“…First, imagine building yourself a cage of your own—we’re upright, righteous, clever, selfless, and under what circumstances would we inevitably fall from grace?” Inside the room, Ning Yi spread his hands. “Someone holds a knife to your throat? We won’t yield. The wicked hold overwhelming power? We won’t yield. Someone tells you the world is simply evil, and we might even slap them for saying it. But now imagine—your own kin need food, drink, want just a little something extra. Your father-in-law wants a small official post; your brother-in-law wants to run a small business. All sorts of people, needing to get by. Today you fancy a plate of pig’s trotters from outside; and all around you, there are countless examples telling you that reaching out and taking a little for yourself really isn’t such a big deal, because it’s genuinely hard for anyone up above to catch it. Mr. He, your own family comes from a great clan too—I imagine you understand all this well enough.”

He Wen looked at him. Ning Yi smiled. “This dense, tangled web of relationships is a force greater than life and death itself. But can it really bring down an upright man? No! It can’t.”

“There’s still a way out, if I truly made honesty the purpose of my life—I could turn my back on my own kin, suppress my own desires, refuse to be swayed by human sentiment, hold myself to the strictest of rules. Uncomfortable, yes, a little. But is it impossible? Not necessarily. Confucianism has a thousand years of history, and scholars who could bear this kind of suffocating restraint are hardly rare—if anything, when the only enemy we face is of this kind, people come to see this suffering itself as a mark of nobility. It looks difficult, but there really is a narrow path through it. The real difficulty must be something far more complicated than this…”

“So I kept looking, kept refining these ideas, chasing after a cycle that would trap a person no matter what, that no one could possibly escape. Until one day, I discovered something—an objective rule, in effect—and by that point, I had very nearly finished working out this cycle. Under this logic, no matter how upright, no matter how hard I tried, I too would inevitably become a corrupt official, a villain in the end…”

“What logic?” He Wen asked.

Ning Yi’s expression remained mild, his head tilting slightly. “Every transformation in this world is, in the end, a matter of factions turning against one another.”

This statement left He Wen silent for a long while. “On what grounds do you say that?”

“Because the world is made of people.” Ning Yi smiled, his gaze complicated. “You can hold office and refuse all dealings with family, refuse every bribe, refuse to grant anyone special favor. But when you want to accomplish something, who do you rely on? To fight the wicked, the constables must do your bidding for you; to carry out reform, your superiors must vouch for you, your subordinates must carry it out faithfully, and when execution falters, you need trusted aides to discipline them. The world looks complicated, but in truth, it comes down to one contest of strength after another—the stronger defeating the weaker. The idea that evil can never overcome good is only ever the pleasant fantasy of simple, well-meaning folk; what actually drives events is the underlying force behind them. When evil overcomes good, it’s because the strength of evil overpowered the strength of good; when good overcomes evil, many believe it’s the will of heaven—it isn’t. It’s always because someone did the work, and gathered strength to their cause.”

“I can’t agree with this,” He Wen said. “In the way of officialdom, beyond factions turning against each other, there is also the principle of checks and balances.”

“There is such a technique, within the art of ruling,” Ning Yi nodded. “At court, one faction is balanced against another, a third against both, setting them against one another in mutual suspicion, so that when one gains, another loses. But throughout all of history, I have never once seen a truly incorruptible imperial house. An emperor himself might want for nothing—but the imperial clan as a whole is inevitably the single greatest interest group of all. Otherwise, do you really think he could play every faction against each other like pieces on a board?”

He Wen considered this. “‘The gentleman associates broadly without forming cliques; the petty man forms cliques without associating broadly.'”

“There’s that saying too,” Ning Yi said, nodding approvingly. “But that describes a perfect state of affairs. The reality is, the gentleman who associates without cliques will never defeat the petty man who forms cliques without truly associating. Why? Because when gentlemen gather, it’s because their principles align—but principles can take a thousand different forms, and the gentlemen gathered together today may well stand opposed to one another tomorrow. The petty men, though, always stay together—they form groups, cooperate with one another, sharpen each other through practice. Has Mr. He ever seen a production line? Workers who’ve worked together for half a year, a year, can be ten times more efficient than a disorganized crowd. Soldiers under strict discipline can defeat ten times their number of untrained, hot-blooded brawlers. None of that fervor counts for anything there.”

