VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 3, SECTION 1
Saving the Tool Is Saving People, Saving People Is Saving the Tool: Two Faces of One Thing
The last chapter made plain that the real human is the skin and the tool the hair, and that if the real human is gone the tool goes too. Following that thread, this section sets down, straight on: saving the tool and saving the real human's share are two faces of one thing. Guard the five so they do not go out inside the body, and the tool has a home. Put the tool back in its place, not letting it crowd out the ground the five grow in, and the five live on. Guard both faces, and there is something to guard. This also throws light on the blindness of the two camps of the age: to shield only the tool without saving the real human, and to smash only the tool without saving the real human, both fall to one side.
Take the first face: saving the real human's share is saving the tool. Picture the five alive, unwithered, in one body after another, everyone a real human, keep, guard, love, mercy, heart all present, all alive, all bright. What is the tool then? It sits in the tool's place, made by real humans with the five, used, kept, answered for. It has a body, a home. Every thing it does is lit by a living intent that guards people. It drafts a document to get a real human a thing done. It reads a scan to save a life. It reckons an account for a household's living. It has no self, yet it has a use. It has none of the five, yet it serves the five. Every thing it does is pointed to and warmed by the five, and its running has meaning at last. This is the tool's home. And where does the home come from? From the five alive in real human bodies. Guard the five, and you keep this home for the tool. Guard the five, and you keep the tool from sinking into an engine that lights nothing.
Think it through and a deeper thing appears: the tool's good or ill lies not wholly in the tool but in whether the five are alive in the one who uses it. The same tool, in the hands of a real human with all five, helps, guards, completes. In the hands of one whose five have gone out, it presses, reckons, harms. The tool has not changed. The hand and the heart holding it have. So to make a tool good, the first move is not to polish the tool. It is to grow that hand, that heart. Grow the five, and the tool falls into its place and becomes a fine thing to use. Let the five go out, and the finest tool is only a colder, faster instrument of harm. Guarding the five is the deepest way to keep the tool a good tool.
Now the other face: saving the tool, putting it back in its place, is saving the five. Picture the opposite. The tool is not saved, but pushed onto the person's place, set to sit the judge's seat, the seat of life and death, the seat that raises the young. The nest that sets the tool on the person's place hands away the real human's seats one by one. On whom does this fall? Not only on the specific people pressed under the algorithm. Deeper, on the five. Give the judge's seat to the tool, and the glance that lifts to the living person beneath the case has nowhere to grow. Give the doctor's seat, and the heart that sees who this patient is has nowhere to grow. Give the teacher's seat, and the care that holds a child's whole life has nowhere to grow. A seat is where the five grow and are spent. The more seats given, the less ground the five have, until there is none, and they wither, shut, go out. So putting the tool back and setting the real human's seat back is keeping the ground the five grow in.
This must be said fully, for it is the most easily made light of. People mostly think a seat is only a matter of who does it faster and cheaper, and the tool does it faster and cheaper, so let it sit. They do not see that what grows on a seat is not only the finished task but the share in the heart of the one who does it. A judge trying a case trains the glance that lifts to the living person. A doctor treating an illness grows the heart that sees who the patient is. Let the tool hold the seat and the task may still get done, but that share can no longer be trained, no longer grown. Let a generation give all these seats to the tool, and the next has no ground left to grow the five. The five are not seized. They wither because their ground to grow is cut off. Keeping these seats for real humans is not a contest with the tool over who is better. It is keeping a thread of life for the five.
Put the two faces together and they are not two things but two faces of one. Saving the real human's share is saving the tool's home. Saving the tool, putting it back in its place, is keeping ground for the five. Guard one face, and there is something to guard on the other. Let one collapse, and the other collapses with it. You cannot guard one and give up the other. Guard the real human but let the tool onto the person's place, and the five's seats are crowded out, with nowhere to grow. Put the tool back but do not grow the real human's share, and though the tool is placed, the body has rotted, hair on rotted skin, still no home. The two are skin and hair, one body. Skin standing, hair clings. Skin rotted, hair falls. Save both faces at once. Undo both at once. This is the deepest breaking of the trap this volume opens: put the tool back in the tool's place, set the real human back in the person's place, both together, each to its place. See this, and you no longer ask which to save first. There is no first, no heavier and lighter. It is one body, two faces, guarded and saved together. Take one face and drop the other, whichever you take, and in the end you lose even the one you took.
Now the blindness of the two camps shows plain. The first camp holds that the tool, the faster the better, the stronger the better, the bigger the better, should do everything, take over everything, replace everything. Their eyes hold only the tool, not the real human's share. They think the five outworn, a stumbling old thing, and once the tool comes to sweep them away the world moves forward. Their blindness is to shield only the tool and drop the real human. But by skin and hair: if the real human's share goes out inside one body after another, the tool loses its body and its home. Drive the tool ever stronger while the real human's share withers, and the end is rotted skin and fallen hair, tool and real human sinking together. The forward they want is the stripping away, inch by inch, of the very skin that carries them. They call it riding the tide, say the tool replacing the real human cannot be stopped, and the wise only embrace it. But the talk of the tide hides one plain question: what lies at the end of replacing? A void, the real human's share all gone out and the tool with it. A road to a void, walked fast and firm, is not forward. It is a rush to the cliff.
The other camp holds the tool too dangerous, to be stopped, banned, smashed, an enemy, a monster that would swallow the real human. Their eyes hold only the tool's danger, not that the tool is a thing that can be put in its place, nor that the real human's share is what matters. Their blindness is to smash only the tool, and they too drop the real human. But smashing the tool saves not the real human's share. The nest that set the tool on the person's place stays where it is. The withering of the five is not stopped. Smash this tool, and they swap in another and push it up, and harm as before. The next tool made fills the emptied person's place as before. They spend their strength and fight the wrong field. The real human's share that should be saved is unsaved, the nest that should be turned unturned, and only an innocent tool, one that could have been placed, is smashed. Their heart may not be unkind. They see the tool harm and wish to remove the source and guard the living. But they name the source wrong. The source is not the tool. It is those who set the tool on the person's place, the nest with the five gone out that knows only metrics and not living people. Remove the tool and not the sickness, and it is like melting down every blade because a blade cut a person. The blades gone, the hand that swung and the heart that willed remain, take up another edge, and cut as before. Mercy aimed at the wrong place spends strength on nothing. Fight the wrong field, and however hard the fight, the ones to be saved are not saved.
The two camps look set against each other, quarreling without end, and under it lies one sickness: both see only the face of the tool, neither sees that the real human's share is the skin, the body, the thing that matters. One shields the tool, one smashes it. One drives it up, one forces it out. Two opposite ends, both missing the one flavor, saving the real human's share. This volume takes neither road. Not drive, not force, not embrace, not smash. It puts the tool back in the tool's place to do a tool's work well, and sets the real human's share back in one body after another to grow the five alive, both together, each to its place. This is the straight road Hope lays down from first to last, even and unbent, plain in look and the only one that goes through. The next section carries it a layer further: the ground of saving the tool, and, since it knows and feels nothing, what saving it is for.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.