VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 2

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 2 

You Are a Person, and Every Law on Earth Is There to Protect You

Did you take hold of the two things from the last section? The law protects people. The mess was made by people, and people can straighten it. If you have held onto them, let us take one step further. This step is about something you see every single day and have never once thought about this way, something as small as a three-year-old child. And when we are done, the most poisonous thought in you will be pulled out by the root.

Which poisonous thought? The one that crawls out and bites you in the middle of the night: I am useless now, I do not produce anything, I contribute nothing to society, so I deserve to be discarded, I deserve to starve. That thought is meaner than losing a job, because it does not bite your paycheck. It bites your right, as a person, to be alive at all. This section is here to drag that snake out of you and kill it.

Look first at a three-year-old child. This child does not work, does not earn, does not produce a single thing. Put him in a factory and he can do nothing. Put him in an office and he cannot even write his full name. By the measure of contribution to society, by value created, he is a zero. A clean, round zero.

Now run him through that arithmetic where only the useful deserve to live. What should happen to this child? Throw him out? Let him go hungry? Turn him out the door? Not one person alive would say so. If you actually heard someone say this child creates no value and should not be fed, you would be the first on your feet, calling him something less than human. A three-year-old does not deserve to be raised: the words themselves feel filthy to hear, cold, like something is missing from the heart of whoever says them.

Why do you react like that? Hold onto that reaction first. That reaction is worth more than any grand argument. It is the most honest scale in your chest, and what it weighs out is this: a person is not measured, for the right to live, by useful or useless.

And how does this child live? He is fed, spoonful by spoonful. He is clothed, and when he is cold, someone adds a layer. When he is sick, a doctor sees him, and someone sits up all night beside him. Whatever he needs, he more or less gets. Hungry, there is milk. Sleepy, there is rest. Afraid, there are arms to hold him. In other words, he is given what he needs. He is given what he needs, and no one keeps a ledger on him, no one asks what he has contributed.

Why? Four plain words: he is a person. Being a person, he should be cared for. Being a person, he is under the protection of the law. Being a person, it goes without saying that he should have food, clothing, someone to love him. Whether he produces has nothing to do with it. No law anywhere reads: those under three who create no value shall not be cared for. If any society actually did that, the whole world would say it had lost its humanity.

Set that matter in your heart for a moment. A child who contributes nothing, who produces nothing, is cared for and given what he needs, simply because he is a person.

Now let me ask you one thing. And you? Are you a person? Of course you are. You have lived decades longer than that three-year-old, loved far more people, carried far more weight. You are a person, real and solid, through and through.

Then that thought in you, I do not produce, I am useless, I contribute nothing, I deserve to be discarded, I deserve to starve, is wrong at the very root. Wrong where? Wrong in tying your life to that one word, production. As if whether your life is worth living depends on whether you can work, whether you can earn, whether you can create value.

 It is not like that. That three-year-old produces nothing, and is his life not worth living? No one would dare say it. Because whether a life deserves to live, deserves to be cared for, was never about whether you produce. It is about whether you are a person. You are a person. So, exactly like that child, you were always meant to be cared for, always meant to be given what you need, always meant to live well. Not because you are useful, but because you are a person. 

By now you probably want to turn it around and ask a question. Then why? Why is that child kept safe and sound, while I, a grown and living person, have no one to catch me, get cornered by a machine, sit up at night counting how many more months I can hold on?

 You are right to ask. That question goes to the root. It is not because you do not deserve it. You are a person, the child is a person, you are equally people, equally meant to be protected. It is the system that has gone wrong.

The system that catches that child was meant to catch you too. But on your end, it has snapped, it is leaking, it is broken. When the machine took your work, something was supposed to catch you, the way it catches the child who produces nothing, but this thing right now did not catch you. Not because it should not have, but because it is broken. 

Think through the reason in the middle. What is it that catches the child? It is that this society holds one truth, that a person, being a person, should be provided for, and so the moment a child is born, there are people to tend him, protect him, raise him. That same thing was meant to hold you your whole life, from three years old to thirty, to sixty, to ninety, your whole life through. When you grew up and could work, you went and worked, and you helped that same thing raise other children, other elders, which is each giving what they can. And then one day, when you could no longer work, or your work was taken by a machine, that same thing was meant to turn around and catch you, the way it caught you when you were three. That is its whole and proper shape. But right now, it uses you while you can work and lets go of you when you cannot, which is what snapped, what leaked. And it leaked at exactly the end where you needed it most.