Ning Yi paused. “In the eleventh year of the Jinghan era, I served at the Right Chancellor’s residence, assisting with famine relief. The great landholders in the disaster region had already banded together into a single united front—two hundred years of accumulated clan power. To keep them in check, what could be done? We drew in landholders and merchants from other regions with slogans and incentives, and in the process, the Chancellor’s residence put pressure on any number of local government offices. In the end, both sides of landholders came away having profited—but the large-scale land consolidation that would otherwise have occurred was held back, at least to some degree… That’s what a contest of strength looks like. Without strength behind you, shouting slogans, however loudly, means nothing. With strength, you take exactly as much as you outmatch others by, and lose exactly as much as you fall short by. The world, in that sense, is entirely fair.”

“If the Right Chancellor’s residence had had no strength of its own to begin with, this kind of alliance-building could never have happened at all. But try explaining something like this to gentlemen of principle. The Chancellor’s residence loudly proclaimed it was providing famine relief—in truth, it had taken money to do so. The people who worked alongside the Chancellor’s office profited from it too. We called people to the disaster area under the banner of relief, when in truth, we were selling them grain—at prices even higher than usual. What then? Was this a good deed? A true gentleman would probably sooner drift off to sea on a raft than have anything to do with it—and the number of people who’d die, and the number left nursing bitter resentment, would only grow larger still.”

Ning Yi pressed his palms together. “Only when the forces of good have truly overwhelmed the forces of evil does it become true that evil cannot prevail over good. Factions banding together against their rivals—this is the essential nature of every transformation. To accomplish anything, you must satisfy the people under you; as your strength grows, and you defeat the wicked, the demands of your own followers cannot go unmet. Add to that every manner of temptation, kinsmen you cannot refuse, and you inevitably find yourself retreating step by step, until at last there’s nowhere left to retreat to. That’s how I became a corrupt official myself, a villain in my own right. Of course, through long observation and refinement, in the course of it all, I came to see every kind of human desire, every kind of flaw, and some undeniable truths about human nature itself…”

“Is that why Mr. Ning is called the Devil of the Heart?”

“That’s why I put this question to your fellow students. Why is it that men like you, Mr. He, can never find a way out of the Confucian circle? Such outstanding men, and yet there is only ever the one of you, throughout history. He Wen, Qin Siyuan, Li Pin, Yao Zunian, Zuo Duanyou…” Ning Yi smiled. “To be frank, I killed my own emperor, and openly declared my opposition to Confucianism. Many of the young people here look down on Confucian learning with real contempt. And the more outstanding you all prove yourselves to be, the more clearly you demonstrate to them just how enormous the problem they face truly is. A problem that countless outstanding men, across a thousand years, have never once managed to escape—to think that one arrogant heart could solve it alone would be a joke indeed… I want them to be humble.”

“Humble…” He Wen laughed. “If Mr. Ning already knows this problem has had no solution for a thousand years, why is it that you yourself are so arrogant as to believe you can tear the whole structure down and build something new in its place? Do you understand the consequences of being wrong?”

“The sun’s out nicely, Mr. He. Shall we take a walk?” The afternoon light poured in through the doorway. Ning Yi spread his hands, and once He Wen had risen and stepped outside, he spoke as they walked. “I don’t know whether what I’m doing is right or wrong. But I do know that Confucianism’s path has already gone astray, and that has to change.”

The two of them stepped out of the room, and saw Ning Xi, Min Chuyi, and the others peering their way from not far off in the corridor. Both men were skilled fighters, and of course they knew at once that the children had been eavesdropping outside—having been argued into silence by He Wen that morning, they had wanted to hear how Ning Yi would win back the ground lost that afternoon. Ning Yi patted Ning Xi’s head. “Go back and finish writing up everything Mr. He said this morning.” And he sent them off.

