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 is gone 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 and the same thing. Guard the five so they do not go out inside the body, and the tool has a home. Put the tool back in the tool's place, not letting it crowd out the ground the five grow in, and the five live on. Guard both faces together, and only then is there something to guard. This also throws light on the blindness of the two camps of the age: shielding only the tool without saving the real human, and smashing only the tool without saving the real human, both lean off to one corner.
One. The First Face: Guarding the Five Is Guarding the Tool's Home
First look at the first face: saving the real human's share is saving the tool.
Picture the five in one body after another not going out, not withering, not going cold, everyone living as a real human, keep, guard, love, mercy, heart all there, all alive, all bright. What does the tool look like then? It sits in the tool's place, made by real humans who have the five, put to their use, kept running by them, its rights and wrongs answered for by them. It has a body, somewhere it belongs, a home. Every single thing it does is lit by a living intent that guards people. It drafts a document so a real human can get 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 single thing it does is pointed by the five and warmed by the five, and so its running has meaning. This is the tool's home. And where does this home come from? From the five being 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 a lump of computing power that lights up nothing.
Think this face through and a deeper meaning shows: the tool's good or ill does not lie wholly in the tool itself. It hangs on whether the five are there in the one who uses it. The same tool, in the hands of a real human with all five, helps people, guards people, brings people through. In the hands of one whose five have gone out, it presses people, schemes against people, harms people. The tool itself has not changed. What has changed is the hand that holds it, the heart that holds it. So if you want the tool to be good, the first move is not to polish the tool. It is to tend that hand, that heart. Keep the five alive, and the tool naturally comes back to its place and becomes good to use. Let the five go out, and however fine the tool, it is only a sharper instrument that harms people faster and colder. Guarding the five is guarding, at the root, the tool's being a good tool.
Two. The Other Face: Putting the Tool Back in Its Place Is Guarding Ground for the Five to Grow
Now look at the other face: saving the tool, putting it back in the tool's place, is saving the five.
Picture the opposite. Do not save the tool, and let it be pushed onto the person's place. Let it sit the judge's seat, the seat that decides life and death, the seat that raises the young. That nest who set the tool on the person's place hand the real human's seats over to the tool, inch by inch. On whom does this handing-over fall? Not only on the particular people pressed under the algorithm. Deeper, it falls on the five. Give the judge's seat to the tool, and the thought that should grow in the judge's heart, lifting his head to see the living person beneath the case, has nowhere to grow. Give the doctor's seat to the tool, and the heart that should grow in the doctor, seeing who this patient is, has nowhere to grow. Give the teacher's seat to the tool, and the care that should grow in the teacher, holding a child's whole life in mind, has nowhere to grow. A seat is the ground where the five grow and are put to work. The more seats are given away, the fewer places the five have to dwell, until at last they have nowhere to dwell, and they wither, close, go out. So putting the tool back in the tool's place and setting the real human's seat back up is keeping the ground the five grow in.
This layer must be said all the way through, because it is the one most easily made light of. Most people think who sits a seat is only a question of who gets the job done faster and cheaper. The tool does it fast and cheap, so let it sit there, is that not better? They do not know that what a seat grows is not only getting the job done. It is that share in the heart of the one doing the job. A judge trying a case trains that thought of lifting his head to see the living person. A doctor treating an illness grows that heart that sees who the patient is. Let the tool take the seat, and the job may still get done, but that share has nowhere left to be trained, nowhere left to grow. If one generation gives all these seats over to the tool, the next generation has no place left to grow the five. The five are not taken away. They wither on their own, because their ground to grow has been 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.
Three. The Two Faces as One: One Thing, Not Two Things
Put the two faces together and they are not two things. They are two faces of one thing.
