VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 3, SECTION 8

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 3, SECTION 8

Saving the One Who Lives on Capital: Bringing Down the Capitalist Is a False Target, and That Cursing Is a Blame Borne for the Hand

The last section took the hat of capitalist off the head of the blood-sucking villain and set it back on you and me and him, and lifted off the shame of wanting to save money. This section follows those two things down, and pierces a slogan shouted for a hundred years, that to bring down the capitalist is a false target. Then it brings out for you whose blame it is that capital and the capitalist have borne under that hundred years of cursing. Once it is brought out, that one hand that truly does the evil can hide no longer, and out of the great crowd of proper people, alone, one hand, it shows itself.

I. Bringing Down the Capitalist Is a False Target

That slogan shouted for a hundred years, bring down the capitalist, is a false target. What is a false target? It is a target you draw your bow at full, put all your strength behind, and mean to loose at, and then you look close and see that the figure painted on that target is not at all the enemy you took it for. This arrow of yours flies out and strikes someone else, strikes even you yourself.

Let me draw this arrow slowly, and see clearly whom it is really aimed at. Bring down the capitalist, good, then let me ask you, who is the capitalist? The last section just set it up, the capitalist is not that far-off blood-sucking villain, the capitalist is you and me and him. It is you, the person with a bit of savings, buying insurance, paying a pension. It is the one running the little convenience store downstairs. It is the one in your village who contracted the land. It is that proper boss who opened a small restaurant, a small factory, and settled a few dozen people.

Then bring down the capitalist, and whom does it bring down? It brings down you. It brings down the one downstairs from you. It brings down the one in your village. It brings down that proper boss who opened the small factory. It brings down the millions upon millions of ordinary people with a bit of savings who want to live their days in peace. This arrow of yours flies out and strikes yourself, strikes your neighbor, strikes your fellow villager.

Think one layer deeper. To truly bring down the capitalist, to truly wipe out capital, what would it be setting out to do? It would be setting out to take that bit of savings in every person's hand and collect it away, make it public. It would be to see to it that not one person can save any money, have any store, build that wall against the wind for himself and his family. This road, can it be walked? It cannot. And more, the moment it truly begins to be walked, it becomes a most terrible thing. What it means to wipe out is every ordinary person's very instinct to protect his own family, old and young, that bit of a store, that wall. It is not bringing down villains. It is turning the spearhead onto you and me and him, onto every ordinary person who plainly saves and lives his days.

In history, this thing has actually been done. Shout to bring down the capitalist, to wipe out the private, and go truly collecting away that bit of a store, that bit of a household, that people had, making it all common, and what is the result? The result is not that the villains were brought down. It is that millions upon millions of proper ordinary households were stripped to the bone, collapsed, had the wall they built against the wind pushed flat, so that one gust of wind and the family was broken and its people lost. Shouting to bring down the villains, the ones who truly fell were the common people themselves.

Think how unjust this is. It was meant to go after the few who truly wring people, but the moment that spearhead is swung up, it cannot tell who truly wrings people from who is a proper ordinary person saving his money, and swinging on to the end, those few who truly clutch the mountain of gold, who have vast reach and means, have long since slipped away, long since moved their household off, and the ones who fall are all those ordinary households who could not run, could not hide, who held on to one bit of a hard-earned store. A thing shouted to vent the anger of the poor ends up, in the end, smashing the poor themselves, the proper people themselves, to a pulp. This is the most harmful thing about this false target. It does its smashing under a flag that says it is for your good, and what it smashes is your own home.

So bringing down the capitalist is a false target. It drew the target wrong. It painted the three words, the capitalist, into that blood-sucking villain, and then called on everyone to loose their arrows at it. But it did not tell you that the true body of this target is you and me and him, is every ordinary person with a bit of savings. Every arrow you loose at this false target, in the end, buries itself in the body of the ordinary people themselves.

So does this book walk this road of bringing down the capitalist? It does not. Not half a step. This book, from beginning to end, is one line. Use the pen, not the knife. No bringing down, no stripping of households, no making-public, no wiping out. It does not bring down capital, because capital is a tool, a good tool with the greatest productive power and the most people settled. It does not wipe out the capitalist, because the capitalist is you and me and him, is the great crowd of people in this world who are the most proper and most ought to be settled well.

You are probably about to get anxious. Then by this telling, the capitalists are all good people and none of them can be touched? Then those from the last two sections who wring people, lock people, wring people into slaves, is there no one to see to them? Then how is the unfairness ever to be cured? Well asked. That is exactly what we are coming to. To say bringing down the capitalist is a false target is not to say there is nothing that ought to be dealt with. It is to say this target was drawn wrong. The one where the problem truly lies is not the great crowd of capitalists, that is you and me and him, it is, within this great crowd, a very, very small clutch. To take the whole of the capitalists as the target is wrong, and wounds the innocent. But to pick out precisely, from within this great crowd of proper people, the small clutch where the problem truly lies, that is right.

Savor the difference between these two ways. One is to set the whole forest alight, saying there are a few bad trees inside it. The bad trees are burned, yes, but the whole forest of good trees is burned away with them, a loss far outweighing the gain. The other is to walk into the forest and pick out those few bad trees, one at a time, and deal with them alone, and the good trees beside them, not one is touched. The first is what that false target of bringing down the capitalist does, would rather kill a whole swath wrongly, and takes the good and the bad in one pot. The second is what this book means to do, pick out precisely the small clutch where the problem truly lies from within the great crowd of proper people, and harm not one good person.