Once the children had gone back inside, He Wen spoke. “Confucianism may have its problems, but to say the path itself is wrong—that, Mr. Ning, is simply absurd.”

The two men talked as they left the courtyard, strolling out toward the streets and fields beyond. Ning Yi said, “This morning you lectured on the Liyun chapter of the Book of Rites, spoke of Confucius and Laozi, spoke of the Age of Great Unity. Mr. He, do you consider Confucius and Laozi to be sages, or to be great men?”

“The Foremost Teacher of Ten Thousand Generations—a sage, of course.”

“I would say, rather, they were great men,” Ning Yi said, shaking his head with a smile.

“Then I must ask—what makes a sage, and what makes a great man?”

“A sage is someone sent down from heaven itself, whose every word becomes law, a teacher for ten thousand generations, existing on an entirely different plane from the rest of us. Whatever they say is truth itself, necessarily correct. A great man, by contrast, is someone who, faced with a world mired in hardship, refuses to bend, who seeks a way forward through wisdom, and whose contributions to the development of this world are substantial. That is what makes a great man. Mr. He, do you truly believe there was some fundamental difference between them and us?” Having said this, Ning Yi shook his head. “I don’t believe it. There are no immortals, no sages fallen from the sky. They were simply two ordinary men—who happened, without question, to undertake a great exploration.”

This was a difficult thing for He Wen to answer. He nearly opened his mouth to retort, “And how can you be so certain?”—but in the end only shook his head, and Ning Yi had already begun speaking again. “Laozi and Confucius lived in the age of the Warring States and the Spring and Autumn period, at a time when people had only just emerged from a state of primal ignorance—when people were only just beginning to come into contact with one another, when ideas were only just beginning to clash, and the whole realm had fallen into disorder. In that age, they had not even mastered the making of a proper wheel; writing had only just emerged from tortoise shells and bones, and people had only just begun using wooden strips to record it. Facing such an age of chaos, everyone began searching for a way forward, and from this came the flourishing of the hundred schools of thought, each competing to prove itself. As for the Zhou dynasty, the Xia dynasty, and the even more ancient ages before them, there wasn’t even written record to speak of; people, mired in chaos, could only imagine that everything in the past had once been good. Whether it truly was good, of course, is difficult to say…”

“In the course of this search for a way forward, Laozi and Confucius were, without question, among the very finest of their age. Before them, there had been no writing at all, and even the legends of the past were unreliable and incomplete. Everyone was simply looking at this world and trying to make sense of it. Laozi wrote his five-thousand-word text on the Way and Virtue—Mr. He, you brought this up yourself in class today, and I’m quite fond of it too. ‘When the Way is lost, there is virtue. When virtue is lost, there is benevolence. When benevolence is lost, there is righteousness. When righteousness is lost, there is ritual propriety. Ritual, indeed, is the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith, and the beginning of chaos.’ Mr. He, you can see from this that the state Laozi valued most highly in society—or in the state of a person, if you like—was one in harmony with the great Way. When that harmony with the Way could not be achieved, people turned instead to virtue; when virtue failed, to benevolence; when benevolence failed, to righteousness; and when even righteousness was gone, all that remained was to turn to ritual propriety—and once things had come to depend on ritual propriety, the realm was on the verge of great chaos. In that era, ritual propriety was roughly equivalent to what we would now call law: ritual is what one is obligated to do, while righteousness is what one personally agrees with. Mr. He, is that a fair rough summary?”

He Wen thought it over. “It holds together well enough, yes.”

