VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 5
A New Order for Law
In the last chapter, that machine of politics was bent back to its proper place of protecting the people. It cannot even think up such a thing as a law-enforcement apparatus, and there are only two things to be done, administration and the raising of people. At the end of the fourth chapter, a bridge was also quietly left for you: the end of the law is not to enforce, to hold down, to fine, but to lead people to keep themselves in check. This chapter is the last chapter of the whole volume, and it walks over on that bridge. The chapters before told warm, wide great principles. Come to this chapter, it turns onto one precise line. Why change the way of telling? Because the skins over the law are too many, too thick, too intimidating, and the soft, wide way of telling cannot shine through it. The intent of the law is to protect the people. To weigh anything, there is one yardstick only, has it protected the people, or has it not. Read the intent, not the letter. The law is a living ruler that leads people to keep themselves in check, not a coercive power there to be enforced. But in reality there is a contrast that makes your scalp crawl. The representatives of the law turn out to be the ones illiterate in the law, and that single thought in their hands, stroke by stroke, drives the people to their deaths, a killing within the law. The first step is not to strike, but to save. To save the ones illiterate in the law is to save all the people they harm, and to cut, from its source, that chain of thousands of years. The fifteen sections that follow first set up the true nature, then shine on the contrast and on that chain, then tell, one move at a time, how to save, and at the last set the law back in its place and leave the door open to Volume VII.
Section One starts from the way of telling having to change. The chapters before were warm and wide. Come to the law, it has to change to a cold, precise, straight line, because over the law lie layer upon layer of clauses, layer upon layer of procedure, layer upon layer of lawful and compliant, and underneath are hidden judgments that drive people to broken homes and lost lives. This section first shines on the most fundamental thing: the intent of the law is to protect the people, this one thing only. To weigh any law, any judgment, any judge, there is one yardstick only: has he protected the people, or has he not. This yardstick is not one person's opinion. It is held up by a golden line of a thousand years handed down by the ancestors: the law is nothing beyond human feeling. Then it nails one layer deeper: read the intent, not the letter. To read the letter is to lower your head and stare at the clauses. To read the intent is to lift your head and see the living person underneath. When you measure cloth with a ruler, your eyes should be on the cloth, not on reading off the marks on the ruler. What the law measures was never words. It is people. The one who has only words in his eyes and no people, this section gives a name: illiterate in the law.
Section Two picks up that bridge from the end of the fourth chapter. Say the law, and what floats up in many people's minds is the robe, the gavel, the handcuffs, the cell. This section tells you that the law was meant to be a ruler, standing there, for people to look at themselves, measure themselves, keep themselves. This is leading people to keep themselves in check. It is like a small lane with no traffic lights, where the walkers keep to the right on their own and make way on their own for the one carrying a shoulder pole. Coercive power is pressed on from outside. The ruler grows from inside the human heart. That knife was ground on by the ones illiterate in the law. Lawmakers, judges, lawyers, in their true nature, are all there to guard this ruler and help people keep themselves in check. The law-enforcement official is a role that does not exist at all. When someone truly crosses the bottom line, he is not suppressed either. He is asked back to that courtyard of the second chapter, the school is a prison. At the last it makes one thing plain: when everyone has character and torments no one, the clauses should be cut down, leaving those few bottom lines, do not kill, do not steal, do not cheat. What is wanted is precision, not piling high.
Section Three sets that contrast squarely in front of you. Lawmakers, judges, lawyers, law-enforcement officials: in the world's eyes these four kinds of people are the law itself. The robe goes on, the gavel comes down, and below no one dares breathe. But measure them with the yardstick of the intent, and they are illiterate in the law. Like a quack in a white coat, like one who hangs up a fire brigade's sign and, called out, goes to add oil to the fire: the bigger the sign, the emptier underneath, and the more you trust him, the deeper he harms you. For thousands of years no one dared point it out. Here it is pointed out. Then it first clears away a misunderstanding. The common folk who cannot read and do not know the clauses, but keep in their hearts that bottom line of do not harm people, do not bully people, are not illiterate in the law. They are the ones who truly understand the law. The truly illiterate in the law are that whole nest who sit in positions where they ought to understand the intent, and understand only the letter and the procedure. The higher the position, the more professional, the more likely to be greatly illiterate in the law.
