VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 1

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 1

This Machine Called Politics Was Only Ever Meant to Be Administration

That road through the economy, in the last chapter, was walked steadily to its end. This chapter takes you to see a thing more fundamental still: politics. At the start, let me have you do one thing. Take those two words, "the government," and drag them out of that shape they have in your heart (the shape of a great, heavy, faintly frightening giant standing high above you and managing you), and set them down where you can look at their true nature.

This section first sets up two things: the true nature of the government, that it is an administrative machine the people hired to protect the people, and that the whole reason for its existence is to protect those three things. Second, it sets up an eye you cannot do without as you walk through this chapter: read the intent, not the letter.

Think of the government, and what shape does it take in your heart? Is it not a great giant standing high above you, managing you, approving you, stamping your paper or refusing to stamp it, taking your tax, levying your fine, a giant you have to go begging to and dare not offend? In front of it, you have grown used to bowing your head, used to wearing a smile, used to swallowing your grievance. It seems to stand, by its very birth, over your head, managing you. Today, let us swap this shape out for you.

The government was only ever meant to be an administrative machine. Just that one thing: to administer, on behalf of everyone, those public matters that a single person cannot handle. Let me break it down for you. A crowd of people, living together in one place, always has matters that one person, one family, cannot handle on their own. The roads have to be built. The fires have to be put out. The thieves have to be managed. The children have to be taught. The trash has to be cleared. Who is to do these things? Everyone puts in a bit of money (this is tax) and hires a band of people to do these public matters especially. This band of people, this set of offices, is the government.

Do you see clearly now how this machine came to be? It is everyone, pooling their money, hiring it, to handle matters on everyone's behalf. The government did not fall out of the sky and stand, by its birth, over the people's heads. It is a machine the people hired, to handle matters for the people. To say it bluntly, and also truly, in front of that machine, the people are the boss who pays the money, and the government is the hired hand. Where is the sense in the boss bowing his head, wearing a smile, and taking it lying down, day after day, before the hired hand? This above and below is upside down. It is the people who hired the government, not the government that manages the people.

Set this relation of boss and hired hand straight in your heart, and going down through this chapter, you will stand up straight. Think about it: you open a shop, hire a hand, and pay him his wages every month. This hand is there to mind the shop for you, to handle matters for you. Now if this hand were, the other way around, to bark orders at you all day, give you dirty looks, and find crafty ways of digging money out of your pocket besides, what would you do? Would you feel it was only right and proper, and bow your head and wear a smile? You would not. You would say, "I pay to hire you so you will do the work, not so you can ride on my head."

The government and the people were always meant to be this relation. The people take their tax money and hire the government, this hired hand, to handle public matters for everyone. If this hired hand turns around, rides on the boss's head, and digs into the boss's pocket, then it is the hired hand who has forgotten his root, who has done his work backwards. Set this above and below straight in your heart, and as you look at the torments, the harsh taxes, and the fines in this chapter, you will no longer feel they are right and proper or that you must take them lying down. You will see clearly that this is a hired hand who has done his work backwards.

Then this administrative machine the people hired, what does it handle matters for? What is it after? For one thing only: to settle the people who hired it well. Let me state this whole thing in three parts. Everything this machine handles comes down, at bottom, to these three.

The first: to protect the people's freedom. Those freedoms the people are born with, as told in detail below, this machine has to protect, and must not turn around and invade.

The second: to protect the safety of the people's life and property. The people's lives, the people's homes, and the property the people hard-saved, this machine has to protect. It must not let it be stolen by thieves, seized by force, or burned by fire, nor let people be harmed. And still less may it, itself, turn around and seize the people's homes or wound the people's lives.

The third: to give the people an environment to live and work in peace. This is where the first two, put together, come to rest at the plainest, warmest place, letting the people who hired it live steadily and get on with their days on solid ground. To live in peace, to work in peace.

You see these three, and not one of them is about standing high above, managing people, ruling people, or wringing money out of people. Every single one begins with protection: protecting freedom, protecting life and home, and protecting people so they can live and work in peace. This machine, at the bone, is a machine for protecting people, not a machine for managing people. It is the exact opposite of that giant in your heart standing high above, fining you and tormenting you. It was meant to crouch down, hold you up, and protect you, not stand up, press down on you, and manage you.

Hold these three protections firmly, and as you look at every single thing that machine does, you will have a measure. If it is protecting these three, it is doing its proper work. If it turns around and invades these three, seizes these three, or harms these three, then it has betrayed its calling and done its work backwards.

Look back over the road this book has walked. At the head of the third chapter, it said that the four economic systems, at bottom, all settle people. In the second chapter, the school settles people well. In the first chapter, life is saved first. This whole book, from beginning to end, has one common line running through it: to settle people well, to let people live and work in peace. The whole meaning of this administrative machine called the government comes to rest exactly on this line. It is the machine everyone pooled money to hire, to get this very thing done on everyone's behalf.