“Laozi’s greatest contribution was that, in a society with almost no cultural foundation to speak of, he managed to articulate clearly what a perfect society—or a perfect state of being—would actually look like. ‘When the great Way was abandoned, benevolence and righteousness arose. When cleverness and knowledge appeared, great hypocrisy arose. When the six family relations fell out of harmony, filial piety and parental kindness arose. When the state fell into chaos and disorder, loyal ministers arose.’ This echoes what we just discussed about the loss of the Way giving rise to virtue. Laozi described the early signs of a world going bad, described the different levels a society could fall through—the Way, virtue, benevolence, righteousness, ritual—and people of that time were willing to believe that, in some distant, ancient age, human life had once been in harmony with the great Way, carefree and untroubled. Of course, we needn’t argue that particular point with Laozi…”

Ning Yi smiled. “From ‘the Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way,’ all the way to ‘heaven’s Way benefits and does not harm; the sage’s Way acts, yet does not contend’—the five-thousand-word text on the Way and Virtue, from beginning to end, is really a discussion of the basic laws governing this world. It describes the perfect state, and it describes every level in between; if only we could reach the Way itself, then everything would naturally be well. But how, exactly, is one meant to reach it? If there truly was some ancient age in which everyone’s life was in harmony with the great Way, then by definition, every action they took would have stayed within the bounds of that Way—how, then, could they possibly have damaged the Way, and been forced to turn to virtue instead? ‘As the Three Kings governed the world, the great Way gradually receded, and so wisdom had to be brought forth’—but why would the great Way recede at all? Did the Way fall down from the sky one day, only to climb back up and walk away again?”

“I say all this with no particular agenda. Laozi was truly remarkable—he glimpsed perfection, and told the people of his world the fundamental principles governing heaven and earth. That is why he was a great man. As for Confucius, he arrived at a more detailed standard, and a preliminary method as well. He told the people of his time that they must restore the rites of Zhou—that a ruler must act as a ruler should, a minister as a minister should, a father as a father should, a son as a son should—and that if only this were achieved, the world would naturally run smoothly and completely. He respected principle, told people to repay grievance with uprightness, kindness with kindness, and studied the great Way at every turn in his own conduct—until finally, at the age of seventy, he could follow the desires of his own heart without ever overstepping the bounds of what was right.”

“The teacher of that age told you to act this way, and gave you the fundamental reasoning behind it too—why must you act this way? Because it was in harmony with the great Way. But if you couldn’t manage it, well, that was your own failing… Confucius himself never fully achieved the ideals and ambitions he held throughout his life. We can only imagine that, by the time he reached seventy, he had perhaps come to a kind of inner peace and openness of his own. He too was a remarkable, great man.”

The group crossed the fields and came to the riverbank, watching the rolling waters flow past; not far off, the sounds of the marketplace, and of distant waterwheels and workshops, drifted through the air, carrying with them all the noise of ordinary life.

“This too is only Mr. Ning’s own personal reasoning.”

“Indeed, it’s only my own personal reasoning—take it or leave it as you see fit, Mr. He.” Ning Yi paid no particular mind to this response, tilting his head slightly. “‘When righteousness is lost, there is ritual.’ By the time Laozi and Confucius lived, the world had already lost righteousness and turned to ritual. How, then, does one work backward from ritual to righteousness? People tried all manner of approaches, until at last, with the banning of the hundred schools and the elevation of Confucianism alone, a narrow path emerged—one that drew together the strengths of many different schools, and could actually be put into political operation. ‘Ruler as ruler, minister as minister, father as father, son as son’—this proved remarkably useful. When Confucius said this, he meant that each person should behave as befits their role. When the state repeats the same words, it means: the minister must act like a minister, the son like a son—and these things can be monitored by others. But the ruler must act like a ruler—who is left to monitor him? Those above gain more room to maneuver; those below are given a slogan and a framework to keep them in line. These are the words of a sage—you don’t need to understand them, but we teach you according to what the sage has said, and all you need to do is follow along.”

“Laozi could describe the perfect state as beautifully as he liked, but he still had to face the reality that society had already turned to ritual propriety out of necessity. Every generation of Confucian scholars after Confucius and Mencius, in trying to civilize and educate the people of the world, had to face the reality that the force of that education could never truly be made universal. Reality would always have to be dealt with—one couldn’t simply drift off to sea on a raft the moment things stopped going smoothly. And so… you don’t need to understand why you must do this, you simply need to do it. Generation after generation, Confucian thought advanced, laying down rule after rule for the ordinary people below, each rule more detailed than the last. Was this progress, in the end? By the standard of pragmatic expedience, it would seem so.”