Section Four looks at how many shapes this nest of the illiterate in the law grows into in the human world. The passive ones, diligently signing by the procedure, auction off the home of an old person who cannot pay the land tax, and go home to eat a peaceful dinner just the same. The active ones drill a loophole out of a comma, out of the word "or," to get off the factory owner whose pollution harmed a whole village, or the side that drove into a person and killed him. The retired ones, having taken off the robe, still use the sign of former judge to draw in business. The ones in office set personal will above the law, and do not even read the letter. On the lawyers' side, winning is put above being right. Then it peels to the innermost core of power, that single thought over life and death. It can let a person who should die go free, and it can also send a person who should live to his death, like an emperor's stroke of the vermilion brush. Today this single thought is pinched in the hands of the ones illiterate in the law. They wield no knife and shed no blood, and lawfully send people down the road to death. This is a killing within the law.
Section Five comes down from the height to the human world. What the ones illiterate in the law do comes down to four things, tormenting, crushing, robbing, hounding, link locked into link, locked all the way to the road of death. This section looks at the first two links. Tormenting is the first link, and it is also that greatest root sickness the second chapter spoke of. The lawmaker lays down tormenting laws. The judge, by the letter, judges the torment compliant. The low-level official behind the window takes departmental rules, which in their true nature are only a suggested use, for law: this box is not filled in right, do it again; that document is missing, go back and add it. You can only wear a smile, swallow your grievance, run back and forth. By the tenth time, the twentieth time, a person has no fire left. Tormenting grinds life. Crushing is one layer heavier. It is holding you down so you cannot stand straight. You cannot afford a lawyer, and you are pressed down by procedural clauses. Fiercer still is the judge bringing down the gavel by personal will. Once the back is bent, you never dare sue again. Crushing breaks life, and what it bends is the back of the whole world.
Section Six shines on the last two links of this chain, the thickest and the coldest. First, two lines set side by side. A golden line from those before says taxation equals robbing the people, and the anti-tax side of the West says it again and again. Here it is caught and set straight: paying tax is the people's donation. Tax itself is not wrong. The wrong is that the ones illiterate in the law have turned it around and used it as robbing. Reckon up the land tax. It collects a percentage of the home's price, year after year it accumulates, inflation is added, and after some years the total paid exceeds the house itself. You suppose the house is yours, but in fact you are renting it, and the lease is for life. Resist paying, and the house is auctioned. To resist paying is to lose your home. The rich can dodge it. The ones robbed are the people with only one roof, and here it is given its judgment: anti-human. Robbed bare, it comes to hounding. A person with no food to eat, no roof to live under, nowhere to sue, is driven link by link onto the road of death. The one who signed, the one who made the law, the one who drilled the loophole, each says he did nothing wrong. This is a killing within the law.
Section Seven puts the four together. Tormenting grinds life, crushing breaks life, robbing cuts life off, hounding takes life. Every stroke drives the people to their deaths. Every stroke wears a skin of law, and the more compliant the skin, the deeper the blood beneath. What leaves you most without words is that there is no murderer. One life is broken into several shares and handed out into a long row of hands, and ask all the way around and not one person owns it. That fire in your heart has burned to the top again, wanting to bring them all down. This section asks you to slow down a step. For thousands of years there has been striking, dynasty after dynasty changed, and that chain never stopped, because what was struck was people, and that mechanism of reading the letter and not the intent did not move an inch. To cut the chain, it has to be cut at the source, by saving the ones illiterate in the law out of reading only the letter. A judge sits in office twenty years, thirty years. Save him alone, and you save the hundreds and thousands he would have harmed going forward.