And every one of these problems, in the end, is man-made. The system did not fall out of the sky. People set it up. And what people set up, people can also set up crooked, wrong, leaking. As the first section said, a group of people in the wrong seats, who do not understand that the law is there to protect people, made things into what they are today. This system that was meant to catch you broke, little by little, in their hands.

Do not brush past those two words, man-made. They are a root that runs through this whole book. If the bad thing were decreed by heaven, there would be nothing to do but accept it. But if the bad thing was made by people, then there is hope, because what people made, people can change. You being cornered today is not heaven deciding to starve you, but a few people who set the system that was meant to catch you badly wrong. This is a man-made calamity, not a natural disaster. A man-made mess, people can clean up. Hear it clearly: what people made, people can remake. People can prevail over what only looks like fate. 

And those four words do not mean people can wrestle with heaven and remake the earth. They mean that the fates that back people into a corner, the states of the world that look inevitable, that look like there is nothing to do but resign yourself, most of them are not heaven at all. They are people. Made by people, broken by people. And because they were made by people, people can stand against them, move them, straighten them.

Real heaven, such as aging and sickness and death, people cannot change. But a machine crowding a person to the edge with nothing there to catch him, that is not heaven. That is people setting the system wrong. That kind of heaven, people can overcome.

Learn to tell these two apart, which is real heaven and which is false. People grow old, fall ill, die: that is real heaven, accept it, do not wrestle with it. But no job means you deserve to starve, create no value and you do not deserve to live, the machine comes and there is no way left for people: these sound like the order of nature, but are in fact man-made through and through, a false heaven wearing heaven's coat. It fooled you, and that is why you thought there was nothing to do but give in. Peel the coat off, and underneath are a few people sitting in the wrong seats. They are people, and being people, you can move them.

So tonight, take hold of one more thing, on top of the two from the first section.

You are a person. You were always meant to be caught by this society, cared for, given what you need, exactly like that child. That you are not caught now is not because you do not deserve it, but because the system broke. The system was broken by people, so it can be straightened by people.

See how this joins the two from before. The first section said the law protects people. This section says the system should catch people. At bottom they are one sentence: you are a person, so you should be protected, caught, treated well. This is not a handout, not someone taking pity on you, but the portion that is yours simply as a person. The portion that three-year-old child has, you have too, not one bit less.

And straightening it out, who does that fall to? Not to this book. This book is only a small oil lamp, throwing a little light on the ground so you can see your own feet. It falls to you. To you standing up. To you seeing clearly that you are a person, a person who ought to be protected, and then reaching out, first to steady yourself, then to pull up the person next to you, cornered just like you.

One person standing is one person. A crowd of people standing, pulling one another up, that is no longer a few lonely souls gritting it out. That is a force no hand can hold down. The system was made by people, and that standing crowd can make it over again, back into the shape that protects people. Overcoming fate was never one person's work. It is everyone's, together.

Do not think this is empty talk. Think about it: one person crying out that he has no work and no food, that is one person's misery. Ten thousand, a million, crying out together? That is not misery anymore, but a force no one dares ignore. The system was always made by people, and when the people are many and their hearts are one, the system has to be made over again in the shape of people. When you stand up, it is not only for yourself. You are one part of that force. Take you away, and the force is weaker by one. So you standing up matters, and matters most.

So this section, hold onto one line. You are a person. You do not earn the right to live by being useful. Being a person is enough. A child who produces nothing is raised as a matter of course; you are a grown person who has stood upright for decades, so by what logic should you think that if you stop producing, you ought to die? You should not die. You should stand up. First help yourself, then help others.

The first section said: you will not die. This section says: not only will you not die, you will stand up, and help yourself, and help others. See how the two sections lift you, one step at a time. The first pulled you out of the pit of "I am about to die" and let you breathe. This section pushes you a step further, telling you that you can not only live, but stand, and move, and reach for others. Section by section, it climbs higher. This book will not ask you to shoulder great things all at once. It pours water on the fire one ladle at a time, and as the fire dies down a little, you can lift your head a little. Tonight, lifting it this far is enough: you are a person, you deserve to live, you can stand up.

Straighten your back. In the next section, I will take you to see that way out. The end burned out in the first volume is not the only outcome. With machines doing all the work, there is another way to walk this matter, leading to a completely different place. People are already walking that road. Follow along and keep reading.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.