Ning Yi shook his head with a smile. “And so it continued, right up until Old Qin, before his death, wrote his commentary on the Four Books, drawing on his own experience of society to work out even more detailed principles. Building on the same harmonious logic of that age, he clarified the finer points that needed refining across every aspect of life. These principles are valuable—they can genuinely make society better. But they, too, faced a reality that could never be explained clearly to most people. So what then? Let them just go along with it, Mr. He—the more Confucian thought developed, the stricter and more demanding its control over the common people below was bound to become. Before he died, Old Qin spoke of drawing out human desire and guiding it toward heavenly principle. If you can make the reasoning clear, so that people genuinely feel it in their hearts, then acting accordingly naturally draws them closer to heavenly principle. But if the reasoning can’t be made clear, in the end it degenerates into nothing more than ‘preserve heavenly principle, extinguish human desire’—if you cannot persuade through reason, then you simply force the matter instead.”

“I don’t see anything particularly wrong with that,” He Wen said.

“And yet, in the course of it, what’s really happening is the castration of people’s vital spirit.”

“There will naturally be more and more men of learning, more and more people who understand reason,” He Wen said. “If control over the ordinary people were loosened, if the fine rules and regulations of ritual propriety were done away with, private desire would run rampant, and the world would fall into chaos immediately. Is it not possible that Confucianism’s slow, gradual approach is in fact the right path after all?”

“That’s certainly one way of looking at it,” Ning Yi said with a smile, as the two continued along the riverbank. “More than a thousand years ago, Laozi and Confucius and Mencius worked out one particular truth—that the human spiritual realm ought to reach a state of perfection, and that this, in fact, has little to do with the material world; if anything, material concerns can actually hinder a person’s fulfillment. Across these one or two thousand years, in the process of cultivating the human heart, Confucianism and Buddho-Daoist thought alike have, in the end, pursued the abandonment of material desire; however society is meant to function, the ultimate goal has always simply been to bring the human heart to a state of harmony and completeness. And so, later on, Confucianism came to reject clever contrivances and frivolous skills, fearing that private desire would throw the human heart into disorder. But… Mr. He, do you have no private desires of your own?”

“My own cultivation is naturally insufficient.”

“I have them too. So did Old Qin,” Ning Yi said. “The true wisdom in facing one’s private desires is not to annihilate them, but to face them honestly—even to master them. Mr. He, I am a man capable of extravagance, of great indulgence, and yet I can also remain entirely unmoved by it, because I understand how my own desires operate, and I can master them through reason. Greed, in commerce, can drive economic growth and spur the emergence of countless new inventions. The impulse toward laziness can push us to constantly seek greater efficiency and better methods in our work. Wanting a fine possession can drive us to strive and improve ourselves. Loving a beautiful woman can push a man to become his best self. Even the fear of death can help us understand the true weight of being alive. A truly wise person seeks to thoroughly understand private desire, to master it—never to annihilate it.”

“But that too is Confucianism’s highest ideal.”

“And yet the path taken was the wrong one,” Ning Yi said, shaking his head as he looked toward the town ahead. “At the very base of society, suppressing private desire, demanding strict adherence to ritual propriety, will inevitably grow ever harsher in its treatment of greed, of innovation. Once a nation is founded, once we enter this system, we inevitably find ourselves forming cliques and factions for our own benefit; as people accumulate wealth and influence, great clans inevitably emerge, and no matter how one tries to hold them in check through endless counterbalancing, the process remains irreversible—because the very act of trying to hold them in check is, in itself, the process by which new interest groups are cultivated. Over two or three hundred years, contradictions accumulate, the great clans’ power grows ever more entrenched, and the castration of the lower classes grows ever more severe. The nation falls, and the cycle begins anew; the Confucian scholars of the next age draw on the lessons of the last, and the great clans emerge once more. Do you think the advance made this time will be a method for breaking apart the great clans—or a technique for further castrating the common people below, in order to suppress their resentment?”