Section Eight answers head-on the question pent up so long: what, in the end, is to be done? You clench your fist, waiting to say, bring them down. This fire is not wrong. It is a warm heart that cannot bear to see the people harmed. This section does not douse it, but points it a road on which it can get something done. Two reasons. The first: striking is no use, as thousands of years have proven. The second: they too are people caught in the lock. A legal education that tests only the letter, a promotion that looks only at being practiced in procedure, precise in the letter, and winning cases, and a professional climate where doing it by the letter is safest, have raised, inch by inch, people who in their day went into law school with a true heart for upholding justice, into the illiterate in the law. He himself lives on edge, going against his conscience, and in the dead of night he cannot help thinking. He is not a stone. This is not making excuses for him. That account, not one cent of it will be let slide. Others hack people. This book saves people. Whom to save first? First save the people inside the legal system, because they are at the very source of that chain.
Section Nine tells what to save with. That lock is twisted of four strands: legal education and examinations that recognize only the letter, pay and case sources tied to winning cases, a professional climate where winning is right, and behind it a set of law-enforcement coercion propping it up. Undo only one strand, and after a while it coils back. So it takes four systems brought at once. As in the third chapter, where the economy was the main force, and the fourth, where politics was the main force, this time law is the main force. Law lights it, setting the intent up as the yardstick to weigh everything, so he cannot. Culture warms the heart, patching back that heart of protecting people with character education, so he does not want to. The economy draws the firewood from under the pot: things are enough, the non-labor share is returned to the public, and if he guards the intent and has fewer case sources he still will not starve, so he need not. Politics dissolves the knife, dissolving that set of law-enforcement coercion so that his judgments by the letter cannot come down, so he dares not. Cannot, do not want to, need not, dare not. Of the four strands, not one goes to bring him down.
Section Ten brings the four strands down to the first method, oversight. The ones illiterate in the law dare to harm people lawfully because that single thought is in the dark. When a judge signs, whether he is reading the letter or the intent, no one knows. To break it takes one word: light. A thief picks the night to make his move. Turn on the lamp, gather people round, and that hand draws back. Before signing, write out clearly why it is judged this way and whom it protected, and he himself will not be able to press the signature down. Here the line is drawn clearly. Oversight is sunlight, aimed at that single thought, upright and open. It is not informing, not going behind some judge's back to fix on him, not exposing some lawyer's private life. Then it undoes your biggest knot: to save him, is that to let him stay in place and go on harming? It is not. Keeping him in place is watching him walk toward death and giving him a shove besides. To save him is to swap him down and ask him back to that courtyard, to be reforged in reading the intent and patching his character. Swapping him down is exactly the means of saving him.
Section Eleven follows the half of your breath still left. In the saving there is iron. Saving him, the person, reforged in reading the intent, becoming a person anew, living on well, is benevolence. Letting him hold the law again will not do: barred for life. This is iron. If the door of holding the law is not welded shut, then harm people and at worst go through a reforging as a motion and be back on post, and that calculation pays off nicely. Those who took the benefit are the same: the lower judge who rose by going along, the assistant who shared the lawyer's fee, the colleague behind the window who signed along and shared the reward. On what grounds? One line: who told you not to wake up? Going forward, choosing officials does not rest on testing the letter. Testing the letter picks out precisely the ones illiterate in the law and crowds out precisely the ones who truly understand the law. It rests on that heart of protecting people, and that heart is raised by character education. The human heart can change, so three more things are matched with it, hold a license, be reviewed yearly, be reforged in character, just as an implement used long grows dull and has to go back regularly to be ground.
Section Twelve undoes your last solid worry: who fills those positions? There are plenty of good people, lined up. That fire of the first volume, AI, culled a great batch of people, and among them are many honest people, plain and proper, who torment no one, would not drill loopholes, and sat a whole life on the cold bench in their former trades. On one end positions are freed up, on the other good people wait to be settled, and the difficulties on both ends are undone together. In quality, too, it fits just right. The intent cannot be taught, and that heart is already in them. With talent enough, barred for life can be welded dead. The force of promotion is bent around too, from only those practiced in the letter can rise to only those who read the intent and protect the people can rise. With the people changed, it turns to the law. That mountain of clauses is a fog piled up by the ones illiterate in the law. Once character provides the foundation, measure them one by one with the yardstick of the intent. The ones that protect the people stay. The ones that patch loopholes or bring in revenue are abolished. They are cut down year by year, generation by generation.