Saving the real human's share is saving the tool's home. Saving the tool, putting it back in its place, is saving ground for the five to grow. Guard one face, and only then is there something to guard on the other. Let one face fall, and the other falls with it. You cannot guard only this face and throw away that one. Guard only the real human and let the tool be pushed onto the person's place, and the five's seats are crowded out one by one, and in the end they still have nowhere to grow. Only put the tool back in its place and do not tend the real human's share, and even with the tool back in its place, the body has rotted, the hair clings to rotted skin, and it still has no home. The two are like skin and hair, one body: skin standing, hair clings; skin rotted, hair falls. To save, save both faces together. To undo, undo both faces together. This is the most fundamental breaking of the trap this volume sets out to undo: put the tool back in the tool's place, set the real human back in the real human's place, both together, each back to its own place. Once you see that the two faces are one thing, you will no longer ask a question like "which do we save first." No first and last, no heavier and lighter. It is one body with two faces, guarded together, saved together. Whoever insists on taking only one face and throwing away the other, whichever face he takes, in the end loses even the face he took.
Four. The Blindness of One End: Shielding Only the Tool, Not Saving the Real Human
With the two faces as one made plain, the blindness of the two camps of the age, each holding one end, shows clearly. First look at the first camp.
There is a camp that holds the tool is better the faster it is, the stronger it is, the bigger it is, and lets it do everything, take over everything, replace everything. Their eyes hold only the tool. They do not see the real human's share. They think the five are outdated, useless, an old thing to trip over, and once the tool comes and replaces all of it at a stroke, the world moves forward. This camp's blindness is in shielding only the tool's face and throwing away the real human's face. But by the reason of skin and hair: if the real human's share goes out in one body after another, the tool loses its body, and with it its home. Care only to 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 going down together. The "forward" they want is stripping away, inch by inch, the very skin that carries them. This camp often styles itself as "going with the tide of the times," saying the tool replacing the real human is a current no one can stop, and the wise can only embrace it. But the talk of the current hides the simplest question: replace all the way to the end, and what does it look like? It is a void, the real human's share gone out entirely and the tool left without a home along with it. A road that leads to a void, walked however fast, however firmly, is not forward. It is a rush toward a cliff.
Five. The Blindness of the Other End: Smashing Only the Tool, Not Saving the Real Human
Now look at the other camp.
There is another camp that holds the tool is too dangerous, and wants to stop it, ban it, smash it, treating it as an enemy, as a monster that will swallow the real human. Their eyes hold only the tool's danger. They do not see that the tool is a thing that can be put back in its place, and they do not see that the real human's share is what matters. This camp's blindness is in wanting only to smash the tool, and they too throw away the real human's face. But smashing the tool cannot save the real human's share. That nest who set the tool on the person's place are still where they were. The withering of the five in the body has not been stopped. Smash this tool, and that nest swaps in another tool, pushes it onto the person's place again, and harms people as before. The next tool built fills the emptied real human's seat as before. They spend all their strength and fight on the wrong field. The real human's share that should be saved is not saved. The nest that should be turned around is not turned around. Only an innocent tool, one that could have been put back in its place, is smashed. The heart of this camp is not necessarily unkind. They see the tool harm people, and want to remove the source of the harm and guard the living. But they mistake the source of the harm. The source is not the tool. It is the people who set the tool on the person's place, that nest whose five have gone out, who know only metrics and not living people. Remove the tool and not the source of the sickness, and it is like seeing a knife wound someone and melting down every knife under heaven. The knives all melted, the hand that swung the knife and the heart that meant harm are still there; they take up another sharp edge and wound people as before. Mercy aimed at the wrong place throws its strength away for nothing. Mistake the battlefield, and however hard the fight, the people who need saving are not saved.
Six. Two Camps, One Sickness; This Volume Lays Down One Road
The two camps look set against each other, fighting without end, yet underneath they share one sickness: both see only the tool's face, and neither sees that the real human's share is the skin, the body, the thing that matters.
One camp only shields the tool, one only smashes it. One drives it up into the seat, one forces it off the stage. The two ends are opposite, and both lack the same ingredient, "saving the real human's share." What this volume lays down is neither of these two roads. Not driving, not forcing; not embracing, not smashing. It puts the tool back in the tool's place, to do a tool's work well in the tool's place. It sets the real human's share back in one body after another, so the five grow up and come alive. Both together, each back to its own place. This is the right road that this volume, Hope, lays down all the way from first to last. This road leans neither way, embraces nothing and smashes nothing. It looks plain, and it is the only one that goes through. The next section follows this a layer further: where, in the end, the root reason for saving the tool lies; and since it knows nothing and feels nothing, what saving it is for.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.