“I believe it will be the latter,” Ning Yi said. “This wheel of Confucian thought has already rolled, irreversibly, in this direction. If we’re looking for a path forward, we surely need to be certain it can actually reach a perfect outcome in the end—if you treat a temporary expedient as a permanent solution, in the end, what’s the point of any of it? And besides, there are objective laws governing the natural world through the study of natural philosophy. My hot air balloon has already flown. Cannons have already appeared. If you refuse to develop these principles, then a few hundred years from now, some foreign people will surely have developed them with everything they have, and will come knocking at your door with machines that can fly through the sky and burrow through the earth, and cannons that can level mountains and crack open cities.”

“If Mr. Ning has already brought these things into being, how could future generations possibly cast them aside?”

“Because Confucianism seeks harmony and stability above all, while natural philosophy is never harmonious or stable in the least—wanting to be lazy, wanting to advance, it’s precisely material desire running wild that drives its development forward. When I die, you’ll surely smash it to pieces.”

Ning Yi stood on the riverbank, watching the boats, watching the bustle of the town, his hands resting on his hips. “The reason I’d smash Confucianism is that I can no longer see any future in it. But, Mr. He, let me tell you about the future I imagine instead. I hope that, someday, the people you see before you right now will all come to understand the basic laws by which this world operates. That they will all be able to read, to understand reason, and in the end become men and women of true integrity, responsible for their own future…”

“As you say yourself, what have all those clever men been doing for the past thousand years and more?” He Wen said mockingly.

“We spoke earlier of the gentleman who associates without forming cliques.” A breeze blew in off the river, and Ning Yi tilted his head slightly. “When Old Qin died, there were many charges leveled against him, and a good number of them were true—forming cliques for personal gain, certainly, was true enough. In those days, no small number of people lived off what the Right Chancellor’s residence provided. Old Qin did his best to keep the flow of benefit running along proper channels, but to keep it entirely clean—how could that ever be possible? My own hands, too, have plenty of blood on them from more than a few people. We did our best to appeal to sentiment and reason wherever we could, but if you insist on remaining a pure gentleman through and through, you’ll never accomplish anything at all. You might think that, having done good, the common people would support us—but in truth, they don’t. The common people are the kind of people who, hearing only the slightest hint of wrongdoing, will condemn a man to death on the spot. Old Qin was later paraded through the streets, pelted with filth—and by the standard of a purely good man, upright and incorruptible, harboring no private desire whatsoever, acting only ever in the open and above board, he truly deserved every bit of it.”

“Does Mr. Ning actually resent the common people?”

“I don’t resent them. I simply analyze them as an objective law of nature,” Ning Yi said. “Throughout history, political systems have generally worked like this: a small number of people at the top try to resolve pressing social problems. Some succeed. Others try and fail entirely. In the process, all the problems that those at the top fail to focus on keep accumulating, entrenching themselves further and further. As the nation cycles onward, the negative factors accumulate more and more; you enter the system, and you find yourself powerless to change it, because the people beneath you need to eat, need clothes, want things a little better, and then a little better still. Your own interest group might solve a few small problems for those below you, but on the whole, the accumulation of negative factors continues regardless—because the very process by which an interest group forms and solidifies is, in itself, a process of accumulating contradiction.”

“In the course of this, small interest groups must protect their own livelihoods, while large interest groups must contend with other large interest groups. When it reaches the level of the emperor or the chancellor, some among them, harboring real ambition, try to break apart these entrenched interest groups—the most effective method being to turn to an entirely new system altogether. This is what we call reform. Very few succeed, and even those who do often meet a death without even a proper burial to show for it. Every generation’s ruling elite, every man of vision, tries hard to break apart the ever-solidifying interest groups of his time, but they can never keep pace with the speed at which those groups solidify around their own interests.”

“A man of vision like yourself, Mr. He, probably imagines that someday, Confucian learning will produce enough men of vision to finally break this cycle. But so long as the underlying rules of reform themselves remain unchanged, any attempt at reform will inevitably require building up another interest group of its own—and so the cycle never ends.”

