer naively believes that picking just any road brings freedom, and he does not fall into despair and do nothing either. He chooses with his eyes open, and having chosen, accepts the cost of that road and answers for himself. Whether the weak can do more than circle endlessly inside the system, and actually change their position, depends on a road higher than self-rescue, and that is exactly the next section, and the summit this chapter is building toward.
The next section turns to self-discipline, why the highest law of all is self-discipline. The previous six sections have, layer by layer, seen through position after position. Is there any way for the weak to rise above position itself. Not by changing the system, and not merely by passively adapting to it, but by actively standing himself up. The answer is self-discipline, the highest law a person can ever give himself, relying on no outside system, no one else's fairness, only his own will. Carry these several roads of the weak with you, and walk into the next section.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.