And that small clutch, who are they? At the close of this section, that is brought out for you.

II. That Cursing Is a Blame Borne for the Hand

With the false target pierced, let me round this section off. To round it off is to answer one question. Since capital is a good tool, and since the capitalist is you and me and him, then why, for a hundred years, have capital and the capitalist taken such fierce and such long cursing? Let me tell you. That cursing was, for the most part, a blame borne for someone else.

Let me sort out for you how this blame got hung around capital's neck. Look back at the last two sections. The sweatshop that wrings people into slaves, who did that? The one who designed that net of debt and put people into it and chased them to wring them, who did that? The one who means to use AI to lock several million people into a cage they cannot see, who did that? The ones who did these things all had capital in their hands. It was by leaning on capital that they had the means to open the sweatshop, the means to lay that net of debt, the means to buy that people-locking AI. And so the onlooker charges the account to capital, look, it is all capital doing the evil, capital eats people, capital is all evil.

This account is charged wrong. Where is it wrong? It is wrong in that it takes the tool, capital, and the hand that uses capital to do evil, and mashes them together into one lump, and curses the whole lump as capital-is-all-evil. This whole book, over and over, is taking that one lump apart.

A knife can cut vegetables, and it can wound a person. It wounds a person, and do you curse the knife as all evil? No. You curse the hand that held the knife and wounded the person. The knife is innocent, and the wrong is in the person holding it.

AI can assist people, and it can lock people. It locks people, and do you curse AI as all evil? The section before said, no. The crime is in the hand that twisted AI to lock people.

Capital, too, is the same. Capital can settle the people of a whole city, the first section said it, the greatest productive power, the most people settled, and it can also be taken up to wring people, to lock people. It is taken up to wring people, and should you curse capital as all evil? No. The one to curse is the hand that holds the capital and aimed it to wound people.

Hold this reasoning firmly, and for the rest of your life, looking at the things of this world, you will never again be led by the nose. Is the disorder of the world, for the most part, trouble caused by tools? It is not. It is the hand that holds the tool. A thing, be it a knife, be it money, be it power, be it AI, is in itself a dead thing, a neutral thing, and whether it does good or does evil turns entirely on what kind of hand is holding it. If you cannot tell the tool from the hand, you will forever be cursing the tool, cursing that dead thing, and curse however fiercely, that one hand that truly does the evil will, in a place you cannot see, take up another tool and go right on. You have to learn to lift your eyes off the tool and fix them on the hand.

Capital, the tool, is innocent. Under that cursing of all-evil, it bore a blame it should not have borne. Then whose head should that blame have been set on? It should have been set on that hand, the hand that holds the capital and takes it, on purpose, to wring people and lock people.

But this hand is too clever. It hides behind those two words, capital. It does the evil, and the tool capital takes the cursing, and the great crowd of capitalists, you and me and him, take the cursing, and it itself, mixed in among that great crowd of proper people, shouts along that capital must be reformed, shouts it louder than anyone, and no one can make out that the one truly doing the evil is it.

See how cunning this move is. It does the evil, and yet it sets the whole world to cursing capital, cursing the capitalist. Curse capital, and capital is a dead tool, it will not cry out its wrong, it can bear it, curse it however hard and it makes not a sound. Curse the capitalist, and the capitalist is you and me and him, a great crowd of proper people, so many mouths that no one can say clearly just who is being cursed, and this blame gets muddled and shared out across millions upon millions of proper people. And it itself, mixed in among this great crowd, beats its own breast and shouts a few lines too, capital is all evil, capital must be strictly reined in, and shouts it more eagerly than anyone. Tell me, who would ever think that the one shouting the loudest is exactly the one who ought to be cursed? By this one move it has hidden itself for a hundred years.

This is the greatest muddled account of these hundred years. The tool, capital, bore the blame, a great crowd of proper people, the capitalists, you and me and him, took the cursing along with it, and the one hand that truly did the evil slipped away instead. To write this section is to come and take that blame off.

Take the blame off the tool capital, it is a good tool, the tool with the greatest productive power and the most people settled, and the wrong was never it. Take the blame off the great crowd of capitalists, you and me and him, they are proper people, ordinary people who want to save and protect their homes and live their days in peace, they are not the enemy, they are people to be settled well.

Once the blame is taken off, that hand that all along hid behind the two words capital can hide no longer, and out of the great crowd of proper people, alone, it shows itself.

That hand, who is it? It is a small clutch. Within this great crowd of capitalists, you and me and him, the millions upon millions of proper people with property, it is the very, very small clutch. It is the ones who hold far, far more capital than an ordinary person, and in whom that thought stirred, to take the capital not to settle people but to wring people, to lock people.

Do not picture this small clutch as a crowd of demons with horns on their heads. They look no different from ordinary rich people, and may even be more genial than anyone, more decent than anyone, better than anyone at doing charity, at giving to funds, at getting up on a stage and saying a few fine words. But it is exactly this very small clutch whose capital in hand is too great, great enough to open a whole spread of sweatshops, to lay a whole net of debt that eats people, to buy up a whole set of people-locking AI. Let that thought of wringing people stir in them, and the ones harmed are not one or two, but thousands, tens of thousands, millions.

So this small clutch, though very few in number, tears the largest hole of all. This small clutch, the next section spends a whole section on, who they are, why they do this, and, most important of all, what is to be done with them.

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