“If we were to treat this as a mathematical calculation, I wonder—could we introduce some entirely new factor, never introduced before, that would naturally and organically help resolve the negative factors accumulating within society? In the end, this can only fall upon the ordinary people themselves.” Ning Yi smiled. “Of course, first, they’ll need to be able to read.”

“Mr. Ning’s establishment of these paper mills, his research into natural philosophy—these are truly a magnificent achievement, one for the ages. If someday it truly allows every person in this realm to have books to read, that alone would be an accomplishment worthy of standing alongside the sages themselves. But beyond that, I confess I cannot understand your reasoning.”

“Let me give you an example, Mr. He, and you’ll understand.” Ning Yi pointed toward a row of waterwheels in the distance. “Take those paper mills, for instance—you know them well enough.”

He Wen nodded. “I think of them daily. If I could, I’d love nothing more than to pack the whole operation into my bags and take it home with me.”

“Papermaking causes a great deal of pollution. Mr. He, have you ever seen the outflow from those paper mills? We’ve cleared whole mountains of timber to make paper, and the water where it drains out is already fouled—unfit to drink, and sometimes there are dead fish in it besides.” Ning Yi looked at He Wen. “Now imagine a day when paper mills discharging waste like this line every riverbank, when the whole realm is covered in such mills, when every stretch of water has been polluted, fish dying everywhere, and people who drink the water begin falling ill as well…”

“Surely it could never come to that!” He Wen said sharply, lowering his voice.

“Just imagine it as a hypothetical, for now,” Ning Yi said with a smile. “Say one day, the pollution has grown this severe—but these mills are, by then, the lifeblood of the nation. The people come to protest. You’re a minor official in the local government—how do you explain the problem to them?”

He Wen frowned, thinking it over for a long moment. “I would, of course, tell them the truth, and explain the reasons in full detail…”

“And then your superiors would scold you for it—might even have you removed from your post! The common people are simple folk. The moment they learn these mills are the cause, they’ll pressure the mills to shut down immediately. The state may already be preparing measures to address it, but that takes time—and if you’re honest with the people right away, they’ll immediately turn to hating these mills, and then the government office that hasn’t yet shut them down becomes, in their eyes, nothing more than a den of corrupt officials. And if, one day, someone even dies from drinking the water, the people will take to the streets, and unrest will be at hand in no time. In the end, it will spiral entirely out of control, and the blame will fall squarely on you.”

“…Then there’s no choice but to deceive them.”

“Exactly. Knowing the people are this simple in their thinking, we tell them the deaths came from some other cause, that the water pollution isn’t really that serious, that the court is already handling it, and that everyone must simply endure the hardship together for now. Then the court quietly pressures these vital industries to reform themselves as swiftly as possible, getting these mills clear of the problem before public outrage boils over. Of course we know telling the truth would be the right thing to do—but faced with people like this, telling the truth only guarantees the outcome spirals entirely out of control. Who exactly is to blame becomes impossible to trace, but unless you accept this underlying pattern, how could you ever hope to find a way to change it?”

Ning Yi watched the waterwheels. “Or take another example—say I noticed early on that this river near the paper mills was polluted, and stood up to warn people that mills like this would cause serious trouble down the road. By that point, though, the paper mills are already seen as vital to the nation and its people, and no criticism of them is tolerated. We tell the crowd, this man is a villain sent by the Jin state to stir up trouble. Hearing that I’m a villain, the people will of course move to bring me down first—whether there’s any truth to my warning about future trouble becomes irrelevant, no one pays it any mind. Or, suppose instead I say these mills will run into trouble because I’ve invented a somewhat better method of papermaking, and I want to profit from it—the people, seeing that I’m after money, will simply turn to attacking me all over again for that instead… All of this reflects an objective feature of how ordinary people behave.”

“Faced with a populace like this—one whose sense of right and wrong is this simplistic, this objectively predictable—suppose one day a constable under our own office makes a mistake, and someone dies as a result, by accident. You and I are minor clerks in that office. If we confess honestly right away that our constable was at fault, what happens? If at all possible, we would first try to discredit the dead man, hoping the whole matter can simply be allowed to pass. Because we understand the nature of the crowd—if they see one constable at fault, they may well conclude the entire office is corrupt. Their process of understanding events isn’t specific but chaotic, not governed by reason but by sentiment… At this stage, as far as the running of the state is concerned, they carry almost no real weight at all.”