So to weigh whether this machine is good or bad, there is only one yardstick, and this yardstick is the exact yardstick of this chapter on politics. Has it, with all its heart, handled these three things well for the people who hired it? Has it protected the people's freedom, life, and home, and given the people the peace to live and work? If it has, then it is doing the proper work it was hired to do, and it should go on doing it well. If it has botched it, or turned around and invaded the people's freedom, seized the people's homes, and driven the people to where they cannot live and work in peace, then it has betrayed the calling it was hired for. A machine hired to do the work that turns around and harms the boss is a machine with a great fault in it, one that needs mending, adjusting, or having its people replaced.

With the true nature of the government set up, let me take you to see the first of those three things: the people's freedom. See what kind of thing it is, and how it ought to be read. Let me speak first of how it ought to be read, because this one thing is the most easily read crooked, read so crooked that the very root of it is read clean away.

Let me set up a crucial way of reading for you. To read the law, to read a constitution, read its intent, not its few letters. What does this mean? Let me use the people's freedom as an example. You have probably heard that some countries have written the people's various freedoms, in black and white, into a constitution, into those amendments. And so a great many people, especially those who can only pick at the letter, take it that the people's freedom is given by these few lines, that the constitution granted the people their freedom. As though, without these few lines, the people would have no freedom. Let me tell you: it is backwards. Utterly backwards.

The people's freedom is not given by any law or any constitution. The people's freedom is inborn. A person, born, is free. This is inborn; it is a thing he carries with him from the start as a human being. First comes this inborn freedom, and only afterward did someone write it into a constitution, into a law. The law, the constitution, does not grant the people freedom. It acknowledges the freedom the people already had, writes it down, sets a note of it, and adds a layer of insurance for fear people forget or for fear it be invaded. The root of freedom is in that word "inborn," not in those few letters of the constitution.

Think it over and you see the sense of it. An infant, just born, wailing, wants to cry and cries, wants to laugh and laughs, wants to stretch its arm and stretches it. No one can stop it, and no one gave it this freedom; it is a thing it was born carrying. Later this child grows up, and someone writes these freedoms onto a sheet of paper, saying you have the freedom to speak, the freedom to believe in what you will. Did that sheet of paper give him freedom? It did not. Those freedoms of his have been there since the day he was born, and were never given by that sheet of paper at all.

What that sheet of paper did was take the freedom he already had and solemnly acknowledge it, note it, and protect it, for fear that one day someone would come to seize it or invade it. So it was set there in black and white, in advance. On no account take that sheet of paper for the source of freedom. The source of freedom is that it is inborn. That sheet of paper only acknowledged this source and protected this source. The inborn thing and the thing added afterward, let no one get them backwards. Inborn is what is born with you; that sheet of paper is what was added afterward.

Sort this out clearly, and then look at those clauses that write out freedoms, and you will read them right. Those clauses, however many freedoms they list (the freedom to speak, the freedom to believe, the freedom to gather together), are not giving you these few, and still less are they saying your freedom is only these few. They are taking that whole inborn freedom of yours, the freedom you already had, and stressing it once, in particular, pointing along the way at a few of the most important. Your inborn freedom is one whole stretch. The few the clauses point at are picked out of that whole stretch and given a particular word of caution: that these few in particular must not be invaded. Your freedom is far more than the few the clauses write out, because its source is that it is inborn, not that a clause enumerated it.

This is what it means to read the intent, not the letter. The one who reads the letter, to put it bluntly, is illiterate in the law. His eyes are fixed on those few lines, counting how many it lists, taking it that the people's freedom is only that many, only what those few lines gave. What the clauses did not write out, he takes it the people do not have. He reads that source, inborn, as a branch, those few lines; he reads acknowledgment as granting. He has read the source clean away.

The one who reads the intent sees, through those few lines, the source underneath: that the people's freedom is inborn, sacred, and not to be invaded, and that those few lines are only this inborn freedom solemnly stressed once more. What he reads is that breath, that intent, not those few letters.

Why set up this way of reading for you right at the start? Because down through this chapter, you will use it again and again. Later it will speak of how the government, under cover of laying down rules, taxing, and fining, invades the people's freedom and seizes the people's homes, a little at a time. At that point, there will always be someone who picks at the letter and says to you, "But this is within the rules, it is written in black and white."

But if you can read the intent, you see right through it. Those few letters of the rule may be written neatly to fit the rules. But its intent, has it protected the people's inborn freedom and home? If it has not, and has instead invaded them and seized them, then it has betrayed the intent of the law. However neatly those few letters are written, it is crooked. This way of reading is an eye for going down through this chapter and seeing through those seizures dressed in the skin of legality. Practice this eye well first.

With the true nature of the government set upright, and the eye of reading the intent well practiced, the next section takes up this yardstick of protecting the people and goes to measure a few things on the machine of government (lawmaking, departmental rules, fines) to see what they were meant to be, how they most easily turn crooked, and at last it nails down a thing you have probably never in your life thought of this way: that in this world, you could never even think up such a thing as a law-enforcement agency.

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