Section Thirteen looks back at the group of people most wrenching on this whole road, the ones this chain has already harmed. The people who could not pay the land tax and stayed behind there along with their homes, the mother driven to a broken home and lost family by a lawyer drilling a loophole, the small shopkeeper robbed of his savings, the ordinary man who at the end still clutched his wife's hand and said, I was wronged. First one line is set dead: the harmed are not numbers. Curing the source saves those downstream, but the ones harmed before must also be cared for, and four things are given. Give back: the home taken by the land tax, the money fined away, whatever can be given back is given back, and whatever cannot be traced is recorded first. It may not go undone because the years are long. Clear the name: retry it with the yardstick of the intent, and if the person is gone, give the clean name back to his name. Raise a stone: so this life does not vanish for nothing into the fog of legality. Heal the heart: the slowest, and also the warmest, letting them slowly see that the world has truly grown better, and slowly come to believe again.
Section Fourteen draws this whole chapter back in. First look at what that machine was like before: like a machine assembled backwards, its gears biting in reverse, and the more busily it turned, the more people were crushed underneath. On this road the intent was set plain, the ones illiterate in the law swapped down, good people swapped in, that single thought put under the sunlight, the clauses cut down, the harmed cared for, and this machine, inside and out, was bent back to its proper place of guarding the law for the people. Bent back to its place does not mean the bending is finished. It means the direction is right, and the rest is for generation after generation to walk. It turns for one thing only: letting the people live and work in peace. A roof to settle under, a mouthful to eat, going out to handle matters without being tormented, a heart not uneasy at night, and between person and person, real person with real person. A system was never the end. It is a means. The end is forever those living people, one by one.
Section Fifteen is the last stroke of the fifth chapter. It first draws back in what this chapter has fixed in its light, from the intent of the law is to protect the people, all the way to a thousand labors coming down to one thing, letting the people live and work in peace. But what you hear is that the light is fixed, not that the shining is finished, because the door is not sealed. This world is too big, this chain too long, the ones illiterate in the law too many, the harmed too many, and there are new things like AI that this book had not yet met when it was written. However bright the light, it is only the stretch this generation can reach. This is not the finish line. It is a relay baton. This chapter is not sealed, this volume is not sealed, and this book is not sealed. In your heart there is probably still one thing tugging: how do the four new orders fit together, and where should AI computing power be placed? That is what Volume VII, Hope, will walk.
What this chapter has stood up is that yardstick so simple it fits in one line: the intent of the law is to protect the people. Has it protected the people, or has it not? Measure once, and you know. To the ones illiterate in the law: do not strike, save. To save them is to save all the people they harm. In the saving there is benevolence, and there is iron. The source must be cut, and of the ones harmed before, not one may be left out. By here, all four new orders have been set up. The next step is the last volume, Volume VII, Hope. It joins the four strengths together, like the five fingers on one hand, completing one another and keeping one another in check. It tells plainly, head-on, that AI computing power is only a tool and cannot replace the real person. All the ones saved before were real people, and come to Volume VII, it is AI's turn to be saved. It also sets plain one thing: heaven is on Earth, not on Mars. In the end: fundamentally, not a single thing exists; let great love remain in the human world.
Contents of This Chapter
One. The Intent of the Law Is to Protect the People
Seven. Every Stroke Drives the People to Their Deaths, This Chain Must Be Cut
Twelve. There Are Plenty of Good People to Step In, and the Law Is Not Piled High
Fifteen. In Closing: The Light Is Fixed but the Door Is Not Sealed, and On to Volume VII
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.