“But what if, one day, they progress beyond this?” Ning Yi’s gaze grew gentle. “If our people begin to understand logic and reason, if they know that moderation is generally the wisest course, if they can judge each matter on its own merits, analyzing rather than simply being deceived—when we face a populace like that, and someone claims this paper mill will cause trouble down the road, and we try to discredit him, even if he really is a bad person, is what he says about the mill’s problems still worth considering? At that point, would we still try to solve the problem simply by discrediting the messenger? If the people no longer assume that every constable must be corrupt just because one of them was, and if they can’t so easily be fooled, then even if we insist the dead man was somehow at fault, they would still pay attention to the constable’s own wrongdoing regardless—would we still, in that case, be so quick to use the dead man’s faults to paper over the constable’s mistake?”

“Government offices will always have a tendency toward perfunctory, careless handling of problems. Just as Laozi described what perfection would look like, down at the level of the individual, we are, after all, only ordinary people, handling dozens of matters each day, with superiors checking in, the court demanding no mistakes—and so the operating principle of the office’s clerks will always be to choose the simplest, most convenient method, to get by without incident. That tendency isn’t easy to change. But if the people begin to understand reason, the cost of this kind of perfunctory handling only keeps rising—and at that point, since the people are no longer prone to extreme reactions, they will, if anything, come to prefer honesty instead. A populace that understands reason becomes a cushion that absorbs negative factors, feeding back into the court, actively resolving the accumulation of vested interests within society. This process is what we mean by the people governing themselves—and it is also the true meaning behind the gentleman who associates without forming cliques.”

“Reaching that point is, of course, no easy thing. You might say I resent the common people—but really, I only hope that someday they’ll come to understand the kind of society they’re living in, and that every transformation is, in the end, a matter of factions turning against one another. Old Qin was one interest group; those entrenched landholders, and men like Cai Jing, were another interest group as well. If there’s any difference between them, it’s this: men like Cai Jing take ninety percent of the benefit and leave the people ten. Old Qin, perhaps, took eighty percent, and gave the people twenty. If the people want someone who will hand them a full hundred percent, a truly good man through and through, there’s really only one way that could ever come about.”

“We first have to clearly recognize the one who gives us twenty percent, support him, and let him replace the one who only gave us ten—so that we gain that extra ten percent for ourselves. Then, perhaps, someone else comes along willing to give us twenty-five percent, and we support him in turn, letting him replace the one before. And then, perhaps, someone willing to give thirty percent might appear as well, and so on. In this process, there will also be some who only promise us twenty percent and then turn around and deceive us—and it is our own responsibility to see through them, and reject them. The world can only be transformed through this succession of interest groups, one giving way to another. If, from the very start, we insist on nothing less than a perfectly good man, then we’ve simply misjudged how the world actually works, and every choice we make becomes a matter of pure chance—which means none of those choices mean anything at all.”

“In the course of all this, a great deal of specialized knowledge is involved. The people may, one day, come to understand reason—but there is no possible way any single person could understand everything on his own. At that point, what they need are trustworthy professionals whose judgment they can rely on—professionals who understand that the work they do matters, who can take pride in their own expertise, who are willing to spend their whole lives in pursuit of truth, even willing to face down the powerful, even to die striking a pillar in protest if it comes to that. Only in this way can they earn the people’s trust. This is what we might call a system of cultural self-respect.”

“When the people understand reason, and society possesses this cultural self-respect—only with both of these in place can the true core of democracy take shape, and only then can society keep turning, cycle after cycle, without ever exhausting itself.” Ning Yi looked toward He Wen. “This, too, is why I’ve never made things difficult for you and your fellow scholars.”

“…You’re only afraid you won’t manage it,” He Wen said after a moment, calmly.

“Then I suppose I’ll have to keep reading first,” Ning Yi said with a smile. “And take the examination after that.”